Here’s something from the Scientific American.

It is becoming apparent that our adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan have maimed and damaged a lot of people, mostly but not all men, and that we are going to be taking care of them for a long time and at great expense. Well, that last part is not apparent at all, since we have a shitty, shitty record when it comes to actually taking care of veterans. (“Only eight percent of the general population can claim veteran status, but nearly one-fifth of the homeless population are veterans.”)

“The stress and suffering of combat are known to leave a lasting impact on military veterans, in some cases triggering post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Researchers have now found an even more serious and debilitating mental condition, known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), in veterans, particularly those injured by the concussive force of bomb blasts.

 

Whereas PTSD is a mental illness, marked by unwelcome flashbacks and anguish, CTE is a progressive neurodegenerative brain disorder characterized by abnormal protein deposits that eventually kill brain cells and thus cause cognitive declines, including loss of memory and the ability to learn as well as depression. The number of veterans at risk is large: traumatic brain injury caused by explosive blasts is thought to afflict about 20 percent of the 2.3 million servicemen and women deployed in combat since 2001, according to a team of researchers from Boston University, New York Medical College and the Veterans Affairs Boston Healthcare System.”

There’s more. Remember all the suicides of professional football players that are finally getting some attention? There’s a link:

“Growing awareness of CTE has come primarily from its impact on the lives of former professional football players diagnosed with the condition. Several of these former players—including Chicago Bears safety Dave Duerson, Philadelphia Eagles safety Andre Waters and Pittsburgh Steelers offensive lineman Terry Long—ended up taking their own lives.”

So there it is. This kind of injury kills, and it is not restricted to the dangers of combat.

There was a time when geisha poisoned themselves with horrible lead-based make-up. That ended a long time ago and now even the thought of it makes us shudder. It’s time for society to catch up when it comes to men.

Of course all the usual dismissals come out of the woodwork on this kind of thing:

- “I don’t feel sorry for these guys; they chose to do this.” Well that’s true for just about any workplace injury or death – crab boats lost at sea in 60-ft waves, people raped in their dream jobs at prestigious law firms, whatever….

- “Do you expect me to feel sorry for privileged white guys” Well, no actually; if that’s how you respond to this, it would be a mistake to anthropomorphize you by expecting you to be capable of empathy like that.

- “War is hell (so what the hell)” – This is the voice of civilian privilege talking, standing on the sidelines and tut-tutting, or even brazenly taking a picnic lunch out to watch the battlefield from some hilltop. (People actually did this during the Civil War.)

These are horrible, life-changing injuries, and they are incurred doing things the whole nation sent them out to do. However misguided that was, however much one may have tried and (obviously failed) to stop it – we in this nation and in the others who have the same kinds of war injuries coming out of these wars have a responsibility to these people to do as much as we can to take care of them. And just trying to deny the problem and wishing it would all go away is not going to work.

Well here’s something contrary to the stereotype. The stereotype is that lesbians go on three dates and then stay together for thirty years. This article says they break up sooner and more often than gays do. It makes sense in a way though, since wives tend to initiate divorces more than husbands do.

The writer, Marina Adshade, quotes, Giles Hattersley, the writer of the root article, on some reasons for the disparity. Let’s see how they stand up:

 1. Women are impulsive about relationships.

This would take a lot of proving. He seems to be trying to say that women, who are proverbially cautious about casual sex, are going to somehow conversely be rushing into long-term relationships. 

2. Men are more pragmatic about relationships.

There may be something to this, but again it would take a lot more proving than this article does. Perhaps women do buy into all the Romance bullshit – but even Jane Austen’s heroines knew the difference between maundering on about their infatuations and taking their career machinations seriously; how’s that for pragmatism – and start out with more unrealistic expectations, which are easier to fall short of. It’s possible. Not demonstrated.

And then she offers some alternative explanations of her own, and these make more sense to me:

1. Women just initiate divorce more. A relationship with TWO women in it starts out on very shaky ground to begin with.

Adshade points out that inequalities in divorce proceedings and child custody awards may drive that more than anything else, which weakens this particular argument. But I still think it has a lot more basis to it than Hatterley’s..

2. Female relationships tend to have boundary problems and breaking up is the only way to get some individuality back.

This may well be true. It certainly comports with the stereotype of the airless, in-grown lesbian circle of friends. So how valid is the stereotype? Citation please?

3. “If lesbian women are more likely to have been in a heterosexual relationship in the past that ended in divorce (which appears to be true) than are gay men, then there is nothing surprising about their higher divorce rates in that gender group.”

I’m not sure that actually is true, because she appears to have narrowed her pool to people who are getting civil partnerships or marriages. That is hardly the whole or even  necessarily a representative pool of gay men or probably even of lesbians either.

 So.

So this article sheds light on something new, at least new to me. It is an interesting departure point and I look forward to further research into the subject, as well as implications for heterosexual relationships.

Over the years some studies have shown a greater incidence of Intimate Partner Violence in lesbian couples, some have contradicted that, but the mere existence of the debate shoots a gaping hole in the Duluth Model of DV. So this observation of Hattersley’s, with Adshade’s commentary, may do the same with the old stereotype that divorce is due to men running off and abandoning their marriages. For what that’s worth.

A redditor says:

Both genders do shitty things. I think because we’re in a patriarchal society and a lot things favor men, a lot of people don’t take their problems seriously. When you are in the favoured group, a lot of your valid complaints are ridiculed. I’m sure it gets annoying. This is the one of the few places where their grievances are validated.

 

I’m not interested in either getting in a fight with this particular redditor nor am I pointing them out for condemnation.

I just want to ask how can society ‘favour men’ while taking none of their problems seriously?

This is the first article, coauthored by Typhonblue and JohnTheOther, within the ‘Compassion for Men Movement’ theoretical framework.

Understanding breeds compassion, and so we begin with an examination of one of the most demonized aspects of men, their use of the services offered by the sex industry.

A survey of men who seek gratification through commercial sex services – either porn, or prostitution, or lap dances or any other commercial sex showed that rather than men seeking sexual gratification as rutting animals – modelled on the Dworkinian view of men as subhuman; men’s motivation to seek commercial sex is based on the human need to be recognized as desirable. This runs contrary to the populist notion of male sexuality as debased, inferior and pathological.

Socially, men are expected to validate women’s value as objects of sexual desire by exhibiting attraction, affection, and deference, but at the same time, men are also expected to weather a culturally normal climate of pre-emptive rejection. Further men must pass tests of fitness, financial and physical, to ‘prove’ the worth of their desire. All of these expectations validates the feminine fantasy of hyper-desirability; desirability beyond the humanly possible.

The self validation of women and girls by rejection of positive male attention is expressed in hundreds of small, socially normal gestures and practices. De-escalation of male initiated social contacts. Two messages or more required for a single call-back. Voice message left, but only a text message returned. All these variations on ‘playing hard to get’ reflects a normal social protocol in which men, on whom the onus has always been to initiate social contact, have to make a more overt effort than that which is returned, even when the woman in question desires that contact. This establishes a climate in which men automatically assume a low level of ongoing social rejection. This is normal across our culture, and masculine complaint can be easily punished through the censure of “wimp”, “sissy” and similar minor insult.

Feminine attire which puts secondary sexual characteristics on display is standard in casual clothing as well as evening attire or less formally “party clothes”. The obvious purpose of such clothes being to amplify the wearer’s overt feminine sexuality and command attention. Conversely, although all men are expected to respond with positive attention, only those passing the feminine test of high status or conspicuous wealth are allowed to express their stimulated attention. This is the social levy exacted, but only returned to those males overtly demonstrating their utility as dispensers of upward social mobility and feminine access to resources. Men expressing the attraction or desire socially assumed of them also risk censure if such expression is mis-timed, too overt, or for any reason, not reciprocated.

This elaborate, confusing dance becomes much simpler in the lens of manufacturing hyper-desire. The more obstacles a man must overcome to express his desire the more the woman feels desired by the man.

Romance novels can be reduced down to a simple formula in which female desirability inspires grandiose acts of self-sacrifice on the part of the male. The men in romance novels are ‘eyeballs and actions’, empty ciphers that exist only to illuminate the hyper-desirability of the female protagonist.

In fact this whole system, from shaming of male sexuality as debased through the expectation that men weather rejection without end in order to manufacture hyper-desire for women to it’s vetting of which men are allowed to desire—excludes men from a fundamental human need—developed through eons of evolution as pair-bonders—the feeling of being desirable.

In discussions of female sexual objectification for the purpose of marketing to man, the usual language describing imagery of women usually refers to “tits and ass”. However, research from the Center for Behavioural Neuroscience in Atlanta[1] shows that depiction of the feminine gaze is key to male attraction to such images. It is, in fact, the sexual agency of an attractive woman, as expressed through a direct gaze towards the male subject that lights up the male’s reward response system. [2] When an attractive woman is presented as a ‘sex object’ her gaze averted and herself unengaged with him—his reward system is unresponsive.

To put it simply, men look at porn to feel sexually desirable. Men pay strippers to get positive, sexualized attention from women. Men use prostitutes to feel like whole sexual beings.

It is, in fact, the basic human need to feel not only loved, but sexually desired turns out to be what drives the use of commercial sexual services by men. Most women are aware that being a woman does not detract from their sexual desirability; most men are acutely aware that being a man most certainly does. In that context male sexual fantasies revolve around male sexuality simply being desirable. Porn can be likened to the fantasies of an impoverished developing nation—it’s people imagine a world with abundant and plentiful food. Romance novels are, on the other hand, the fantasies of a prosperous nation—sprawling McMansions, yachts, vacations to the Caribbean.

In this context the social censure against men’s self medication for the psychic wound inflicted on them by women’s thirst for hyper-desirability is just as morally bankrupt as a prosperous nation sneering at the ‘base and animalistic urges’ of an impoverished nation for food and clean water.

We starve men, then shame them for their hunger and then when they reach for what little food is within their grasp, we smack their hand away.

The dose makes the poison.

One of the very useful memes that has come out of feminist discourse in the last few years is a discussion of “toxic masculinity” as distinct from an earlier demonization of “macho pigs” and masculinity in general.

Toxic femininity is not a personal trait of individuals. It is an aspect of a gender role, and since gender roles are a matrix of customs, expectations and policing, they are social rather than individual. To the extent that gender is constructed, this is where the construction takes place. (Gender identities are different; they inhere in individuals.)

I have drawn up a preliminary list of types and aspects of toxic femininity. They come from things I have picked up in the femmisphere in posts and comments, from things I have seen in the manosphere and some come from personal experience. I wanted to list and name them so that people can use this in their own discussions and would have something to refer back to. The list is preliminary and suggestions on additions are gratefull accepted.

The list falls inot two sections, Damseling and Gynonormativity. These roughly correspond to femininity seen as childlike, in a dependent position; and femininity seen as the moral standard, in a dominant position. This sounds like a contradiction but in fact it is just a description. The switch from dominant Moral Guardian to trembling Damsel can be instantaneous, because at bottom there is not much distnace between them. The dominant matron battle-ax can very easily stand over a man and lecture him about defending and protecting poor, helpless women.

As we go through the sections below - and this is only a first cut at listing these aspects of toxic femininity, not claimingto be exhaustive – we’ll see exactly how much this stuff is socially constructed, how much it can’t even exist without a lot of cooperation from all parties involved.

And notice how  in each example for what the healthy and non-toxic version of this. There is a healthy and decent form of each one of these dysfunctions. Again, the dose makes the poison.

DAMSELING                                                                                              

Damseling is the female end of White Knighting – one cannot exist without the other. It is a celebration of helplessness and dependence on someone else’s protection. This is really nothing other than a feudal relationship. Depending on someone else for protection is a form of vassalage.

Examples include -

Victim Cred – For the most part we have a moral structure that stigmatizes victimizers and tries to validate victims. It doesn’t always play out that way in practice, but even in practice if a victim brings a complaint against the person who victimized him – oops, there’s counter-example right there – but anyway, for the most part the reaction from the rest of us will not be to stigmatize the crime victim as a loser, but rather the perpetrator. This feature of our moral code works against the operation of the law of the jungle, and it makes our type of society possible. So far so good. But of course it has a down side. It grants victims a moral claim, a form of moral superiority over those they identify as having wronged them, and this can incentivize victimology, the weaponization of victimhood.

-          Strategic Resource: Victim Cred is a strategic resource and has to be shepherded. This includes not only maintaining what victim cred you already have, but increasing it. This involves making the validity of your victim cred unassailable, controlling access to victim cred by restricting the number of people who can claim victim status, adding to your victim cred by casting as much as possible of what happens to you as some kind of victimization and appropriating. 

-          The “It’s Worse When It Happens to Women” meme:  This not restricted to rape, either. This was a big part of the FGM/MGM discussion until mostly feminists shouted it down – others had been calling BS on privileging FGM all along, but it was feminist voices that settled the matter. It pops up all over though. Boys being raped? It’s worse for girls, and they get silenced and victim-blamed more, and the rapists get off scot-free! You see how the claims don’t have to be any reaction to any facts, they just have to sound horrific enough to get the desired reaction. 

An extension on WCFbelow is to make it all about women even when there is no direct connection. This is how Hillary Clinton can say that women are the primary victims of war – war is worse when it happens to woemn – because they SURVIVE to deal with the grief. This is why every discussion of MGM inevitably ends up centering around the evils of FGM as a caution that of course it is immeasurably worse…. This is why when male suicide is discussed, female suicide attempts are considered relevant (It’s very important, just not relevant to the topic of actual suicide. So why is it brought up?)

 -          Appropriation of Others’ Suffering – This is why homophobia has to, has to be a form of femmephobia. This how legislative attacks on women’s health services get hyperventilated inot a “War on Women” – war is war; how many women are coming back from the War on women with legs blown off? This is how people think it’s appropriate to say that women “fought” for the vote, as opposed the very actaul wars men had to fight to get the vote.

           -             Women and Minorities: This is an application of Appropriation of Others’ Suffering lieke the others above, but tis one stands out, so it gets its own bullet. This one was devised back in the 70s when the initial and limited successes of the Civil Rights Movement made the public relations and therefore political advantages of victim cred apparent. White feminists knew a good thing when they saw it and pitched themselves as the natural allies of black people and POCs in general. (The rise of Womanism represents of some of the reaction to this appropriation.) I really have seen white feminists insist that black men are privileged by having male privilege – this in a society where they and white men have spent the last 300 years destroying black men’s manhood. 

-          The Princess and the Pea – Daintiness is generally a good thing, but it can be weaponized, for instance if it is used to extort special considerations out of someone or society as a whole.We all have food sensitivities and that’s fine, and some things are just disgusting it msut be admitted, but rejecting food because it’s “gross” is taking daintiness too far. Nobody much likes getting their hands dirty, but if you think a girl shouldn’t have to do this or that dirty job and besides that’s what boys are for, that’s taking daintiness too far.

“Sugar and spice and everything nice…” how liberating would it be for little girls to hear “Spiders and lice and every vice, that’s what girls are made of.”?  So you don’t have to spend your life trying to be nice-nice, you don’t have to worry if some crudity you let slip out is going to shock people.

 Bambi-ing: This is a tendency for society to conflate women and children, to assign women a claim to the same kind of care, protection and leniency afforded children. Obviously it is misogynist, but its effects are misandrist as well, both since men get the job of babying women, and also since getting this kind of care gets typed as non-masculine, so they are cut out of care when they need it. The name is chosen specifically because is both refers to that baby dear character in the Disney film and is also a stereotypical (and obnoxious) nickname of grown women, thus capturing the conflation.

-          The Women and Children First (WCF) meme: This is not only an expression of male disposability, it is also an infantilization of women. It is a case of expecting men to sacrifice their lives for  women’s lies as if those women’s lives were as valuable as children’s and thus more valuable than men’s.

 -          The Female Sentencing Discount : This is an institutional and systemic form of female privilege in which female perpetrators either receive lighter punishments or even are not prosecuted at all for the same or convicted crimes as men. It is quite well documented.

 -          Sex-negativism: This is the source of demonizing male sexuality that is such a strong feature of our laws and social policy. This also the source of “rape privilege” – the idea that rape is somehow the most heinous crime EVAH, that it is worse than murder or having your children taken from you are anything else. It is basically a desire to cling to a pre-adolescent state.

 -          Fat-shaming: A lot of what we call fat is not fat. Yes we have obesity problems in our societies, but a lot of women get called or think of themselves as fat when in fact they just have the bodies of grown women. And hate it. I bet if you gathered a group of a hundred women and asked them each to draw up lists of the five biggest examples of misogyny they observe, fat-shaming would be high on a lot of those lists. it’s about holding to a pre-adolescent body ideal well inot middle age. Arrested development.

Daddy’s Little Girl: This is so well-understood that it probably does not need much explanation, either what it is or of how toxic it is. As obnoxious as a Daddy’s Little Girl is, she’s not the source of the problem. Her daddy is. Chances are very good that Mom tried everything under heaven and earth to raise her daughter to be decent but Daddy undermined her every step of the way for his own selfish reasons.

The Princess Culture:  This is not just the Princess-Industrial Complex, as cannibalistic and noxious as that is. It reaches much further into the culture. It includes a lot of romantic tropes – expecting the man to get down on one knee to propose marriage, expecting a ring or some kind of gift for giving birth to one’s own child. Feminists have denounced the engagement ring from the angle of it being a possession-taking ritual – so far so good – but so far they have not exploited the female-entitlement angle of the ritual for criticism. That is probably a job for MRAs anyway.

Of course it’s wonderful to dote on someone you love and wonderful to receive that kind of attention. Where it crosses the line probably comes when one person comes to expect as her due rather than appreciating it as a gift. But the Princess Culture is all about fostering an attitude of dependence. “Someday my prince will come….” is really is a clear example of misogyny in a velvet glove.

GYNONORMATIVITY

Gynonormativity is not in of itself a bad thing. There are situations where what is generally considered a female way of doing something is the appropriate way, regardless of who is doing it. Teaching young children – primary grades surely, but even the older elementary grades sometimes – is one obvious example. Some kinds of anthropological fieldwork obviously call for gynonormative approaches. In other areas it’s neutral.  In some it’s not suitable.

These are examples of bad gynonormativity:

The Golden Uterus : GU is a distortion of the motherhood role into a tool for subjugating others to the mother’s will. It can even be used as a form of power to use in a rape. James Landrith recounts how his (pregnant!) rapist used her unborn child as a human shield against him to keep him from defending himself.

The Moral Guardian – The Moral Guardian is now almost exclusively a female role, (Although until recently you saw men doing it to. It still exists in communities on the Religious Right.)

Ninni Tokan recounts a story over at Pelle Billing’s blog of being regulated on by a Moral Guardian:

“It is October 2008, I am on the train to Stockholm. I will finally meet my wonderful friends from an online forum. Then I will go directly to this weekend’s conference; I have already gotten myself together for that. I’m all dressed in black slacks and a black blouse, with thin white lines. I’ve made myself up and fixed my hair.

After a while on the train I need to use the bathroom, and I’m not alone, so I get into a queue of 3-4 people ahead of me. The man at the front of the queue throws a glance backward, finds me in line, halts with his eyes and smiles. I respond to his smile and he disappears into the bathroom. When he comes back, he stops for a moment and we talk. Before he goes, he asks me to come back to his place to talk more later.

The man goes and I take a step forward when the queue shortens. On my left is a lady stands up, about to get into line. She casts a quick glance, which lands on me, and looks down at what she has in her hands again. The fraction of a second later, the reaction, the death gaze.

In slow motion, she lifts her eyes and the eyes meet mine. Then as she scans her eyes, slow down along my body, my shoes, flip and go as slowly up and look into my eyes again. Her eyes are razor grass, her facial expression clearly says “improper”, but the entire procedure lasts just a second. After bobbing her lightly on the neck and looks conspicuously obliquely upwards, before she returns to what she was doing.

What exactly happened? What was the social game that took place? Why did the man and woman act like this when they saw me on the train?

What we call gender roles can be likened to a flexible picture frame of standards, within which we “should” find ourselves. The frame will vary depending on social context, but also factors such as age. That both men and women reacted to was that I, on a train, found myself a step outside my picture frame in terms of “fitting clothes.”

The man would have reacted the same way if we’d met at a pub. His response is what we call “flirting”, “encounter”. It’s part of his gender to be the “fishing” (poor men, so tiresome it must be!). He obviously showed interest, without being the least disruptive; he is both pleasant and enjoyable (we talked more later) … and not without me taking his interest as a compliment. Sure it has happened that I happened onto to men who ” fish “without it being the least pleasant. And yes, some men sometimes be a bit “too on”. But men who do not ” fish nicely” are a crystal clear minority.

The woman, however, she had not reacted as if we’d met at a pub. She probably had not even noticed I existed. At a pub, I would had been dressed  ”right” in my gender (hence flexible picture frame). While the man’s reaction was “fisherman”, the woman’s reaction “moral guardian” whose purpose is to get me in line and teach me how a woman should act / be. It is almost exclusively women who guard women so that we stay within our gender!”

The Church Lady – Churches are almost female-dominated with male front men, which is why they are typically so toxic for women. They are tools of power in female hierarchy struggles. Of course this dynamic is harmful to men and especially to boys, but its real victims are women who happen to fall outside the Amen Corner. All the hyper-emphasis on policing women’s sexuality is no accident. See Ninni Tokan’s story next above.

-          Female Approval: “Man up!” “Get a pair!” The Real Man discourse and the whole concept of what makes a man a good man usually come down to one thing: How useful is he to women. That’s the measure of how good and masculine a man is. The measure of what made a woman a good women used to be the mirror image of this. Thank God feminism eroded that away to nothing. Now it’s time to do the same with this. 

“Man up!” “Get a pair!” Lectures from a woman on toxic masculinity are probably going to get a readier hearing than from a man, and the history of 70s feminism as a broad cultural change shows that. But harangues for more masculinity, especially a masculinity destructive to the man and beneficial and profitable to the woman, from someone who never has and never will have to meet the same standard, are just patently offensive.

Ultimately men’s need for female approval stems from childhood where women are the only authority figures around, because all the men have to leave the kids for most of their waking hours and support the whole arrangement. Where mothers do need this kind of authority to raise kids, espcially in the absence of the fathers they have sent off to support them, it’s dysfunctional when this authority gets transferred to women in general as a feature of a gender role. It’s disastrous when it gets transferred to wives.

-          The Flag-Waving Civilian Hyper-Patriot: Never served a day in her life, but she is ready to hound any man in sight to “man up” and go lay down his life for her. This chicken hawk is a real moral guardian of patriotic values. See also White Feather Society. 

-          “Boys will Be Boys” – Listen around and you will see how general the meme is that men are eternal boys and that women are long-suffering adults picking up after them. It comes out in teachers saying that girls mature faster than boys – by the gender-biased standards of teachers. It comes out in 20-something women presuming to lecture men their age on manners and mature behavior. It comes out in TV commercials and programming showing men as helpless, clumsy and incapable, but always with some superior woman coming to the rescue, or more often just looking on clucking her tongue.

-          Creep-shaming – This is how women take to Church Lady out on the street and use it on men. Lots has been written about creep shaming and if we want to go further into it, we can. It generally comes down to a content-free grenade a woman can lob at a man, though of course though content-free it is not necessarily consequnece-free. It can all too easily have real legal and criminal consequences.

WRAPPING UP

NinniTokan says that to free women, women have to dare to “make femininity problematic” and to shift the focus from demonizing men to women’s real gender problems – collectivism, moral guardianism and social punishments. She related (above) her own experiences of being slut-shamed by an older woman as an example of the damage gender role policing does to women.  She insists it is mostly women who enforce gender roles on other women.

She says the problem is not so much gender roles as the pressure to conform to them, and that to a large extent exerting that pressure is a part of the feminine gender role itself. I can confirm her in that; I have certainly experienced policing of male gender roles at the hands of women.

I consider it a perversion and a distortion of the feminine role and I call it toxic.

I’ve often heard modern gynocentrists say ‘if men were raped, society would take rape seriously.’

Aside from the deliberately obscured and ignored fact that men are raped, quite possibly by women at rates similar to the reverse, and by men by rates exceeding community rapes of women(due to prison rape)… there’s the following data point to add to the file.

A serial rapist in Munich keeps getting released from police custody. 

Now this is a comment from a redditor from Munich so I can’t confirm his information but he was commenting in response to the following article:

“It was hell, I can’t walk!” Man found sobbing in street after 36-hour sex ordeal with German nymphomaniac

Notice how they replace the world ‘rapist’ with ‘nymphomaniac’ and that the general tone of the story is lighthearted and fun!

Not only that, but notice how this woman isn’t in police custody. When a man is charged with rape just on the word of the accuser alone he’s often kept locked up for fear he might rape again. At this point Munich police can make the rather solid assumption that this woman raping another man isn’t just a possibility but more probable then not.

Their solution? Psychiatric observation!

Now to the modern gynocentrists who say ‘if rape happened to men… then we’d take rape seriously’ I offer the following news excerpt from a world in which the rape of women(by men) is taken exactly as seriously as the rape of men(by women).

“It Was Hell! I can’t walk!” Woman found sobbing in the street after 36-hour sex ordeal with German Sex Machine

 

A woman was found sobbing in the street by police after her one-night stand demanded too much sex.

The African woman broke down in tears outside the man’s apartment after the 36-hour ordeal in Munich, Germany.

Police confirmed that the exhausted woman told them: “I met him on a bus. He invited me back here. Oh God, it was hell. I can’t walk. Please help me.”

The woman is believed to be the latest victim of a German sex machine who was arrested last month after forcing his date to make love to him eight times.

His first victim, Michaela Mustermann, was forced to escape from the apartment to raise the alarm when her insatiable lover refused to let her go.

The 43-year-old met the man in a bar in Munich, Germany, according to German news website The Province.

The pair went back to his apartment where they had sex several times, but when the eager man demanded more, the exhausted woman refused.

When the sex-hungry man wouldn’t take no for an answer, the woman took drastic action.

Desperate Ms Mustermann was reportedly spotted on a balcony crying for help after the eager man demanded more and more sex.

A police spokesman was quoted as saying: “She complied with the man’s wishes another few times so she could finally leave the apartment.

“But when he continued to refuse and demanded even more sex from her, she fled to the balcony and alerted the police.”

Ms Mustermann reportedly told police: “You have got to help me. He is trying to kill me with sex. I cannot get out and I cannot go on!”

Incredibly, when police arrived at the apartment, the man even tried to tempt them into his bedroom.

The man, who is believed to be 47, has now been taken to hospital for psychiatric observation.

And just for completeness sake, here’s the gender reversed update by a concerned citizen in Munich.

Girl from Munich here. That article is missing some infos.

1. He locked her in the bedroom, took her cellphone and tied her to the bed. She ran out when she told him she had to pee.
2. The article has some wrong translations in it. He forced the first girl to have sex with him 8 times in less than 6 hours. The second girl was in his apartment for 36 hours. She lost count after 15 or 20 times.
3. The latest news about the guy is that he did this already 5 times this year. Everytime the police let him go.

‘Everytime the police let him[the suspected serial rapist] go’. That certainly sounds like an improvement for female victims of male rapists to me!

Someone at Oxford did a study in the UK, US, Finland and Hungary analyzing communications patterns based on a mobile phone database of over three million subscribers. (And you thoght it was government surveillance you had to worry about.) There’s a article on it in Science Daily.

What they found was that :

Researchers found that women spend more time and effort than men in maintaining a close relationship with a member of the opposite sex (boyfriend or spouse) from their early 20s. They found that a man’s closest contact was his wife or girlfriend, but that level of contact was much steadier and less intense than for women.

 

The researchers suggest that from their early 20s, women are investing more of their time than men in finding a potential mate; but this intense interest tails off from the age of 45. The peak contact time with their daughters was likely to be when the woman was around the age of 60, the study found. At the later stage in life, women tended to be more likely to be in close contact with their daughters than their husbands or their sons. The research suggests that once fathers were around 50 years old they had peak contact time with their daughters, but at this stage fathers still spent about half as much time as the mothers staying in touch with their daughters.

While for men they found:

Men communicated mostly with their wives, and there was what the researchers call a ‘striking tendency’ for men to have a greater gender balance in their close relationships. The researchers found that men did not discriminate at all on the basis of gender where their own children were concerned.

Then they start to draw some conclusions:

The researchers say that for the first time they have captured strikingly different patterns of behaviour between men and women which reflect how social strategies change in the course of our lives as a consequence of changing reproductive interests. Women were found to shift their relationship preferences, investing far more time and effort than men in communicating with the opposite sex when they were of childbearing age.

 

Co-author Professor Robin Dunbar, from the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford, said: ‘This suggests that the intimate structure of human social networks are driven much more by women’s interests than by men’s — men are more casual in their social relationships,

Hmmm….

A couple of methodological caveats. While analyzing solid data such as cell phone traffic has the advantage of being solid, it may or may not have an advantage of being a vaild basis for these conclusions. Cell phone usage represents a fraction of social interaction and relationship maintenance. It may skew for age, for one thing. And  the pattern of who calls were made between also says nothing about the content of those calls. If a woman calls her daughter to find out why what’s going on with her son, or even with her father, now divorced from the mother, does that get counted in the daughter or in the son or father columnn in this study?

Then the article goes with some more of the conclusions:

Co-author Professor Robin Dunbar, from the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford, said: ‘This suggests that the intimate structure of human social networks are driven much more by women’s interests than by men’s — men are more casual in their social relationships,

This is a stretch. For one thing the caution I mentioned above applies here – I don’t see where the researchers accounted for other forms of interaction or what role they play in social networks. But beyond that, it is a just a leap to say that because women are doing the work of social networking that that effort is going to follow their interest. Women control most household budgets, but a hefty chunk of that goes to utility bills and disposable diapers. (Which women typically do not need until much later in life, if ever.)

They go on to make an interesting observation and then to extend it to an interesting assertion:

It notes that while scholars have tended to focus on male bonding behaviour in defining human sociality, this study underlines the importance of mother-daughter relationships in understand how the structure of human society has evolved.

Yes, it is true that male bonding gets a lot of attention in the study of human sociality – a lot of it negative, see also “homosociality” – and it is true that mother-daughter relationships get less attention. That’s a gap and it needs to be filled. However, because in many, many societies daughters marry out of the family, all their parental relations – mother or father - become secondary. In fact this pattern applied in Europe for so long that Y chromosome haplotype distributions show a pattern of differning geographical cioncentrations where mitochndrial DNA is much more evenly spread. Sons stayed by fathers and daughters married into neighboring villages, and their daughters married further out, and so on.

Which raises another point. A study of whose interests drive social networks needs to stay specific to specific societies. Mother-daughter relationships may in fact be the key to understanding family life in a specific society. While mother-daughter networking may not have been important for centuries and centuries because of a tendency toward patrilocalism, that doesn’t apply for instance to the present-day US, where matrilocalism is often the norm – “A daughter’s a daughter for all her life; a son’s a son till he takes a wife.”

Anyway, this is an interesting set of observations. The conclusions may not flow in a very direct line from them, but they may in the end turn out to be valid too.

Here’s someone else who thinks it’s her place to lecture men on how to be fathers, and to lecture us on wanting mandatory DNA testing to establish paternity. Same old tired BS. She even uses the same tired old tropes to defend her misandry. And it is misandry, since this is an issue that discriminates solely based on sex.

Bari Zell Weinberger practices law and has written an article in the Huffington Post about a bill in New jersey that would mandate paternity testing at birth. Ms. Weinberg drags out all the same invalid objections, but first she starts out:

“First, let’s talk about women…..”

No, Ms. Weinberg, let’s NOT first talk about women. Let’s not center women in this issue because they are not at the center of it, men are. The issue is a human right of parenting. It is about the right to choose when and whom to parent, basically the same right women claim in abortion, only in this case no one dies.  It is about the right of man to recourse when he is defrauded by his wife, if only to be relieved of a baseless obligation to support someone else’s child. A woman’s interest in this matter is at best tertiary – after the father, then after the child, then finally she is in line for consideration.

She moves on to centering women’s feelings over men’s rights.

“Yes, we know that sometimes women have multiple partners, even when they are married. However, assuming that you can’t trust any New Jersey mom to be honest about (or worse, to know!) who fathered her child seems like a giant step backwards, not to mention insulting.”

Well they’ll just have to roll with the insults, because there is a rather larger issue of someone’s rights here, and the part those insulted people may have in denying them.

Also – so it will “set women back” to hold them accountable, Ms. Weinberg? Misogynist much?

She continues with some very selective accountability:

“Is it now the state’s responsibility to let men know their wives have been unfaithful?”

Well yes it is, since the state will see itself as responsible to twist child support out of them if these wives decide to leave. That seems pretty obvious, obvious to the point of doubting the good faith of the question really. That should after all be pretty obvious to someone who practices family law.

Then she’s onto telling men how to father, with a not-so-subtle attempt at shaming.

“As for fathers, it’s a psychological fact that men do bond with their children, sometimes even before they are born. And that bond doesn’t require shared DNA. Even when they have suspicions that Mom isn’t being absolutely honest, many men won’t insist on a paternity test for one simple reason: because they want to be Dads.”

She however is quite shameless herself, when she presumes to shame some fathers into allowing themselves to be duped the way some others do. According to her apparently a real man mans up and just sucks it up and parents someone else’s child – and his consent or lack of it is irrelevant – and rewards the woman who cheated and continues to lie to him.  And Ms. Weinberg does mean duped:

“Blissful ignorance guarantees the ability to raise a child they may have loved from the very first ultrasound picture. “

And then she veers off into illogic:

“And contrary to what the bill’s sponsor may believe, men raising children fathered by someone else often do not feel any differently about the child once they learn that child isn’t their genetic offspring.”

Well yes, Ms. Weinberg, some do. And some rape victims fall in love with their rapists. So what are you saying, Ms. Weinberg, that the state should mandate that rape victims marry their rapists, just as you seem to think the state should mandate victims of fraud reward those who defraud them?

She is not above proposing all sorts of completely absurd hypotheticals, not absurd as situations, but absurd as relevant to this issue, because as someone who practices family law she knows perfectly well that there is law to cover every one of these situations. Here goes:

“The ramifications of this bill don’t even stop there. If it’s encoded into law that fatherhood equals shared DNA, where does that leave non-biologically based fathers — and more importantly, where does it leave their children?”

It’s called adoption. The market in private adoptions can be very lucrative, so feigning ignorance is not going to work.

“What does this bill mean for adoptive fathers and gay fathers?”

Where is there anything in that law that overturns adoptions? And please, spare us your crocodile tears and appropriation when it to comes to gay fathers.

 “This legislation flies in the face of adoptive parents and same-sex couples when one of the “parents” is clearly not biological.”

How so? See above.

 “What about fathers (and mothers) who don’t want testing done for any number of reasons, including religion or inability to make payment for the mandatory lab test?”

Why should these lab tests not be covered by the government the same way contraception supplies for women are? The tests won’t covered in New Jersey? Is there some kind of a War on Men in New Jersey?

“It’s hard to see who wins with this bill, except for perhaps the lab testing companies. “

Only if you insist on looking the wrong direction. It’s plain who wins with this bill. And it’s plain who stands to lose… but nothing they ever had any right to in the first place.

“As for the non-biological father, he gets the dubious pleasure of knowing he’s been cheated twice over — cheated financially out of money he paid to raise a child for whom he’s not responsible, and cheated emotionally of his status as a loving father.”

False. He can adopt. or if he is married to the mother, he can simply not contest paternity. since the writer did not bother to link to the text of the bill, we cannot tell what is actually in it, but it seems a stretch to expect it to forbid husabnds to assume paternity of whatever children their wives bear.

“As for the child, I can’t imagine that it’s anything but painful to learn that “Dad” isn’t your father — especially once you’re old enough to realize that Mom may have been hiding his “real” identity. And Mom herself? “

Here the cynical lawyer part of the writer drops the mask – for her it’s preferable to lie to the child. Exactly how long does a child have to go before he learns his father should never have trusted her, that she’s a fraud and a liar? When’s the best time to spill those beans?

“She gets to have her character called into question because she either didn’t know or didn’t say who her baby-daddy was.”

Not a too high price to pay to protect a person’s rights, is it?

“Basically, this law would be a lose-lose-lose-lose proposition for everyone involved.”

No. See above. Repeating a lie doesn’t make it true.

“This law brings into question several interesting problems to consider. Is fatherhood really established at the moment of conception? Or is it a bigger and more complex role than DNA can determine? And are decisions about who gets to be part of a family — and who doesn’t — really the province of our political and legal system to determine?”

So many deflections and strawmen….where to start. Working backwards – the law definitely does say who cannot and cannot be parts of a family. I suppose polygamy is illegal in New Jersey? And as someone who cannot get my partner on my medical insurance, I know this, and a family practice lawyer has no excuse for not knowing it. Then there is the false choice in her questions about when fatherhood begins and how it is defined.  That’s a pretty dishonest distortion of the question.

The article she links to does in fact deal with legislation concerning paternity testing, but it doesn’t cite any part of the legislation that would deny anyone the right to raise a child he chooses to raise and call his child. So that was false too. The issue not defining who is not a father, just ensuring that no one is forced to parent someone else’s child through fraud.

And by the way, the measure she links to has nothing whatever to do with paternity testing of any kind. The bill she links to deals with rates for medical charges, at least in its text. So we can’t really tell what she is talking about, and it’s not. Oopsee. Oh, well; the article she linked to made the same mistake.

So this whole article is a hot mess of red herrings, deflections, mischaracterizations and shaming. Whoever else gets hurt in this, what is paramount for the writer is to minimize as much as possible any inconvenience to the one person in the situation who is committing a wrong. And it seems her commenters saw all this too.

What it all comes down to is quite simple. Only the man himself should decide whether he is going to take on the joyful burden of raising someone else’s child. It is his choice. And choice requires informed consent, and this law ensures that. It’s hard to see how there is any real basis for controversy with that.

R.A Dickey pitches for the Mets. He writes and reads a broad range of books. I don’t follow baselball at all, so that’s all I know about him. Well, now it seems he has written an autobiography and given his fame it is likely to get a lot of attention.

Bombshell: He was sexually abused at the age of eight by a female babysitter. The abuse went on for a period of time.That is not “ephebophilia’ or “true love” or any of those other comfortable pervarications when the rapist is female. this was straight up pedophilia, female on male. This was rape of a child.

Oprah got praise for finally mentioning boy victims of rape, after a career of bringing male sex abuse of girls and women to the stage. Good for her, for all of it. Of course she had to start with male sexual abuse fo females, because that’s all her audiences were open to hearing about, given their biases, comfortable prejudices and limitations. But in the end she led them to the point where they could acknowledge the existence of male victims. She never got to the point where she featured males who had been abused by women as boys before she ended her show, and maybe she just couldn’t get there. Bless her for what she did manage to do.

This is the next step. Of course there have been bloggers writing about this forever – Toysoldier comes to mind immediately – and he has a post up about Dickey himself – but they don’t have the access to a national audience that an R.A. Dickey does, and a specifically male national audience. That is the audience that needs to hear this, with their biases, comfortable prejudices and limitations; the others can come later. In that audience will be men who need to hear this for their own reasons.

It’s high time.