What taf is wrong with men?!

[guinnessguzzler]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c78vgm0e3zzo

Wtaf?! After the Pelicot case in France, and I'm sure someone posted about a similar situation in Germany the other day, and now this. Why are they so awful?

And yes I know it's not all men but ffs.

Yes.
I’m 58 so I don’t think I have enough time left to answer the question of what is wrong with men.

Definitely socialisation plays a key role.

I'm a manga fan & I was recently thinking about a male Reddit post I saw which said, ' I don't get why lesbians often say Citrus shows lesbians as rapey when gay male & some straight manga is arguably worse.'
(For context : Citrus is a manga about a lesbian relationship, written by a woman, but highly controversial due to the relationship being between step-siblings & arguably seeming coercive).
I actually took this up with ChatGPT. I know it's lazy to use AI but it gave thoughtful answers & offered some useful links to follow up. I said that the analogy to straight & gay male manga doesn't work since, in Japan as elsewhere, lesbians have been stereotyped as perverse & predatory in a way straight men have not, and stories often, until recently were confined to often tragic/peverse/platonic storylines. Moreover, the high level of sexual violence in Boys' Love manga is driven by mainly female authors who write the victimised character as feminine (the reasons for this are disturbing and deserve their own post..) Gay men understandably prefer bara, written by gay men & with much less sexual violence.
So straight men, in contrast, seem the only group on average happy to enjoy manga which often has them behaving in a sexually violent way. There are complaints, and obviously manga is its own thing, but I do think this is a broader pattern.

we can't exactly ban men

Every time I suggest sex-selective abortion as a means of doing exactly that, I get deleted.

Hah! 😆

It would be interesting to see what society became if we banked men's sperm, let the current batches of men die out, and then only had girls for five or so generations, before eventually reintroducing boys once society had stabilised, with several generations of women socialised in a matriarchal world.

Certainly, you'd have to think that violent crime would go down - but would women rearrange ourselves into some kind of toxic hierarchy to maintain an oppressed/oppressor dynamic? Would the 'mythological' men become revered, their faults forgotten? Would we ever get free of patriarchal socialisation? Would we end up placing men back at the top of the hierarchy when they were eventually reintroduced? Or would they end up oppressed? It's interesting to think about.

I had Louise Hunt and Sara Everard in mind when I was writing my second paragraph.

If you take only my first paragraph, the "hey look, I can get my dick wet here" without consideration of the woman as anything other than a barely-sentient wank sheath fits in there.

There's a Latin word, qua, that crops up when NGOs talk about rape in the context of war crime. Qua means "in the sense of" or "as a form of". They talk about "rape qua genocide", "rape qua torture", "rape qua rape", to distinguish differing motives.

In the cases of Hunt and Everard, "rape qua torture" and "rape qua act of hatred" certainly apply.

Oh, I didn't know that, and that's very interesting! Thanks!

(Of course, what do the NGOs call it when their own workers commit rape, as is endemic? 😬)

In the case of Peter Sagan pinching Maja Leye's arse, not even orgasming, but making a crude joke on the podium of the Tour of Flanders. Not thinking "this human might be upset if I do this", just thinking "how can I photobomb the medal presentation of the rider who beat me?"

No- it's never right to abort on the basis of sex.
And factually we obviously aren't able to reproduce without men- this isn't Charlotte Gilman's Herland where they have parthenogenesis.
I don't know what the answer is to rape. Rates I think are actually declining, so we shouldn't lose hope. Imo one key factor is that online platforms are allowing radicalisation & bad actors to meet around the globe, eg. In the horrific Pelicot cases.

Sadly my personal measures are focused on my own safety, so that means altering my own behaviour. I never spend time alone with a male friend, I think it's too risky. Very sad but there you go....

Yes, and what @OtterlyAstounding elaborated. I've stopped some acquaintance rapes by calmly pointing out to the man that he was acting like a rapist. Some really do 'get carried away' and respond OK to being brought back down to earth. It's not a guaranteed defence by any means, but does kind of support your point.

I've also stopped at least one stranger rape by humanising myself (that was exhausting) but others have relied on intervention by a saner man. Once hatred and misogyny are in play, however, defence options are miserably limited.

Happy to note that saner men do exist, will intervene, and that sanity can be restored to some of the others! We just need more male sanity ... and a great deal less bro code.

the high level of sexual violence in Boys' Love manga is driven by mainly female authors who write the victimised character as feminine (the reasons for this are disturbing and deserve their own post..)

I'm in my forties and I don't have enough time left alive to write up a proper deep look into female-authored alpha-omega (aka alpha/beta/omega, a/b/o) fan works. As it is, this took me the better part of an hour. The dynamic you describe is very similar to alpha-omega. The short version is: this is an example of female sexual entitlement, in which women try to find a way to masturbate to stories about rape and abuse whilst still thinking of themselves as "feminists".

1. No woman actually wants to be raped and abused. She might fantasise about being sexually dominated, including pain, because patriarchy, internalised male gaze, etc but by definition, her fantasy is completely under her control, so it can never be compared to real-life rape and abuse, because by definition, she wouldn't control that. Her fantasy can never exceed what she can cope with, whereas real-life abuse can and often does. She may be very fond of those fantasies and struggle to orgasm without them.
2. Very very few women want to rape or abuse. A larger number want to sexually dominate and fantasise about doing so. She is unlikely to exceed the pain tolerance of her imaginary "victim" or cause lasting injury. She may imagine being male as a prerequisite to the fantasy because a penis is a lot easier to sexually dominate someone with than a vulva is, and because of a lack of credible models for female sexual dominance. (What men call "femdom" is not a credible model for female sexual dominance.) She may be very fond of those fantasies and struggle to orgasm without them.
3. Women in fanwork spaces tend to be omnicause, liberal not-actually-feminism types, pronouns in bio etc. They have enough feminist awareness to recognise that men have structural privilege over women and that men sometimes ignore safewords and agreed limits, even as they tie themselves in knots to pretend that men can become women.
4. When the fantasies outlined in (1) and (2) are written down and collide with the feminist awareness in (3), it sets up cognitive dissonance, which not even the most "choosy-choice", "consent makes it OK" liberal not-actually-feminist approach to sex can adequately resolve. The writing-down aspect matters: seeing things written down makes them more real and more public than if they are just thoughts in your head, increasing the sense of shame. Also, when A writes a male-on-female rape story and B reads it, B doesn't control what A writes, she can only control whether to keep reading, so B has a loss of agency compared to her own private fantasy and that increases B's cognitive dissonance about having sexual fantasies about men hurting women. B no longer decides when the imagined abuser has gone far enough for her liking, or the imagined victim is at her limit, because A controls the story. That cognitive dissonance interferes with these women's ability to use other women's written stories to orgasm and hence must be eliminated to allow the orgasms to continue. This is what I mean by "female sexual entitlement".
5. Enter alpha-omega pornfics. Alpha-omega relationships between two men allow the author to write pornographic literature containing enormous power imbalances without having men subjecting women to sexual violence. Superficially, the patriarchal male-on-female power dynamic has been removed. In practice, the male-on-female power dynamic is still there because the omega is a proxy for women and the alpha is a proxy for men. The alpha and omega status is frequently biological, innate, unchangeable, easily determined by unmistakeable external markers (often pheromones), just like sex is in reality, and is very clearly a proxy for sex class. (There are nominally also betas, but you never see those; perhaps they are the non-binaries of a/b/o.) Alpha-omega pornfics allow the female reader and female author to create an illusion of sex equality by erasing women completely, allowing them to create and consume the pornographic literature without the enormous and jarring cognitive dissonance that would occur if the victim was actually female.

Lastly, if you think that alpha-omega pornfics aren't one of the drivers of ROGD in young and autistic women, there's a bridge I'd like to sell you.

It's a really interesting thought experiment that really requires a sci-fi novella at least as long as Ethan of Athos to fully examine. <Looks hopefully at Lois McMaster Bujold>

"Business As Usual", I believe.

Would sperm sorting prior to artificial insemination be more acceptable?

Also, you probably don't want to look too hard at the practices of the egg and dairy industries if relatively-early abortions by sex bother you.

@selffellatingouroborosofhate Oh, I love Lois McMaster Bujold 😍 She would do a fantastic job.

As to your 'business as usual' comment - hah! Sadly that's so true

WTF is wrong with men?

They know they can get away with abusing, even murdering, women and children. So why shouldn't they if they want to?🤷‍♀️

One of the problems with relying on the woman to bring the man back to sanity is that autistic women just don't have the social skills to do that. Which is why our sexual victimisation rate is nine out of ten instead of one in three. And is one of the reasons why expecting women to avoid rape instead of expecting men to get express consent is ableist.

Yes, that's not abortion.

Re egg & dairy industry, I know they treat foetuses of a non-useful sex very brutally, that shouldn't be happening...

To be fair, while I'm not in favour of normalising sex-selective abortion because it's usually a symptom of misogyny, and creates imbalances on a population level...if you're alright with women aborting for any reason (which I personally am), then you should be alright with individual women having early abortions on the basis of sex.

creates imbalances on a population level

That's kind of the point. If we had one tenth the number of men, we'd all be a lot safer.

That's true - a population imbalance in favour of there being more women would be quite different to the imbalances we currently get, with more men. Then again, it could easily create different, toxic dynamics, such as polygamy, considering how desperate women can be to have a man. I can't argue that it would reduce violent crime though.

Ultimately, it's all hypothetical as it'll never happen, and on a selfish level I think my husband and son are decent human beings who add value to society - unlike many of the other men I've had in my life. Although, seeing horrific news stories like this, I'm very glad my daughter is lesbian.

I really hope I didn't seem to be expecting women to avoid rape or to make them sane!

See I find this interesting and I think it probably does get to the crux of the matter. But it's the combination of being able to get away with it and 'if they want to'. There genuinely isn't a person on this earth I would want to hurt so much no matter what I could get away with. People have talked about lack of empathy, but I just can't get my head around thinking that your own momentary gratification (whether based on sex, power, both or something else) is worth someone else suffering for their entire life. Do these men not understand the impact of their behaviour on women? Do they think it's just a moment in time and then it's over so it doesn't matter? Do they somehow convince themselves that women want this? Do they actually believe that women don't feel things in the same way they do? How do they justify it to themselves?

They don’t justify it to themselves.

They don’t think women have feelings. They don’t think women matter other than in relation to what they want and their needs.

It is strange to us but that’s how it is. Women are there to serve men. In their minds. And in whatever twisted, deformed and damaging way that may be.

The human race would die out

I don’t think that follows.
I can disagree with the reason somebody had chosen to do something even if I think they should be legally allowed to do it.