A lot of MRAs maintain that they’re not anti-woman, just antifeminist. Heck, one new contributor to Reddit’s Men’s Rights subreddit has put that claim in the name he chooses to identify himself by: ProWomanAntiFeminist.
Alas, his comments don’t quite live up his moniker. PRAF (for short) launched his Reddit career a couple of days ago with a series of comments, all of them upvoted by the regulars, arguing that prostitution should be legalized — because he thinks that would be bad for women. “[L]egal prostitution reduces women’s economic advantage over men,” he argued in his second comment. Why? According to PRAF, because prostitutes offer men a better deal on sex:
[P]rostitutes give men no strings attached sexual satisfaction reasonably and anonymously for a set price. Without the man having to jump through arbitrary hoops to “impress” the girl, risking an “oops” pregnancy, or (god forbid) getting married.
When sex and female companionship is a man’s objective, prostitution is an efficient and cost-effective option that many women don’t want to have to compete with.
In other words, prostitutes break the back of the dreaded Pussy Cartel — or, as PWAF would call it, the “sexual trade union.” Not only are wives and girlfriends more costly in the long run for men, but they’re also not actually obligated to have sex:
Married women get unfettered access and control over male resources, and they don’t even have to put out. Girlfriends get some access to male resources, dependent on how attractive she is and how desperate he is.
Simply paying up front for sex is so much more convenient:
Prostitutes offer a dependable, no strings attached experience for men.
And so we come to what PWAF sees as the big payoff here:
Legal prostitution reduces the desperation of men, mandating that non-prostitute women have to bring more to the table to secure male resources.
I suggest you read that last sentence over again, because it’s a doozy.
Even by his own daffy logic, PWAF is advocating something that he clearly sees as anti-woman — or at least anti “non-prostitute women,” as he so charmingly puts it.
Might want to rethink that name.
Of course, given PWAF’s familiarity with MR lingo and logic, I suspect that this “new” commenter is actually a very old commenter under a new name.
[S]ometimes it’s easier for a survivor to live with the knowledge that their rapist is free than it is for them to go through years of being under constant suspicion of being an evil false accuser. It ends with misogyny justifying and reinforcing itself, as the concept “women lie about rape” becomes both proof of and proven by “women are untrustworthy, manipulative, and malicious.” It ends with rapists who tell their victims “no one will ever believe you” being right, with society standing behind them.
Every time we reinforce the common wisdom that “women lie about rape all the time,” rape gets a little easier to commit.
All too often, the mainstream men’s rights movement is not gender egalitarian at all. All too often, those of us who support equal rights for everyone– no matter what our differences in opinion– have found our voices drowned out by misogynistic, rape-apologist and frankly stupid asshats. That has to change.
Reddit is home to a whole network of proud pervs, and through Jailbait I came across another board dedicated to creeping on someone named Angie Verona. … Three years ago, when she was 14, Angie took some photos for her boyfriend and stored them in a private Photobucket account. The account was hacked and the photos leaked. Pictures of 14-year-old Angie posing provocatively in a bikini and lingerie were thrown all over the internet, showing up on message boards like Reddit and 4chan, and posted on porn sites. …
[E]very teen with a Facebook account has pictures like Angie’s. What’s fucked up is this trafficking of pictures of random underage girls that falls just this side of child porn, with no regard for the real life that might be ruined in the process.
Oh, by the way, TRIGGER WARNING for all of his comments, which tend to be sexually explicit and often pretty rapey.
The only thing that allows me to retain my faith in humanity (and the medical profession) is my almost complete certainty that he is not really a surgeon and that this bit of celebrity bladder fondling never happened outside of mroglolblo’s fevered imagination.
I’d love to have gotten a rare inside visit to the Cern supercollider and jerked off right into the tubes as they were starting a run and everyone freaks out until they discover my sperm travelled 25 times the speed of light and scientists shit themselves when they see the results, and to confirm the results they have me whack off into the supercollider in front of a team of top physicists and dignitaries live on tv and the results are reproduced and it turns out my sperm has unique properties and they have the Spanish girl from My name is earl lay spread eagle in the collider that I whack off into again and she gives birth to a baby with the powers of superman and he turns out to be crazy and by force makes Felicia Day and Olivia Munn submit to a 1500 man gangbang at the next comicon.
Needless to say, mroglolblo has an extensive knowledge of pornography. Really, really, really extensive. Charmingly, he’s rather modest about his accomplishments:
I wouldn’t say I know all that much about porn. More than the average guy for sure but there is a whole other level of porn aficianado out there that dwarfs mine. It’s the guys who have been following porn for 20+ years and have tens of thousands of posts on sites like Adultdvdtalk and planetsuzy.com and run blogs about porn who are the real experts who have helped educate me. It’s kind of like what Newton said about standing on the shoulders of giants.
Naturally, Reddit loves the guy. Indeed, one of his skeeziest comments, involving some almost-certainly-imaginary incest with his aunt, garnered him nearly 400 upvotes.
There are still certain things that a suitably trained woman can do that a dog, no matter how smart and well trained, cannot do. That is why I am interested in female companionship.
Here’s the entirety of a recent post by an MRA who calls himself Snark:
Uh, dude, I think you’ve confused “feminists” with “Daleks.”
Our new friend Fidelbogen thought this was such a brilliant idea he devoted a post to it himself, declaring:
Such economy, such concision. …
Really now, we wouldn’t go far wrong to make our rhetoric revolve around this above all, and very little more. The saying is deceptively simple, for it goes deep and reaches into many corners.
It puts them on the spot, and nails them there.
I knew Fidelbogen was a bit of a pompous doofus, but this is a whole new level of stupidity for him. I don’t even know what to say about something this idiotic.
Also, check out the comments to Snark’s piece. There’s something about potatoes you kind of have to see to believe.
Ladies! You may think you’ve got the men of the world fooled, but the guys over on MGTOWforums.com can see right through you! As dontmarry puts it:
Everything that a woman does is deceitful. From makeup, push-up bras and high heels, to fibbing about her dick count or proclamations of ‘I don’t mind marrying a poor man’ (oh yes you do).
That’s right, ladies! We know those eyelashes aren’t real! We know your cheeks aren’t really that rosy! And your lips aren’t really that red! And your boobies aren’t really … um, what was I saying? I got distracted thinking about boobies. Anyway, you’re all a bunch of liars! I bet some of you even wear Spanx, which are a tool of Satan.
Also, that thing he said about the dick count. Stop the lies! We demand dick count accuracy!
Jezebel’s Anna North has an interesting piece up on the return of Reddit’s ultra-skeezy Jailbait subreddit – and on the surprising number of vocal redditors who think that pedophilia ephebophilia is perfectly “natural.”
This slogan is apparently what CAUSES violence against women.
Another day, another apologia for male violence from the Men’s Rights crowd. This time the apologist is W. F. Price at The Spearhead, who uses several recent news stories involving violent men as an excuse to attack feminism.
Repeated provocations against men, systematic discrimination against men, and state-sanctioned debt slavery are starting to have the inevitable effect. In a triumph for the feminist movement, men are lashing out violently against women, fulfilling the feminist fantasy of a gender war.
In the old days, everything was (presumably) peachy keen between the sexes. Then along came the feminists, and all hell broke loose. Those “take back the night” marches feminists love so much? They’re just red flags to the bulls – that is, our society’s ample stock of “mentally unstable and out-of-luck men.” You don’t want to make these guys mad!
[W]omen were encouraged to be militant against all males, which can only have unfortunate results, given the hands-down male superiority in combat. …
In other words, the fact that there are violent men out there is why women shouldn’t complain about violent men. Presumably the only marches women should be organizing would be “No, Go Ahead, You Keep the Night” marches. Don’t want to offend those rapists –that’ll just make them even rapier than usual!
According to Price, though, feminists actually like violence against women — because it keeps them in business.
For feminism to exist as a valid movement, there must be violent conflict, so many of the efforts of feminists have sought to provoke just that. … You see, for a feminist to justify her job there must be some degree of brutality against women. … So, if you are a feminist, the hapless women murdered or assaulted by the damaged men feminists have created are necessary sacrifices for advancing the feminist agenda.
So not only do the feminists provoke these “damaged men” – they created them in the first place, by being so feministy.
Wouldn’t this whole provoke-the-men strategy make life more dangerous for feminist women as well? No, because feminists are all rich ladies, and everyone knows that rich ladies are never beaten or raped or murdered:
[W]e all know that feminism has never been about the typical woman who lives a humble life, but rather the ambitious elite who want to have access to the big boys and big money on Capitol Hill and Wall Street. … Disadvantaged women are truly the cannon fodder of feminists.
So what “proof” does Price offer for his claim that men are “lashing out” at women because of feminism? He cites three news stories: one dealing with a woman-hating trucker who’s accused of killing several prostitutes; another involving a man who went on a shooting rampage at a church, killing his wife and wounding two others; and finally, the case of James Ray Palmer, the Arkansas man who shot up the offices of the judge who’d handled his divorce and custody case more than a decade earlier. (I wrote about his case here.)
How do these cases relate to feminism? You’ll have to ask Price, because none of the news stories suggest any connection, and Price doesn’t explain why he thinks there is one. True, the trucker is said to be a misogynist, but misogyny is far more ancient than feminism. Meanwhile, we have no evidence that the church shooter was angry at any women other than his wife.
In the case of Palmer, there may be an indirect connection, if it turns out that he was influenced by the angry, violent rhetoric of the Men’s Rights movement. As I pointed out in my post on Palmer, many in the MRM have made a martyr out of Thomas Ball, who committed suicide on the steps of a courthouse, leaving behind an manifesto that urged men to literally burn down police stations — and courthouses. It is certainly conceivable that Palmer’s courthouse rampage was inspired by this sort of rhetoric.
But to blame feminism for any of this is ass-backwards. Feminism is a response to misogyny, not its cause. To blame feminism for violence against women is a bit like blaming Jews for provoking the Holocaust. (Forgive me, Godwin; it was the clearest analogy.)
Price ends his piece by urging women to, in effect, shut up and fix him a sandwich:
Women’s best bet for security is not in denouncing and fighting men, as feminists would have it, but in cooperating with them and taking on their proper role.
Then he ends with a weird coda suggesting that feminists should be locked up for having the temerity to speak up in the first place:
The United States will once again be a righteous society only when feminists are jailed for interfering with families, and their academic apologists are removed by security from their jobs in taxpayer-funded educational institutions. This would be the most humane course of action to take. Far more humane, in fact, than provoking men and women to physically attack one another, as feminists would have it today so that they can unleash state agents on confused and demoralized families.
I didn’t have the stomach to read all of the comments responding to Price’s argument, such as it is. But here are some highlights – lowlights, really – of the highly upvoted comments I did read.
Anger against feminism has been building for years. As the men’s rights movement has gained momentum, feminists and their lackeys have doubled down and become more virulent in their anti-male hatred and propaganda. Women today are becoming more and more nasty on an interpersonal basis, and they are doing so more frequently. A breakpoint will come. It will probably take a catalyst; another severe economic downturn might do it. But it will come. Feminists and their pet femboys will push things until it does.
Wait. If the Men’s Rights movement is, in effect, provoking feminists to get more feministy, then wouldn’t (by Price’s logic) the allegedly increased violence be the fault of the MRAs?
Rod worries that in the case of a real gender war, men might actually lose – all because of those darned “white knights” and their reluctance to beat up the ladies:
I’m afraid that if it ever came down to a real physical war between the sexes, men would unfortunately lose. There are too many men who can’t stand the sight of men harming women, and would immediately step in to save them. Perhaps nature instilled in us a visceral reaction to women’s suffering, making us want to step in and help, and at one time in the history of our species, that reaction was no doubt a salutary thing. Now it just works against us.
Antiphon, meanwhile, blames it all on the Jews. Or, more specifically, the Jewesses, who apparently control the feminist movement in the same way that their husbands control the banks.
Needless to say, this being The Spearhead, Antiphon’s comment has three times as many upvotes as downvotes. Apparently, the only thing worse than a feminist is a Jewish feminist.
I guess my Nazi analogy earlier in this post wasn’t so out of place after all.
Sometimes I need a brief respite from manosphere douchebaggery. Sometimes I’d rather just watch kittens and listen to Krautrock. Possibly at the same time. If anyone wants to join me, here are some kittens attacking a soda box, and a recording of Harmonia playing live in 1974.
To be honest, I don’t actually expect that anyone but me is going to enjoy the Harmonia video, which has no visuals other than the album cover and which consists of 17 minutes and 24 seconds of the fellas playing basically the same thing over and over. (Hey, I like it.) The kittens, on the other hand, are almost certainly going to be a delight for everyone.
If I could only figure out a way to get kittens to perform Krautrock, then I’d be in heaven.
