Honestly, you seem like a sweet girl, and hold many potentially noble ideals, but …
With a start like that, it’s pretty clear that whatever follows that “but” is going to be pretty icky. And our message-sender does not disappoint, going on to suggest that his would-be date’s announced sexual preference (bi) was … illogical.
Your body is designed in a certain way, that is, to receive a man, and this is something you enjoy, but yet, you entertain the notion of artificially reproducing this amazing effect with some kind of gadget operated by another woman? I fail to see the logic in this.
After requesting an explanation, he moves on to this:
Also, allow me to unceremoniously offer my view on “feminism”, in the form of an example. Let us examine the concept of “women’s sports”.
Or maybe let’s not. If you actually do want to read his detailed analysis of this pressing social issue, head on over to A(n)nals.
Oh, Scott Adams! Can you write anything about that whole man-woman business without being a creepy douche about it? In a recent blog post titled “Pegs and Holes” – which refers to exactly what you think it refers to — Adams offers his take on the powerful men who have been in the news lately because, as Adams puts it, they’ve been “tweeting, raping, cheating, and being offensive to just about everyone in the entire world.”
After noting that the “current view of such things is that the men are to blame for their own bad behavior” and that this “seems right” to him – gee, ya think? – Adams decides to get all philosophical on us. (When you’re Scott Adams, this is a very very bad idea.) He writes:
The part that interests me is that society is organized in such a way that the natural instincts of men are shameful and criminal while the natural instincts of women are mostly legal and acceptable. In other words, men are born as round pegs in a society full of square holes. Whose fault is that? Do you blame the baby who didn’t ask to be born male? Or do you blame the society that brought him into the world, all round-pegged and turgid, and said, “Here’s your square hole”?
I’m assuming that Adams doesn’t actually think that baby boys are born with erections, and realizes that it is biology, not society, that hands out penises and vaginas to babies in the first place. I’m just trying to understand the whole pegs and holes metaphor. Why does he think “round” penises and “square” vaginas are somehow incompatible? In the context of consensual sex, after all, penises of all shapes and sizes generally fit into vaginas quite nicely.
As far as I can figure it out, the round-vs-square analogy simply refers to the fact that men can’t simply stick their “round pegs” into any conveniently located “hole” whenever they feel like it. The fact that these “holes” aren’t accessible to any random guy thus renders them “square.” This seems to frustrate Adams, who goes on to complain that “society has evolved to keep males in a state of continuous unfulfilled urges, more commonly known as unhappiness” and that “society is organized as a virtual prison for men’s natural desires.”
Looking at Hugh Hefner’s marital history – he’s been married and divorced and just got stood up at the altar – Adams concludes that:
For Hef, being single didn’t work, and getting married didn’t work, at least not in the long run. Society didn’t offer him a round hole for his round peg. All it offered were unlimited square holes.
What does this even mean? I suspect that over the course of his lifetime, Hef has had about all the sex he could possibly want, and then some. Is it somehow unjust that he couldn’t force his latest fiancée to actually marry him? Or that some women are sexually unavailable – that is, square holes – to him?
It goes without saying that Adams’ notions of human sexuality are profoundly insulting to both men and women . On the one hand, he’s suggesting that men are basically all potential rapists walking around with, er, turgid pegs; and, on the other, he seems to regard women as little more than passive (if stubbornly recalcitrant) receptacles for these male “pegs.”
And so it’s hardly surprising that his grand solution to the conundrum he’s invented is a rather depressing one. After noting that it really wouldn’t be a good thing for men to go around willy-nilly raping women and/or, as he puts it, tweeting their meat, he suggests the real solution is for men to be chemically castrated. And no, I’m not making that up. Here’s Scotty:
I think science will come up with a drug that keeps men chemically castrated for as long as they are on it. It sounds bad, but I suspect that if a man loses his urge for sex, he also doesn’t miss it. Men and women would also need a second drug that increases oxytocin levels in couples who want to bond. Copulation will become extinct. Men who want to reproduce will stop taking the castration drug for a week, fill a few jars with sperm for artificial insemination, and go back on the castration pill.
That might sound to you like a horrible world. But the oxytocin would make us a society of huggers, and no one would be treated as a sex object. You’d have no rape, fewer divorces, stronger friendships, and a lot of other advantages. I think that’s where we’re headed in a few generations.
Is he being serious here, or is this all some satirical “social experiment?” Who the fuck knows. Though I suspect if I accused him of being serious, he’d claim he was being satirical. And vice versa. Because that’s just the way he is.
Also, while I’m at it: the idiomatic expression about pegs and holes posits a square peg and a round hole, not the other way around. Why did Adams reverse this? Why!? Why!!?? Is he trying to drive us all mad?
Ladies, your days are numbered! The sexy lady sexbots are only a few years off, which will free men of the onerous task of having sex with your cootie-ridden human bodies, and pretty soon you won’t be needed for anything at all, not even making babies. At least according to this comment by “JR” on Roissy’s blog, which was recently highlighted on the Pro-Male/Anti-Feminist Technology blog:
I think the obvious gender-wide frustration of women today can partly be explained by this lowered value of children/reproduction altogether. Women understand that their primary purpose will always be tied up with reproduction and not civilization-altering achievement; now that this purpose has been largely removed, what do they have left? … [M]en are as useful as ever, whereas women’s role as child-bearer is rapidly becoming unnecessary and in many cases even harmful.
Babies? We don’t need no stinkin babies!
And if after a few years of childless Children of Men-style dystopia we male humans decide that maybe it would be good if we, collectively, had a few kids, well, by then some clever dude will have invented an artificial womb. And then, ladies, you’re toast! (Which we dudes will be eating a lot of in the future, by the way, as actual cooking, not to mention sammich-making, is for bitches.) As Mr. Pro-Male/Anti-Feminist Technology explains:
Before … our current level of technology, women were in complete and total control of reproduction. Women could get knocked up by one guy and claim another guy is the dad and there was no way of knowing what the truth was. First came increased scientific knowledge about reproduction. Before that the process of reproduction would have been considered to be almost magical given women room to exercise total control. This lessened women’s control over reproduction. In the 20th century came paternity testing so men could know without a doubt who a child’s father is. Now women have no room to hide except that the law allows for paternity fraud. Eventually we will have artificial wombs which will allow men to have children without women if they so choose. The artificial womb represents control of reproduction being wrestled away from women. This is a pretty direct progression of how women become less and less necessary in reproduction.
Of course, there’s that whole issue of actually raising the little buggers. But don’t worry, dudes are totally better at this, too!
[W]omen’s role as child bearer in many cases is becoming harmful. … All the pathologies caused by single mothers do not need to be repeated here. Beyond single motherhood take a look at younger women in their 20s. How many of them would you really trust to be mothers even if divorce wasn’t an issue? Take a look at the current crop of teenage girls, and it’s clear they will be even worse for motherhood than women currently in their 20s. Don’t forget all the misandry that these women carry which will have a negative impact on any sons you might have with them. … All things being equal the two parent family is probably better for raising children, but all things are not equal. Because of divorce the two parent family can become single motherhood at the drop of a hat. Single fatherhood from the beginning is better than that. Even without divorce women are increasingly unqualified to be mothers. … We are getting to a point where single fatherhood may be the superior system of raising children, especially when it comes to raising sons.
In your face, ladies! Moms suck! DudeMoms rule!!!!
Of course, not all dudes want to be single fathers. As savethemales notes in the comments on Pro-Male/Anti-Feminist Technology,
Robogirls can take the place of mothers and assist in raising children for the biological dads who employed artificial wombs in the labs to incubate their babies. Personally, I never want kids and frankly, what reason is there? Children and women are a big liability. Actuarial escape velocity and transhumanism will be the answer and logical choice over procreation for many men.
I have no idea what he just said there, but I am totally 100% behind it. Except maybe for the part about Robogirls. I mean, how do we know for sure that Robogirls aren’t going to teach robomisandry to our dude-children?
Personally, I wouldn’t trust my artificial-womb-born dude-children to anyone but a RoboDudeMom.
Apparently we feminists simply can’t understand the Men’s Rights Movement, because
feminist ideology is still stuck in the 19th century concept that women are second class citizens when objectively they are in a better position than men. … The[y] just cannot grasp that in modern western society men are second class citizens.
Oh, and while they’re at it, they would also like to explain to us at great length why the whole Slutwalk thing is so silly. I mean, telling women to not dress like sluts if they don’t want to get raped is just good common sense! And obviously dudes have a much greater understanding of the topic of rape and personal safety in general than silly ladies with their silly lady brains and their silly tendency to get drunk on silly lady drinks.
Because Reddit Men’s Rights is not completely dominated by retrograde MRA misogynists, there are actually some decent comments mixed in with all the patronizing nonsense. Enjoy?
As SallyStrange has pointed out in the comments here, quite a few MRAs seem to have a bad case of “womb envy” – or, more specifically, “abortion envy.” That is, they envy the ability of women to abort fetuses that they – the guys, as sperm providers — have had a part in creating. And since they don’t get final say in whether or not the woman in the equation gets an abortion, many of these guys claim they should have the right to a “paper abortion” – that is, to wash their hands financially of the baby once it is born.
But for every MRA demanding their own right to an abortion, there’s another MRA who thinks abortion is an unmitigated evil, which in essence means that they think pregnant women should be forced to give birth to babies they don’t want. The guy behind The Life Zone evidently thinks this way. And so does one New Mexican pro-lifer named Greg Fultz, who has launched a bizarre campaign designed to shame the woman who aborted what he thinks of as “his” baby – the highlight of which is a giant billboard depicting him holding what looks like the blackened carcass of a baby under the headline “This Would Have Been a Picture Of My 2-Month Old Baby If The Mother Had Decided To NOT KILL Our Child!”
I’ve been meaning to write about the Fultz thing for some time, but haven’t, because frankly the whole thing makes me depressed. Over the past day or so three separate Man Boobz readers have brought the subject up, so I figure it’s time to deal with the subject. My solution? I’m going to punt, and rather than post about it specifically I’m just going to point you to an excellent, and nicely sarcastic, post on the subject from Jill on Feministe.
Since Jill wrote that post, Fultz has been ordered by a judge to take the billboard down or face jail; he says he won’t. Details here.
NOTE: I originally ended this post with a 1200 word dissertation spelling out my take on abortion. But reading it back over again I realized that many of the points I made in it had already been made, in many cases more deftly, by various commenters in yesterday’s 800-plus comment thread (which actually stayed on the topic for the first several hundred comments, until more or less everything that needed to be said on the subject had been said). The tl;dr summary: her body, her choice. “Paper abortions” only work if the government is willing to step in to make up for the loss of child support, and that isn’t going to happen in the US any time soon. (And I don’t see many MRAs calling for increased support for single moms.)
So instead of abortion, let’s talk about Fultz. What a dick.
Three young women wake up, confused and terrified, in a room that looks like a cross between a normal hospital room and the creepy underground lair of some mad scientist from a horror movie. A video screen flickers on and a creepy older man, looking a bit like Academy-award-nominee Robert Loggia, appears on it, telling the women that he’s their “jailer.” The women, you see, had all been getting abortions when their jailer’s shadowy accomplices kidnapped them and brought them to this strange prison, where they will be forced to live for the next seven months until they gave birth. “You were all on the operating table, all ready to commit murder,” announces a mysterious doctor. “Your babies will be given life just as God planned.”
Now, if you thought that something seemed really … off about that trailer, well, you’re not alone. For the film is not, as you might have assumed from my description, a warning against the fanatical misogyny of many in the anti-abortion movement.
No, the film – produced by a pro-life former judge, crime thriller author, and Republican New Jersey state senate candidate – is meant as pro-life propaganda. As the offical press release for the film’s premiere put it:
The film, which appears to cut right down the middle [of the abortion debate], examining the topic from both sides, offers a powerful, anti-abortion climactic twist. Del Vecchio and the cast invite pro-lifers to come to this historic event.
During the months the three women are held in captivity, you see, they are exposed to a barrage of films and books intended to, er, educate them about abortion –what their attending obstetrician Dr. Wise describes as “an abortion think tank.” Two of the captive women do indeed convert to the pro-life side; apparently we in the audience are supposed to develop Stockholm Syndrome along with them. The third, as we see in the trailer, tries to induce a miscarriage, which doesn’t go quite as planned.
And this sets us up for the final twist, which I’m just going to go ahead and reveal: once all three women have given birth, Dr. Wise tells them she’s going to sew them all, mouth-to-vagina, into a Human Abortion-pede!
Actually no: the twist is that the “life zone” the three women in has actually been … purgatory! All three “captives,” you see, had died on the operating table while getting their abortions. (Apparently they went to the world’s worst abortion clinic, as first-trimester abortions don’t involve anything more surgically invasive than the insertion of a suction tube; the risk of death from a legal surgical abortion is 0.0006%, one in 160,000 cases, making the procedure many times safer than childbirth itself.) Their time in the “life zone” was a test: the two women who changed their minds were whisked up to heaven, while their miscarriage-attempting, stubbornly pro-choice companion is sent straight to H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks. Dr. Wise, despite being on the right side of the abortion question, also goes to hell for committing suicide. And, oh yeah, their jailer – Loggia – was Satan. Why Satan and a hell-bound doctor were the ones trying to convert the abortion ladies to the pro-life side I can’t tell you; del Vecchio’s theology is evidently more sophisticated than I am.
The real twist here? As Jersey Journal writer Alan Robb notes:
The Life Zone went viral across the internet [last] Friday after blogs The Frisky and Talking Points Memo picked up on the film’s trailer. … But despite garnering more than 20,000 hits on YouTube in the last four days, only fifty people – including the film’s cast and producers – attended this weekend’s screening, and even those who starred in the movie didn’t know how to interpret its twist ending.
It’s impossible to tell from the trailer if the film is bad in a so-bad-it’s-good way, or if it’s just plain awful. I will try to get hold of it when it hits video, and will report back with my results.
In the meantime, if you’re looking for a good horror film set in a creepy hospital, try renting Infection, a Japanese film from 2005. Or, if you’ve got a longer attention span, try Lars Von Trier’s supernatural soap opera The Kingdom, a darkly comic miniseries which takes place in what one might call, paraphrasing Bill Murray’s character in Tootsie, “one nutty hospital.” Both are conveniently available on Netflix instant watch, so you don’t even have to leave your pregnancy dungeon to see them.
EDITED: Added some info on the minimal dangers of abortion procedures.
Dude, do you have a moment to take a quick survey?
So AskMen.com just put up the first segment of its annual 3-part Great Male Survey. Filled with strange assumptions and sometimes creepy questions, it’s a survey that reveals at least as much about the survey makers as it does the survey takers, and what it reveals ain’t good: it seems to have been written by a jaded ex-romantic ( or a committee of such) only a few short steps away from full-blown MGTOW-hood.
The survey starts off with a fairly innocuous question about basic compatibility, but quickly veers off course with question #2:
How important is it to you that your wife/future wife signs a prenup?
Hold on a second, daddy-o! We haven’t even determined if the little missy has “wife potential” yet — as question #3 puts it.
After one more question about marriage, the quiz moves on to cheating and then (perhaps inevitably) to the issue of divorce:
Do men get screwed by the courts in divorce?
Then it’s onward to kvetching about what a naggy shrew your partner is (assuming you haven’t already finalized the divorce):
Followed by the classic “Would you dump a girlfriend if she became fat?” (Just in case you’re wondering, ladies, nearly half the American guys in last year’s survey said “yes.”)
Next we get to what we might call the “creepy controlling asshole” portion of the survey. After asking whether we’ve ever snooped through our partner’s email or Facebook messages, they pose this doozy:
That quiet clattering you hear is the sound of a thousand creepy dudes Googling to see if this is possible – and, if so, the best place to put the chip.
After several more questions about Facebook and the internet, a few badly conceptualized questions about romance, and a bunch about sex, the quiz moves on to some good old-fashioned slut shaming, asking men to quantify the number of sex partners a woman is allowed to have before they consider her “promiscuous.” Ladies: you’ll be glad to know that 41% of American dudes who took the survey last year consider any women with more than 9 lifetime partners to be dirty sluts – sorry, “promiscuous.”
Then of course it’s on to an attempt to quantify exactly when women start getting all old and ugly:
Yes, one of the possible answers is “18.” You may be slightly reassured by the fact that zero percent of last year’s survey takers gave that answer. Six percent said “20,” though, and 24% said “30.”
Then we have this curiously worded question on workplace sex:
So the idea that your partner might be a big higher up on the old org chart isn’t even a possibility? What is this, 1962? Did they borrow this question from Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl? Or find it scribbled on a napkin on Don Draper’s desk just before he impulsively proposed to his new secretary?
Creepy, huh? This is the most unsettling book cover from a set of “crappy joke books, circa 1955” found on the blog Vintage Sleaze – which lives up to its name, and then some.
Like Nigel Tufnel of Spinal Tap, whoever it was who bought these sorts of books by the millions in the 40s and 50s clearly had some trouble telling the difference between sexist and sexy. And I’m not quite sure how it was that anyone, sexist or sexy, actually found these funny. Then again, I think the same of newspaper comics today.
But I digress. Click on the link to see the covers of 1) an evidently hi-larious book called “Keeping Women In Line,” and 2) an irreverent guide to married life by Stanley and Janice Berenstain. Yeah, that’s right: the motherfucking Berenstain Bears Berenstains!
The video above, which has been making the rounds of the manosphere, is one of the creepiest and most off-putting things I’ve seen since watching Dogtooth a couple of weeks ago. Actually, I take that back: Dogtooth was much less creepy and off-putting. I was so repelled by what I saw in this video that it literally took me several tries to get through the whole thing. And no, it’s not some weird misogynistic rant by the likes of Bernard Chapin. Oh, no no no. The misogynists of the world are as repelled by the video as I am, though for radically different reasons. Titled “Dear Woman,” the video was actually put together by a couple of self-described “conscious men” who think they’re doing a great favor to the women of the world.
To which I can only say: Guys, stop it, you’re not helping.
If you can stomach it, the video is worth watching in its entirety. If not, here’s what you’re missing: The video is the work of a couple of New Age gurus — Arjuna Ardagh and Gay Hendricks, Ph.D – who, with the help of a little gaggle of guys, have written a little manifesto “apologizing” to the women of the world for all the bad shit done by men to women over the centuries. Or, as they put it:
I feel deep love, great respect and a growingsense of worshipfor the gifts of the feminine. I also feel deep sorrow about the destructive actions of the unconscious masculine in the past and present. I want to apologize to you and make amends for those actions, in order to bring forth a new era of co-creation with you.
The first step in “making amends,” evidently, was to gather together a group of men – some of whom seem to have been roped into it in the middle of a garden party — and to somehow convince them to read out loud the entire text of this manifesto. (The full text is here, but it’s much creepier when it’s read out loud.)
There is something about this manifesto, and the men reading it, that is so “off” that it may well make your skin crawl, and make you wonder how many of the men in the video have dead bodies secreted away in the crawl spaces under their homes. A female friend I showed the video to could only make it through the first couple of minutes before switching it off in horror; one commenter on Metafilter reported that it “made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and not in a good way. Eeew.”
The creepyist, skin-crawliest part of the video has to be the section in which the assembled men talk about women’s bodies:
I honor the beauty and integrity of your body. When we worship each other through our bodies with awareness and devotion, there are no boundaries to the love that we can generate. I feel sorrow that men have used your beauty as a form of commerce in prostitution and pornography. In the grip of lust we have often lacked the skills to ask gracefully for intimacy or to take ‘No’ for an answer. I take a stand against any form of enforced or soulless commercialization of woman’s beauty, andI respect that your body belongs to you.…
I honor your capacity to listen to your bodyand its needs for food, rest and playtime.
I feel confident that I speak for many when I say “ewww.” Somehow I’m reminded of Saturday Night Live’s hot-tub-loving “lovers.”
It’s worth pointing out that the written manifesto refers to men and women “nurture[ing]” one another’s body; apparently no one noticed that the dude reading this passage in the video had turned nurturing into “worship.”
As one commenter on Metafilter put it:
“We worship women” sounds like something Buffalo Bill would have said if he had a PR agent. My guess is that they’re sickos who seem really earnest at first but it turns out that they’re actually trying to collect used tampons for onanistic purposes or something.
So what is it, aside from all this worshiping, that makes the video so creepy? Part of the problem is that these “conscious men” are, in their own way, as patronizing and sexist as any manosphere dudes “mansplaining” about how all women only want to fuck alpha guys. Women, in their view, are inherently peaceful earth-mother types. “I commit now to … honoring the spirituality of the divine feminine,” the guys tell us. “Ihonor your deep connection to the earth.”
The manifesto is overflowing with this kind of shit. No matter how “New Age” these guys think they are, these are some truly ancient, and quite thoroughly retrograde, notions.
But that’s just what makes them wrong and misguided. What is it that causes viewers to pick up that whole serial-killer vibe?
I think the answer to this can be found in a book called The Gif tof Fear by security expert Gavin de Becker. The book attempts to explain why our intuitions about creepy people are so often correct. There’s a good reason you feel uneasy around certain people; that’s your unconscious picking up on real, if hard to pin down, signals of danger.
De Becker also lays out some of the techniques predators use in an attempt to allay the suspicions of those they’re trying to victimize. One of the sneakiest? The unsolicited promise, which often means the very opposite of what is said. When someone tells you, out of the blue, that they “aren’t going to hurt you,” it’s often a very good sign that that’s exactly what they’re going to do. When someone feels the need to tell you, apropos of nothing, that he “honor[s] the beauty and integrity of your body” and “respect[s] that your body belongs to you,” you may well want to run screaming.
Even more than the unsolicited promises, I think it’s the unsolicited apologies in the Dear Woman video – so similar in intent to unsolicited promises — are a large part of what is setting off alarm bells in so many viewers. When a young guy in the video takes personal responsibility “for dragging you into … wars, and for the rape, murder, broken hearts and damaged families that resulted from them,” that’s just plain … weird, given that (unless he’s some young despot I’ve never heard of) he’s not actually responsible for any of this.
The “unsolicited promise” is similar to what de Becker calls “loan sharking” – offering unsolicited “help” in order to make victims feel obligated in some way to their unwanted helpers. In the manifesto/video, this “help” is abstract, but the strategy seems to be the same:
From this day, moving forward, I vow to treat your heart as the sacred temple it is, and I commit to honoring the feminine in you and me and in my relationship to all life.
Uh, who the fuck asked you to treat anyone’s heart as a “sacred temple?”
The manifesto/video is also filled with examples of “forced teaming,” another strategy favored by predators who want to convince their victims that they are in fact working together to do the very same thing:
I know that by leaving the past behind and joining hands in the present, we can create a synergy of our strengths. Together, there is nothing we cannot do.
But there’s something else about the video that adds to the sense that something is not right here: no matter how earnest all the men in the video are trying to sound, none of them (except perhaps the two ringleaders) seem to really believe the ridiculous things they’re saying. Instead, they seem to be, with varying degrees of insincerity, mouthing a series of essentially meaningless New Age platitudes – in short, simply saying what they think women want to hear.
No one is buying this bullshit, guys. Give it up.
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Women’s magazines can be terrifyingly good at reinforcing every bad thing women in this culture feel about themselves. Take, for example, this awful blog post over on Marie Claire, written by a dude, on “why men prefer innocent girls to bad girls.” It’s filled with statements like this, on why guys (supposedly) prefer virgins or near-virgins to more sexually experienced women — aka “bad girls”:
Guys just want to be the leader of that journey instead of the followers. I guess it’s like white fresh snow versus the snow that’s turning black on the side of the road … under the haze of car exhaust. The fresh snow is more of a palette for adventure.
Yep, that’s right. He’s comparing post-virginal women — that is, most adult women — to DIRTY, SOOTY, PROBABLY PISSED-ON, SNOW.
Actually, don’t click on his article. Not yet anyway. Click here instead, to see Captain Awkward’s masterful and often quite hilarious takedown of Rich and his paean to not-very-experienced, not-too-confident women.
When douchebags go a-courtin, things don’t always go so well, or so suggests this note from an angry dude that was recently featured on the awesome A(n)nals of Online Dating. Our would-be charmer started out with a bit of a no-no – a “but” statement. Specifically:
