The lions and meat argument

In countries where lions aren't native, they're caged for everyone's protection and if one breaks out, they are hunted down and tranquillised while people are warned to stay inside.

In countries where lions are native, it's wise be armed for protection.

Is this analogy really what those using it think of men? I don't!

Never heard that before.

It's just pathetically useless.

In the analogy it's female lions not meat.
Men don't attack women because they will starve if they don't.. eat them?

A female lion would also presumably eat the meat in front of them

I don't know if male lions rape female lions or indeed whether they eat them

Meat is just meat. It doesn't have an age or a sex. So the meat could the the man's daughter, sister, brother etc? Um.

However.

This is a standard view isn't it?

If you Go out dressed like that what do you expect/ asking for it / go back with a man/ walk by yourself after dark...

Societies all over the place don't actually believe all men are rapists and all women and girls are walking prey.

BUT that is the common accepted view. Because it excuses the man and blames the victim for not being careful when there's lions about.

And Feminists get called man haters

Outside of being a horrible sentiment, it’s generally just a pretty stupid thing to say - no women are walking around naked in front of the ‘lions’ who can’t control themselves. Most rapists go out to rape a woman, doesn’t usually matter what that woman is wearing. So the implication that covering up will stop men from raping you isn’t true, it just doesn’t work.

Even in countries where women cover every part of their body head to toe there is still rape. Sometimes that rape isn’t recognised but it still happens.

DH's erstwhile best mate used to think that it was OK for men to be unfaithful because they were genetically programmed to spread their seed (he'd read 'The Red Queen' and decided he knew everything). He was a dick who never got another shag after his wife kicked him out though.

Absolutely mycat. Reporting levels are low here, they must be tiny in countries where the lion/meat analogy is considered a normal analysis, and women can be shot by family members for leaving the house unaccompanied. Whether they're wearing one bit of cloth or another is a bit of a distraction in some ways.

I bet a lot of women don’t report rape in countries like Saudi Arabia because if they do they risk arrest or worse.

That culture (which I assume is some parts of the mid east) is articulating only what we believe in the UK.

Take this for instance.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-39305042

The idea that this man perhaps should not have had sex with a girl he just met in a taxi rank. This man raped that child, she was 12 years old. The law, and indeed most people I discussed this with at the time (including on this board), did not feel he should be held responsible for his actions. I think this comes from the same school of thought as the lion proverb.

I feel the same about "rough sex" defenses, and disputes about child support when the man "thought she was on the pill".

The starting point for all these things (men "tricked" into raping children, men who "accidentally" kill or injure during "rough sex" and men who "accidentally" get women pregnant) seems to be that men will of course have sex and should be able to implicitly trust women when making decisions about sex. Women are the ones who have to take care in these matters, not men. Boys will be boys after all.

Weirdly enough I found out about that ball biting thing yesterday.

Although there’s some would be up for it.

@Gibbonsgibbonsgibbons

DdraigGoch Yes, but the male always eats first, followed by the cubs and finally then the lionesses will get their share. True - I got focused on the hunt rather than the actual (grim) analogy of meat. Plus I always get really cross about the lioness hunters getting to eat last

Oh and then there’s the fact that when lionesses want to mate, they bite the males balls! 😄

Sounds like a man giving us a great reason to impose a curfew on anyone with an xy chromosome!

Since he is saying men can’t elk themselves then surely he won’t object to safety measures being implemented. Men in after dark, not allowed out without an elderly female relative who will vouch for him.

So he has saying since men can’t help themselves then they need strict control measures. Interesting!

I immediately thought that the dark ages are still with us. Didn't the church just love to blame women for all the ills of mankind. Eve, the first harlot and so it continues.

I don’t understand why men use this argument, it just makes them look thick as fuck.

Never heard that one before though have heard others like it.

If rape dropped to zero when all women covered up, it would still be offensive to men and women but might at least be an analogy that had a relationship with reality. Rape is not zero in societies where women cover. It's just that in those societies women are even less believed and even more vulnerable to male sexual violence. I don't know the official rape incidence in Saudi Arabia for example. Who thinks it's not zero?

That analogy manages to be offensive to both men and women.

I had not heard that before, but an obvious flaw in addition to the ones already posted with lions and meat being compared to men and sex is that eating is necessary for a lions life, but sex is not necessary for a man’s life.

Because the meat is really sex, not women. That’s why it’s dehumanising. Because the women in the analogy are simply sex objects, not people.

For most of their evolution, homonids were lion food. But then they got fire and pointy sticks and the lions had to keep back.

"the meat really is an object, something to consume without asking for its permission"

Exactly. It also ignores that the meat consumed by lions was a living animal before it was mere meat. The difference between lions and their meat is not, fundamentally, that lions are beings and meat is an object, but that lions are stronger than their prey and are able to kill other living animals and thus turn them into (dead) objects. It's basically a "might makes right" argument. In other words, if I'm stronger than you and it's to my benefit to dehumanise you, then I should be able to do that because strength is the defining feature of being human.

Or we should treat violent men the way we treat actual wild lions who have acquired a taste for human meat... when they attack, we shoot them.

The lions-and-meat argument has a rather nasty deeper meaning: It states that you cannot control men at all or must not control them, that their innate nature is to eat the meat, and that the meat really is an object, something to consume without asking for its permission. So the owner of the meat (not the meat itself) should keep the meat wrapped up and locked away.

Women will always be smaller than men. Lions recognize prey because it is smaller and weaker. Women will always be easy to prey upon, and men know that. How much wrapping is upon the "meat" makes no difference. Women have value not because they have equal physical strength but because they have equal humanity..

DdraigGoch
Yes, but the male always eats first, followed by the cubs and finally then the lionesses will get their share.
True - I got focused on the hunt rather than the actual (grim) analogy of meat.
Plus I always get really cross about the lioness hunters getting to eat last

So the natural conclusion is that we should lock all men up in cages?

No, the natural conclusion is that we should not buy into the "It's in men's nature, they can't help it, so I guess we'd better focus on getting women to moderate their behaviour to keep themselves safe" bollocks. Men can help it. Some of them just don't want to.

So the natural conclusion is that we should lock all men up in cages?

Lions don’t freely roam the streets anywhere. In countries where there may be a risk of a lion wandering into a village, I am sure the villagers are prepared to deal with it, in a a way that leaves the lion either caged or dead.

When you read that very confused Metro piece by the young female who wants a double mastectomy that's in another FWR thread, it really feels like some of those youngsters have bought into the same line of thought: the double mastectomy to avoid the 'male gaze'.