As I’ve often said, MRAs and feminists are basically the same critter. Both groups have a small fraction of thoughtful individuals who are genuinely interested in examining the ways in which society treats their gender unjustly, both have a larger minority who are bat-shit crazy and suffer from delusions of persecution, and both are mostly made up of unhappy individuals looking for something to believe in. The more unhinged members of both groups are obsessed with kindergarten notions of “fairness”; for feminists this usually looks something like, “Waaaaah, it’s not FAIR that men tend to be bigger and stronger than women, and that women don’t usually make as much money as men merely because we actually want lives and aren’t willing to sell our souls to corporations! Waaaaaaaaaah!” And for MRAs it usually looks something like, “Waaaaaaaah, why do I have to pay women to fuck me? It’s not FAIR that men usually want sex more than women, so women can put conditions on men having sex with them! I should be able to have all the sex I want without paying or jumping through hoops, Waaaaaaaaaaaah!” Most of the time, whiny-baby feminists avoid me because I’m a whore and therefore anathema to their weltanschauung, but often whiny-baby MRAs will approach me online because they’re laboring under the serious misapprehension that because the deranged feminists hate me I must be on their side (Republicans and Democrats often make the same Very Stupid Error, but that’s a discussion for another day). Well, on Wednesday one such individual got on my last nerve, and so I decided to carpet-truth-bomb him thus:
Hi, welcome to this place called “physical reality”. Here, matter is organized into many different forms with varying degrees of scarcity. Naturally, scarcer resources are more prized. So there’s a field of study called “economics”, which studies how sentient beings interact with each other in order to get the resources they need by trading other resources they have more of. Resources are not distributed “evenly” or “fairly”; for example, the sun has a whopping huge supply of helium (it’s a waste product there), while on Earth it’s scarce and getting scarcer. This isn’t because of “capitalism” or “patriarchy” or “privilege” or anything else; it’s just the nature of physical existence. I as a sentient being found something I have a lot of, namely sex appeal, and I trade on that to get things I otherwise have a lot of trouble getting & holding on to, such as money. If you don’t have anything you can trade, sell or negotiate with to get something I want or need, you won’t be able to get what you might want from me, just like if I can’t get the money the grocery store wants, I won’t be able to get the groceries I want from it. This is reality. Learn it. What you need to do is stop bitching about life being “unfair” (no shit) and find something you have that others want & will pay you for, such as labor. That’s all. Everybody is in that boat. Sex is a resource, and so is money. One can be traded to get the other, just like any resource can be traded to get other things. The end.
I honestly can’t comprehend how anyone over the age of 8 can fail to comprehend that the world isn’t “fair” and can never be; the only way it could be would be for everything to be reduced to a thin haze of hydrogen spread evenly through a static universe. Some people have more of one resource and some of another; that’s why commerce was invented. And even though some individuals do have more resources and advantages than others, most individuals are still lacking in other areas (which is, of course, why commerce works in the first place). Yes, I have more than my “fair share” of sex appeal, intelligence, personality force and general health…and far less than my fair share of other nice things, such as emotional stability, consistent orgasmicity, the ability to navigate formal systems, the ability to sleep more than three hours without sedation and the ability to move around and position my body any way I like without becoming violently ill (and that’s by no means a complete list). Money can’t make up for any of those defects, but it can purchase workarounds for many of them, and my sex appeal can get me money. And that to me seems like a far more adult, realistic and practical life-strategy than sitting around whining that it isn’t “fair” that I can’t enjoy air travel, vibrators and many other things large numbers of people take for granted.
Fairness is the embryo of justice.
“No matter how much others might want to accumulate financial wealth, they will not be able to do so unless someone is willing to deficit spend.”
Maggie, I agree with some of your views, and disagree with others. But this post is way off the mark and full of sweeping and insulting generalizations particularly with respect to feminists of which I am one.
What makes you think you aren’t part of the thoughtful minority I mentioned before any other group?
What I do not get is why the small thoughtful minorities stay with the larger groups that just want something for free. Selective blindness?
I am a feminist; I am thoughtful; I am many other things, and I don’t believe I and other feminists like me are a minority, quite the opposite in fact. Of course I may be wrong. But I may also be right. Also, like you, I object to being pigeonholed. I don’t think you can have it both ways, pigeonhole while objecting to being pigeonholed, without being hypocritical.
Eric Hoffer pointed out that “true believers” embrace doctrines and movements as an attempt to escape their own imperfections. It would do well for activists of all kinds to learn the difference he delineated between mass movements and practical organizations. We need more of the latter.
There is one nuance that I think you are overlooking here, which is that while we cannot appeal to the sun about its un fair helium surplus, society is something we create, together. If society is structured in a way that dramatically limits the ability of certain groups of people from either making use of their skills or participating in the social institutions we have created to develop valuabe skills for reasons that are tangental at best to their use of their skills, then we need to have serious discussions about how to restructure society.
So, the concept of fairness is something that can be used to describe whether or noth society is structured in an optimal way. There are ways that society is structured that makes it unnecessarily difficult for women to have children and a carrer (which, from a top level ecomonic view, is less efficient and not particularly good for the species in the long run), there are sterotypes that harm both men and women who want to pursue certain carrer paths, and there a many, many laws that were made in a time when there was a strong, erroneous beleif that women(or incert whatever minority) should be treated differently differently because of some tangental cultural or biological difference.
So, really, anyone who calls themselves an equal rights activist of any kind who doesn’t actually support true equal rights is lying to either themselves or others.
Indeed, reading this column makes me curious to how it reconciles with the concept of a Universal Basic Income.
Wow, good on both of you for missing the point entirely. It’s amazing how some people can read what they want to see into anything. It’s a real stretch to see in this essay an argument against society recognizing inalienable individual rights, and an even bigger one to see an argument against a pragmatic solution to one of society’s biggest problems.
Good going, you two! {slow clap}
Good grief, Maggie. I can’t speak for StormDaughter, but I know you weren’t arguing against the UBI. I’ve seen you speak in favor of it too many times to think you were doing that.
I was just asking how the two concepts meshed. I apologize.
Okay, that first response was a bit off-the-cuff because I was not expecting this in the slightest. In hindsight I should not have piggybacked on StormDaughter’s post because we’re really looking at two separate concepts. StormDaughter appears to be talking about cultural interaction between the sexes and I was asking about economics. Please allow me to try and explain myself a bit further.
First, I want to repeat that I did NOT interpret this column as somehow being an argument against a UBI, Maggie. I’ve been reading this blog for too many years to think there would be any sort of logical hole in any position you hold, Maggie. Indeed, you were the person who introduced me to the idea of the UBI in the first place, through this very blog!
That being said, I could easily see some inexperienced, naive person who thinks he/she knows better than you trying to do so. I most certainly do not know better than you, which is why I try to ask questions (knowing that I am not entitled to answers) more often than staking out knee-jerk reactions. The latter never ends well.
At first I didn’t understand how this passage:
” find something you have that others want & will pay you for, such as labor”
fit into support of a UBI (which, again, is something I support and want to see happen). After some additional thought, however, I realized that a UBI doesn’t negate a person’s requirement to bring something worthy of exchange for what they want, regardless of where that something of worth comes from.
Have I got that right? If so, then I’ve answered my own question and hopefully there’s no need for further distress on my part.
Bingo!
This is why I’ve abandoned ideological labels in favor of calling myself a deep pragmatist. The various ideologies are all about trying to explain the complexities of human interaction in simplistic theories … only to get bogged down into bizarre and sometimes Procrustean ways of trying to make everything fit one’s preferred theory.
I admire the way you equate fairness with the thermal death of the universe. What do we want? Thermodynamics! When do we want it? Hmm, I’ll have to get out my slide rule on that one.
the whining was in defense of sexbots, which you ridicule as a substitute for female company when they merely have to substitute for the male hand. That is a market-based response to scarcity, not a feminist-style declaration of entitlement.
Are there any MRAs who actually say that sex should be taken for granted? I’ve been part of that community for years and haven’t run into the notion. Of course there are “freebies” out there for guys who know where, which leads to the whole “red pill” point of view, but still: TANSTAAFL.
But I agree with Wilson on ‘bots. They have a place in the market, even if they’re an inferior good.
Well, obviously Maggie has a good reason to be against sex-bots (and I am pretty sure she has always only characterized them as inferior or ridiculous, but never called for a ban or anything like it), simply because Maggie does not want to be replaced by robots or characterized as only being on the skill-level of a machine, same as anybody else providing a valuable service.
Of course, there is no risk here anytime soon. Claims of the impending availability of robotic “companions” or “friends” are vastly overblown. You usually find that these claims serve to separate suckers from their money and have no other validity.
I learned long ago, as a father of young children, that people don’t always use the word “fair” to mean “even handed.” Sometimes people use the word “fair” the way we say that someone’s complexion is “fair” or that the weather is “fair:” we say it’s “fair” because it’s what we want and like to see.
Sometimes the opposite of “fair” is “uneven” or “against the rules,” but sometimes the opposite of “fair” is “ugly.” And, of course, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
As we get older, most of us learn that we don’t usually get much sympathy if we cry “unfair” simply because we don’t like what we see. We also learn that we are far more likely to get some sympathy if we say, “I think it’s unfair because it’s not even-handed.” When we say that, instead of the truth, we are throwing out a distraction from our real reason for complaint. But it’s a distraction that has a shot at working.
This is what I see in the argument that this MRA seems to have been making. He looks at the ways that women respond to his interest in having sex, and he doesn’t like what he sees. Rather than say that, he says instead that women aren’t following the rules. Because no one will care about what he likes; but perhaps someone somewhere might care about “the rules.”
Of course, by “not following the rules” he means that women aren’t behaving like men.
Well, duh. Men have been saying that for a long, long time — for just as long as women have been telling each other that men don’t behave like reasonable people .. that is, that men don’t behave like women.
It’s an inevitable complaint. People who become adults learn to live with these differing ways of thinking and behaving. Some learn to delight in them!
People who don’t become adults, except physiologically, well, they behave like children.
“It’s not FAIR!!!”
Oh, and if he wants to have sex with people who behave like men, well, there is a place he can go where he will find plenty of people like that: gay bars.
You have my sympathy, Maggie. Hugs.
Excellent reply!
I think however it has become amply clear that these people do not care about “fairness”, they are just using their talents. And they have found that the one talent they have is styling themselves as “victims” and getting others to give them things for free or at a very bad exchange rate for the other side. There are large groups of “feminists” that like to do this and, I guess, MRAs have also started trying this thing.
As the whole narrative presented basically does not make sense today in the west, they have to use the concept of the “big lie” to create the appearance of being victims, such as the mythical “gender pay-gap”, or that women have it much harder to become scientists, engineers or work in other higher-paying professions.
In the end, the closest analogy for this behavior can be found in Biology and it is the behavior-pattern of parasites. The best way to deal with parasites is to kill the strategy they use to get something from the host without giving something valuable in return. For the case at hand, that means to simply recognize what all those trying to capitalize on a “victim status” are doing and then to ignore them.
This was a really excellent post for me. Thank you for writing it. I feel often that another problem with this ‘fairness’ is that people (sometimes out of willful ignorance) conflate equality with sameness. This would also be the ‘I don’t see color’ camp. The type of feminist OP spoke of does not care for maximizing and compensating the things that (traditionally) women and femme people have been told all their life should be given out for free (sexual, aesthetic and emotional stimulation, labor and comfort.) They wait only for the day when they can be treated the ‘same’ as men (NOT for the day when all skills, including what are traditionally and socially often aligned to feminine beings, are equally respected and compensated.)
I give up. What’s an MRA?
Men’s Rights Activist.
Men should be thankful for being humans I think! In the entire world I see males of different species being eaten after sex, having sex only once a year or less often, having to practice one particular dance for years in order to have sex just once, or having to fight themselves to death in order to protect their (very temporary) right to have sex with different females. Sex is indeed very scarce for males, but not so much for human males when compared with most other animal species on this earth.
Say what you like about the MRAs but it was one of them who inadvertently introduced me to this blog, and to the concept of sex worker’s rights. Before then I used to believe in the Swedish model as the way to go, not anymore.