In post 25 of 100, I began looking at the question of why advocates of Patriarchal Misogyny (PM) believe that women currently control every aspect of society, and that is there is no room for boys to be boys and grow up to become “real” men. In that post, I looked pretty specifically at the situation of whether women really do control the educational system, as claimed by Carl Benjamin. However, that only feels like one narrow piece of the puzzle. There seems to be a second, more common argument within the Manosphere about how women control society by controlling access to sex, something that so strongly motivates men, that they/we have no ability to resist women’s will in our pursuit of sex.
There are a bunch of problems with this claim that I want to talk about either here, or in a future post, depending on how long this goes.
In no order:
1. Sexual violence and harassment statistics would strongly indicate that there is a very hard limit on how much control women collectively have when it comes to controlling access to their bodies. I think PM folks like Men’s Rights Movement types will tend to argue these statistics and claim that false accusations are much more common than the 2-10% they actually are, and other conspiratorial lines of absolute bullshit, but I don’t really want to address that stuff unless someone I care about earnestly asks me to, because it feels like a waste of my time otherwise. No matter what other questions you might have about a person, or their lifestyle or opinions of them, if they tell you they have been sexually assaulted, believe them and help provide them the support they need deal with that horrific and traumatizing experience as much as you are able to, even if that is just telling them you believe them and asking if they have a network of people helping them, or if they need help finding it. You may not physically, emotionally or socially be in a position to be a core part of that network yourself, but you should always be in a position to help point them in the direction of some resources for survivors of sexual violence.
2. The core premise of the PM claim that women control access to (heterosexual) sex is that all men are implicitly consenting and desiring sex at all times, and thus women have an unlimited buffet of options when it comes to choosing sexual partners, leading to belief in the “80/20 rule” mentioned in the show Adolescence, which is an incel corruption of the “Pareto principle” taken to mean here that 80% of women are attracted to the “top” (whatever that means) 20% of men, meaning that the vast majority of men never get looked at by the vast majority of women. Having grown up socialized as a man in the very misogynistic 90s, I know that ideas like this, and claims like “nice guys get the shaft, mean guys give the shaft” were commonly shared, even in very left leaning circles, including anarchist spaces and the punk rock scene. This idea that very many men are competing for a very small percentage of desirable women has been common in much of mainstream society (and media) and not just the alt-right or the manosphere. It is also a self-fulfilling prophecy that comes across as complete bullshit to my lived experience…but the thing about self-fulfilling prophecies based upon entirely subjective opinions about things like attractiveness—there really is no way to disprove this to someone who really believes it.
Like, personally, I know that every person I have ever slept with, hell, ever even made out with, has been HOT AS FUCK (even you, Dru Parish, although you are terrible at making out with boys), and there is no way that I can be in the top 20% of any Incel or PM man’s vision of what are the most attractive men. I probably have to put off deep diving into disproving the 80/20 theorem in a future post, because I can already see that this is something that is going to take a lot of connecting support to make sense of, but even the initial claim that all men are always consenting to have sex is dangerously false. It is one of these stereotypes that I think young boys get told (men want sex, women don’t) that leads to false expectations and can disconnect young men/boys from thinking for themselves about their bodies and desires. Saying “most people have at least one sexual fantasy that they would like to be able to be fulfilled in the right context” feels a lot more true, but is also something that applies as much to people socialized as women as to men. I also think the importance of having sex with another person is such an over-romanticized and heavily enforced expectation for both men and women that it becomes very difficult for people generally to come to terms with themselves as sexual beings and what that means for them. I know that for me, growing up, no one ever talked to me about how masturbation was actually the first act of becoming a sexual being and the place where far too many of my ideas about what it was going to mean to be a sexually active man were beginning to form. I fully intend to write a future blog post about learning about yourself and your body through masturbation, so I will save most of that for the future, but I will say that, even though my first sexual partner was an amazing human being and HOT AS FUCK, I was actually not mature enough to actually be ready to have sex the first time we did it, and that I probably didn’t say anything about that because I thought that, as a man, I must have really wanted to have sex more than I wanted to be able to talk comfortably about things like birth control, and desire, and consent. In the end, I feel very lucky that everything worked out very well for me and that I have no regrets or less than fantastic and amazing memories of any other sexual experience between us, but I am mature enough now to recognize that I wasn’t ready when it first happened. It certainly was not my natural horniness as young man that overrode my brain or self-control, it was expectations in my brain that over-rode my own body’s discomfort and unreadiness.
3. Saying “I believe that women have social, economic and political power over men because I believe that men want to have sex with women so badly that they lose any ability to think or act rationally or be in control of themselves” isn’t saying anything about society, it is saying something incredibly pathetic about yourself as a human being and a man. It is a statement that pretty much invalidates any argument that such a person could possibly try to make about how society is better when men are in charge of things, because it begins with the idea that men are irrational, emotional creatures controlled primarily by their own sex drives, and if they cannot be in control of their own access to women’s bodies to satiate that sex drive, then they can be easily manipulated and controlled. Seriously, making this argument about who is control over society based upon who controls men’s sexual access to women’s bodies is an absolutely pathetic position that completely undermines the entire argument of patriarchy. This ends up being true of most arguments in favor of patriarchy, but the transparent fallacy created by this argument in particular is worth pointing out, mocking, and ridiculing.
Overall, the logic of Incels, Red Pill-ers, Men’s Rights Morons and other Patriarchal Misogynists tends to be flimsy and asinine, but incredibly dangerous because it doesn’t actually require any logic, facts, or complex understanding of the world. It only requires that a person really internalize gender and sexual insecurities, as well as feelings of rejection, into a state of mind that is desperate to find an external scape goat, instead of having to reevaluate personal romantic and sexual expectations and where those expectations come from. This is why folks really buying into PM ideologies become so dangerous, a fact proven over and over again in mass shootings and acts of anti-social violence, and why the people promoting and exploiting PM ideology have to be confronted specifically for relying on this tactic. Attacking Patriarchy and Patriarchal Misogyny is not attacking men. If someone sees an attack on the ideas of Patriarchal Misogyny and feels like those attacks are about taking power away from men, than that person is mistaking the inherently exploitative and corrupt “power over others” as the authentic and true power that is generated as power with and power from within. They are painting masculinity into a corner where it defines itself not as being in control of itself (in fact, PM ideology tends to claim men cannot control themselves), but as being in control of others, especially women, children, and men who are socially inferior. That is a much greater threat to people who want to identify as men than any offense PM ideologues can fantastically imagine.