Men’s Rightsers offer innovative new theory about rape and feminism. And by “innovative” I mean Horrifying


Paul Elam: “Dworkin’s problem wasn’t that she was raped. Her problem, and I mean all along, was that she wasn’t.”

There’s a post on the AgainstMensRights subreddit today highlighting a comment from a Men’s Rights Redditor that offers some, well, interesting theories about why feminists are “obsessed” with rape and abortion, even though he thinks they are very ugly.

Actually, in his mind, it’s because they are very ugly, and secretly wish someone would be attracted enough to them to rape them.

Sasha_ 3 points 1 day ago I can't help noticing that many of these women protesting so vehemently about rape seem to be...well I don't really know how to put it; but if they're rape victims then there must be some very odd rapists in the US; because some of those women are clearly about 15+ stone in weight and there're not what one would describe as 'traditionally attractive' - unless one's particularly attracted to scary she-beasts. It does make me wonder whether some of these women are motivated by sexuar frustration? A great many female feminists seem to be quite unhealthily obsessed with rape in a disturbingly-obsessed way. It goes right across the board really - feminists are always banging on about rape and abortion. It's as though half the time they're obsessed with being 'ravished' - and God knows half the books women read seem to be rape-fantasises like that 'Twilight' nonsense - and the rest of the time they obsessed with killing the results. The more I think about it, the more I think that feminist are really quite creepy.

I’m sure there are MRAs out there who would like to dismiss his posting as the ravings of a random Redditor. Sadly, it’s not. Despite the terribleness of his “explanation,” or perhaps because of it, it seems to be a common one amongst Manosphereians and Men’s Rightsers.

Indeed, in one notorious post a couple of years ago, A Voice for Men founder and all-around garbage human Paul Elam — probably the most important person in the Men’s Rights movement today — offered a much cruder version of this argument. [TRIGGER WARNING for some primo rape apologism. I have bolded the worst bits, and archived the post here in case Elam decides to take it down, as he has been doing with some of his more repellant posts].

what do you do if you are the daughter of an estranged Indian royal family marooned in the heart of late-Victorian and Edwardian London? You join the ranks of the various revolutionaries and other assorted malcontents, while maintaining social proprieties to the very end.

The BBC broadcaster Anita Anand tells the beguiling story of Sophia Duleep Singh, from exile in the Suffolk country estate of Elveden to the suffragette battleground of Westminster, via various trips to her ancestors’ home. Anand vividly paints the picture of society girl turned revolutionary and her father, who spends most of his years fulminating against the British and wanly plotting against them.

Sophia takes the well-travelled route of private tutors and debs balls. “The timid girl who used to squirm before the camera was now an unabashed show-off. She would strike absurd poses for newspaper photographers, marrying her two greatest loves: high fashion and dog-breeding. On one voyage, back home to north-western India aboard the SS Barbarossa, a ship “designed to soothe and pamper even the tautest of travellers”, Sophia paid considerable attention to the etiquette of the captain’s banqueting table and avoiding the more vulgar guests.

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So how did this spoilt princess, goddaughter of Queen Victoria, become a doughty fighter for women’s rights? Her turbulent family history influenced her greatly. Her feisty sister, Bamba, initially secured a place at Northwestern University, near Chicago, to study medicine. The arrival and ambitions of this exotic lady were a matter of fascination and consternation. “Although several universities were admitting women medical students, many Americans found the practice distasteful, believing like their British counterparts that women doctors were an affront to the natural order,” Anand writes. The offer was withdrawn and Bamba returned to the UK despondent, joining her similarly downcast elder sister Catherine.

One of the most fiery debates over female sexuality is whether female ejaculation, or “squirting,” is actually a thing. Last week, the Journal of Sexual Medicine released a study online attempting to settle this once and for all. The journal rounded up 7 women who reported “massive fluid emission during sexual stimulation” and analyzing the contents of said fluids. The study’s authors ultimately determined that “squirting is essentially the involuntary emission of urine during sexual activity,” or in layman’s terms: Squirting is probably pee.

Though the study was far from comprehensive, it did attempt to debunk one of the most prevalent myths of female sexuality out there: that of the ultra-orgasmic woman who effortlessly ejaculates.

Thanks to the lack of information surrounding the female anatomy, such myths dominate our understanding of the vagina to the point where even those who have one need a few hours with a hand mirror to figure out how to navigate the damn thing. The Daily Dot attempted to clear up some of these myths and misconceptions by debunking a few of our favorites.

This is part one of a four-part series. Part Two, Part Three, Part Four.

Fixing this is going to require a lot of talking.

I try not to keep track of the threats. High profile women face hatred and threats online that can take your breath away. It has mine. I’ve been threatened with rape and being beaten to death and fucked to death with inanimate objects and more rape and put into slavery and more beating and then some more rape.

Sometimes the threats are sexual, sometimes just violent. I don’t know about all of them. I know Ryan Singel, my editor at Wired, often deleted them, along with comments about my looks, off the bottom of my articles before I could see them. I have a hard time remembering specific threats, because I have to block them out to function. Once, a man in Britain said he would send me a specific poisonous spider that would jump out of the box and kill me — points for creativity. A man in Australia told me that he fantasized about raping me then beating me to death. That stuck for the sheer vividness. Though when I think about his fantasy, it’s not really me he’s doing it to. It’s some kind of inanimate blow up doll of me.

I would fight, I think. I have a history of fighting back in real life. Sometimes it has worked, and sometimes it hasn’t.
For all the theories and fantasies about how we’d take down our attackers, it’s not so simple to decide if you should fight back. Some say you shouldn’t, because that’s how women get beaten badly or killed, and raped is better than dead, or eating through a tube for life. Or, if you win, you might go to jail for years. Raped is definitely better than going to jail for years, especially given the prevalence of rape in prison. There’s another benefit to not fighting back, which is this: if you know you can’t win, either because of physical or situational coercion, you can just leave your body. You just let it happen to the meat and send your mind somewhere a thousand miles away, where none of this is real. It works for rape, it works for beatings, it works whenever you are in terrible pain and no one is there to care for you. You make your body a stranger, you stop caring about it, sometimes you even hate it, and then it all happens to the stranger you care nothing for.

The problem is it can take years to come back to your body. It can be the hardest trip you will ever make. The stranger meat you’ve learned to hate takes all the abuse, and becoming one person again can be the task of a lifetime. Reuniting your mind and body is like trying to find your way in the dark, and every time someone says “Bitch you’d look better with my cock in your mouth,” you risk getting lost again.

I haven’t thought this through extensively. Normally I wouldn’t write about anything I haven’t thought through extensively, but I’ll explain that.

But I’ve read Scott Aaronson’s article and Laurie Penny’s article and Chana Messinger’s article and I’m still nowhere closer to having a conclusion about any of this. I do know this: pain is real no matter who feels it. I am a feminist and I sympathize with Aaronson. Does this make me that much of an anomaly? I doubt it, but who knows.

I also know this: the vast majority of the time that this particular shy nerdy guy pain has been shared with me, it has been shared in response to my attempts to discuss or advocate against sexual harassment and assault, or sexism in general. This makes it very difficult to continue being compassionate.

I don’t agree that “But I was sad because I could never get laid” necessarily always means “I am demanding that some woman sleep with me in order to make me feel better,” but I understand why many feminist women think that it does. We’re not sure what else we’re supposed to do with all this pain being handed to us. Aaronson may think he’s the only one, or one of the only ones, but many of us have been hearing this sort of thing for years. Some of us heard it from the guys we hopelessly crushed on in high school, who ignored us to fantasize about prettier, normal-er girls–because, guess what? Shy nerdy girls who can’t get laid exist, too.

I was at a relative’s birthday party not long ago with a lot of people I didn’t know. All of the guests were already close friends, and for the most part they, like me, were in their 20s. Some of them were a good deal older, though, and one man—who seemed to be about my parents’ age—appeared to be the leader of the bunch. He was raucous and inappropriate and had a penchant for finding chops to bust; what he did not have, it soon became clear, was any sense of decorum.


At one point, while the whole group was outside on the deck and engaged in fragmented conversations, the man loudly interrupted his wife while she was talking to another woman. He wanted to tell a joke. He did. Or, I guess, he thought he did, because when he was finished most of the group started laughing. But the “joke” he told turned rape into a punch line. It was something he said in hopes other people would find it funny, and it sucked.

I wasn’t the only guest who didn’t respond with laughter, but I think I was the only one who didn’t even crack a smile. Everyone quickly turned back to their conversations, but I leaned over to another relative and whispered, “Glad rape jokes are still in vogue.” I pulled out my phone and fired off some similar snark for Twitter, then went inside to eat some more salami.

About 10 minutes later, when everyone was back in the kitchen filling their plates with food, the rape joke-teller stopped me as I passed him on my way to the dining room. “Hey,” he said, “someone pulled me aside to say that you’re a big feminist, so you probably didn’t appreciate my joke. I want to apologize.” He went on to say that rape is never funny, and that he knows people who have been sexually assaulted and that he would never want to make fun of their trauma. All in all, the jokester said some pretty enlightened things. But then he finished his remarks by saying something about how he was just joking, but he really hoped he didn’t offend me too much. He asked for a hug to let him know I had truly accepted his apology, to show that I knew he wasn’t a bad guy. I relented.

In case you’re wondering, he did not apologize to anyone else (especially not to the women whose conversation he interrupted).

We need to stop talking about Iggy Azalea. Not forever, but for right now. We don’t need to stop talking about her because she’s a poseur—though she is and there should always, always be conversations about poseurs in the public sphere. We don’t need to stop talking about her because she’s white. But we need to stop talking about her because her whiteness has granted her a privileged position in a conversation about race that we've been having all year, and in all that talking, we’ve learned nothing and changed nothing. And now, as the year closes, we are still talking about her when she shouldn’t be the story at all; when talking about her comes at the expense of Azealia Banks, and what Azealia Banks has to say about the music industry and the world we live in is way more important that anything Iggy Azalea has ever said.

That Macklemore album wasn’t better than the Drake record. That Iggy Azalea shit is not better than any fucking black girl that’s rapping today. And when they give those awards out—’cause the Grammys are supposed to be accolades for artistic excellence—Iggy Azalea is not excellent. —Azealia Banks

Despite releasing her long-delayed debut album, Broke With Expensive Taste, to significant critical acclaim, Azealia Banks is likely better known for her caustic and combative social media presence, which has seen her exercise no amount of chill. She lashes out at her perceived peers and frenemies, her collaborators and producers, her icons and respected rap figures, the varied and many machinations of the music game. Unfortunately, the social media beefs have overshadowed the larger narrative formulating for the past three years, obscuring the journey of a woman who completed an arc from having her nose pressed up against the window of the mainstream music industry, to getting a major label deal, to growing disenchanted and striking out on her own. It’s a journey that usually takes an artist much longer, with many detours, false starts and regrouping. Told 140 characters at a time, Banks came off as often problematic, sometimes misguided and, quite frankly, wholly stank.
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More insightful than inciteful, she was all over the place, touching on industry politics and revenue streams (she’s happy to be independent and deal with her fans directly via the Internet forevermore), media conspiracy theories and race (“We have Eric Garner, Mike Brown and Trayvon Martin, and y’all fucking talking about Bill Cosby, like, what the fuck?”), the classification of hip-hop and the swagger-jacking of black culture—even bringing up reparations. “There are huge corporations that are still caking off that slave money,” she said. At this point, she broke down. Her voice cracked. She choked. There were tears, and she could barely finish her next thought: “At the very fucking least, y’all owe me the right to my fucking identity and to not exploit that shit,” Banks demanded. “That’s all that we’re holding on to—hip-hop and rap.”



http://www.complex.com/music/2014/12/we-need-to-stop-talking-about-iggy-azalea

“The gender ideology dominating academe denies that sex differences are rooted in biology and sees them instead as malleable fictions that can be revised at will,” Paglia explains. “The assumption is that complaints and protests, enforced by sympathetic campus bureaucrats and government regulators, can and will fundamentally alter all men.”

So I am having a hard time engaging with this as a serious idea, so instead let’s casually discuss it as something that is very weird. And then let’s talk about the positive response to the piece from men who are usually like #NotAllMen any time a woman tries to write about violence. And then let’s all take a nap or maybe watch a movie.

Paglia does not think rape culture is real, but she thinks “evil” is very super-real. Apparently “evil” is a more useful lens through which we can view male violence than existing critiques of institutional and cultural norms that condone violence against women.

According to Paglia, “The sexual stalker, who is often an alienated loser consumed with his own failures, is motivated by an atavistic hunting reflex. He is called a predator precisely because he turns his victims into prey.”

After establishing that she thinks that rape is intrinsic to men’s nature, a nature that can’t be changed, Paglia advises women to try to understand “evil” and then stop wearing short skirts because those short skirts activate men’s intrinsic primitive violence boners or something. “[Women] assume that bared flesh and sexy clothes are just a fashion statement containing no messages that might be misread and twisted by a psychotic,” according to Paglia. “They do not understand the fragility of civilization and the constant nearness of savage nature.”