When men and women have consensual sex, who is responsible? If you said “both, because they both agreed to and participated in it,” you might be some sort of misandrist feminazi. Because, as W.F. Price explains in a recent Spearhead post, it’s really women who are responsible for consensual heterosexual sex.
If you’re wondering how that could be, well, keep reading. Price starts off by considering what he calls “the feminist claims of mass rape throughout society.”
If as many rapes happen as they claim, chances are someone on your street has been raped recently. There must be multiple simultaneous rapes occurring at any given time within your zip code. Can you hear the silence screaming around you? (this is probably what goes through the minds of feminists).
Why yes, Mr. Price, chances are that someone on my street has been raped recently. Indeed, I know numerous women who have been raped. I’m guessing most women don’t share the intensely personal fact that they’ve been raped with you, Mr. Price, because you’re the sort of person who likes to go around talking dismissively about “the feminist claims of mass rape throughout society.”
Let’s continue:
Anyway, the point is that if men are so irrepressibly prone to rape and so sexually voracious, and women so prone to being unwilling, then who really is most responsible when consensual sex does happen?
Well, that’s an interesting approach to logic: snidely dismiss the fact that rape is common, then go ahead and assume it’s true for the sake of the rest of your argument:
One of the most sacred and cherished rights of feminists is the right to say “no” — that is, the right to deny sex. Do men value the ability to deny sex as much as women? Perhaps when it comes to forced sodomy, but that isn’t a common issue. One rarely sees men marching down the street with placards declaring that “NO MEANS NO,” and when they do, they are generally just holding signs for women. So, if women actually like denying sex, and are more likely to exercise that power, who has more choice when it comes to whether or not a given sex act will occur?
I cannot help but marvel at the twisted logic here. Women want the right to say no to sex they do not want to have. But getting this “no” to be taken seriously is such a problem that some women organize actual protests in the streets to declare that “no means no,” and this means that … they are the ones responsible for sex.
And if women are more responsible for sex than the men they have sex with, just who should bear the responsibility for the pregnancies that sometimes follow? I think you see where Price is going here, but let’s let him spell it out:
Let’s break it down:
Men have a higher sex drive than women
Men have less control over their sexual impulses
Women value the ability to deny sex
Women are far more likely and able to deny sex than men
If the above are true, then barring outright rape, surely women are more to blame for pregnancy than men. So why does the law treat males and females as equal participants in the sex act, and why does policy hold the man to be more responsible? Clearly, the female has more control.
Since women sometimes say no to sex, they should bear all the costs of raising children?
It’s the strangest evo-psych argument I’ve seen so far: Since men are hardwired to be horndog sex-havers, they shouldn’t have to take responsibility for the consequences of this sexual activity, at least when it comes to contributing something to support the children that sometimes show up about nine months later. Ladies: think of the poor men, at the mercy of their boners! How dare you expect that they pay their share of the costs of raising a child?
In Price’s mind, child support is not only unfair to poor horndog men, it’s a cancer destroying civilization as we know it:
There’s been a lot of hand-wringing over the disintegration of the American family and marriage, but few people dare to point out the obvious reason America is fast becoming a nation of bastards. It’s actually fairly clear: women are not being held to the appropriate level of responsibility where their sexual choices are concerned. In the old days, it was understood that, barring rape, women were more responsible for who they slept with than men, and if they screwed up they had to deal with it. This is why the rate of illegitimacy was so low for so long. However, today, women can get pregnant and receive guaranteed support from not only the government, but whatever random man they permitted to have sex with them.
Raising a child as a single mom is apparently the easiest thing in the world. But making men pay for a portion of the costs for this child is tyranny!
Holding men more responsible than women for sex has been an abysmal failure, yet the policy remains in place despite thousands of years of received wisdom that lets us know it is a bad idea. Holding men and women equally responsible would be inappropriate as well, but we’ve gone past even that. Without some change in policy soon, the majority of all births in the United States will be illegitimate in a decade or so. The current system, which absolves women of responsibility for a choice that is largely in their hands, and for which they have even more options and tools at their disposal to deal with the consequences than ever, is unsustainable.
Despite his own handwringing about the state of The Family, Price doesn’t’ spell out how married men fit into his sex-responsibility equation. Are married men considered as responsible for babies as their wives? Is this responsibility retroactively nullified if they get divorced? It’s all very complicated. Which is, I guess, inevitable, once you arbitrarily decide that two consenting adults who have sex with one another are somehow not equally responsible for this sex.
Naturally, the Spearhead peanut gallery provided many more nuggets of wisdom. WGMOW – apparently a woman herself – gave Price’s bizarre argument a big ditto:
I don’t even see anthing debatable here. It is entirely the females who make the decision when and where to get knocked up, and then get child support from a man with the means to provide her with a bank account and credit cards seemingly for life. It there is no such man available she gets handouts from Big Daddy Government in the form of welfare, Sec 8 housing, free utilities, food stamps, free health care, free college education, and in some states, even a car.
These are the females that feminists say are “strong, powerful, and smart.” Bullshit. They are just as dependant as the females of the Victorian age. Then, they went from the care of their fathers into the care of their husbands. Now, they go from the care of their welfare mothers into the care of the government. All courtesy of our tax dollars.
AfOR put it even more bluntly:
The law fucks men over because they can be made to bleed more than a wimminz, they make better hosts for the parasites of society than wimminz.
Who exactly are the parasites here? The babies?
Hf seemed annoyed that women are allowed any autonomy at all:
Women typically struggle with knowing what exactly it is that they want. The “No Means No” movement is just as much trying to convince themselves and each other as it is trying to convince men. Deception is very much a part of a woman’s autonomy.
Nehalem provided a new slogan for the no-male-responsibility-for-sex-or-babies movement:
To get the point across more easily I suggest we modify a common liberal slogan and say:
Her body, her choice, her responsibility.
This being The Spearhead, it sort of goes without saying that each of these comments got dozens of upvotes.
Apparently, then, the only responsible course of action for unmarried women today is to never ever have sex with men. No sex, no consequences, no responsibilities to share with force upon men! But somehow I suspect that the MRAs of the world wouldn’t be happy with this solution.
