The video can be seen here: https://youtu.be/HIG6KMnFjg8
The following text may differ slightly from the video in a few places because while reading I added thoughts or skipped things I'd written, but for the most part it's an accurate representation of the video's content.
TRANSCRIPT:
This is in response to the video "The Men's Rights Movement" by youtuber Brave the world.
I want to start out by saying this is one of the most ridiculous examples of the middle ground fallacy I've seen yet. You've used a combination of strawman attacks, entitlement to dictate other people's standards, and repetition of already disproved claims to bolster your own belief that "both sides of the conflict between MRAs and feminists are dysfunctional and damaging their own causes." While that approach is pretty common, your version of it is particularly shallow and sweeping, with an unusually blunt display of the bigoted belief that conditions of adversity magically have less impact on men who experience them than on women.
There is so much fail in your video that it's hard to respond to all in one statement, though what I've said so far can be taken as a decent summary.
However, I think a bit more in-depth analysis of your assertions is merited, so here goes:
The men's rights movement is not a reaction to feminism. This is a belief feminists have put forth as a way of disparaging the movement. In fact, it exists to address discriminatory conditions which men face, whether related to feminism or not, and not all of them are. The conflict between MRAs and feminists is not in a belief that "women's rights" have gone too far, but in areas where feminist lobbying has exploited discriminatory attitudes toward men for political benefit, or where feminist groups have opposed men's advocacy for relief from discrimination.
Your assessment that men's advocacy has become radicalized seems to rely on a failure to differentiate between men's rights activists and other groups which, by their nature, touch on men's issues. I would also point out that you are mistaken in thinking those groups originated from men's rights activism rather than evolving on their own, and that they're a response to feminism. Like men's activism, other male oriented groups you're calling reactionary are a response to discriminatory social and legal conditions faced by men and boys. Approaches taken by various groups within the spectrum of male responses to that environment range from treating it as a danger and abandoning it (as Men Going Their Own Way do) to advocacy for legal balance and evolution of social attitudes (as Men's Rights Advocates do) to largely bad advice with a sprinkling of knowledge about people, purporting to help young men navigate said environment while attempting to find companionship (see the Pick Up Artist community, who feminists often portray as men's rights activists against the protests of both groups.
As for your statement about the death of feminism, that movement killed itself without any help. From having had to study feminist history to respond to their territorial attitude toward myself and other women, I can tell you that feminism has never been about rights. It's about politics. And it's never been about equality. It's always been a gynocentric approach to genderless issues, treating all women and only women as victims and only victims... and men as both gods and devils. Its ideology promotes the view that female experiences and interests are uniquely relevant and meaningful, women and girls are uniquely deserving of relief or protection from discriminatory law and policy, and men and boys are uniquely guilty of causing that discrimination and accountable for providing that relief.
That combination of toxic ideology, along with an unhealthy dose of collectivism, has quite naturally evolved over time into the level of entitled pettiness that you see today among 3rd wave feminists. Seeing everything through that filter mentally "justifies" advocating for discriminatory law as long as it's men who are discriminated against and women at least appear to benefit.
One significant difference between feminism and men's rights activism is the focus. Where feminists fight to gender government response to genderless issues, MRAs fight for a genderless approach that treats the underlying issue, not the sex of the people involved, as the priority. While feminists consider female experiences and interests uniquely relevant and meaningful, and female needs paramount, MRAs want to see male experiences, needs, and interests given equal consideration; to treat everyone equally in their activism, and to see the law reformed to do the same. It's an uphill battle for us, largely because many people fail to see certain areas of discrimination as discriminatory.
Next, you threw in a series of supposedly predicted men's rights assertions, none of which would actually ever originate from men's rights advocacy positions. The closest you got was on the backlash against modern women expecting men to buy things for them as was traditional when middle & upper class women didn't work. Why should men treat women like we don't have any money when we can all earn it just like they do? Are you really that entitled?
The funny thing is, if you reverse the genders, you did mirror some feminist positions. In particular, the idea of being entitled to romantic attention despite being unattractive; feminists use the fat acceptance narrative to call straight men who have a preference for attractive, healthy women "sexist." Often, however, their belief that having standards for aesthetics is sexist does not extend to women's standards. Men who argue against those standards are labeled "creeps."
There is not only EVIDENCE that there's as much physical violence from women, there's EVIDENCE that there is more. Your claim that men (and only men) who report domestic violence are lying, or that the assaults women commit don't matter because men are stronger absolutely is a gender bias. It is intellectually dishonest of you to use the inclusion of self-reports in the data as an excuse to dismiss the data when self-reports - often well after the events described in them - are the basis for the vast majority of existing statistics supporting the belief that partner violence against women is common and pervasive in our society. Either self-reports are to be believed, or they're not. Believable when you want and unbelievable when you don't like what they imply is not a choice.
It's also a sad statement that you buy into the gender myths that
1) all men are bigger and stronger and all women are smaller and weaker and
2) being smaller means being less capable of doing damage.
Some violent women are bigger than their partners. Some use weapons, solicit proxy violence from friends and family and sometimes law enforcement, and even attack using household objects.
I know a guy whose ex-wife used to throw pots and pans, small appliances, and movable light fixtures at him. I used to know a guy whose ex-girlfriend cracked his skull with an heirloom solid glass paperweight he kept on his desk.
One friend of mine had to defend his current wife against his approximately 5 and a half foot waif of a wife, who picked up a motorized push lawnmower and threw it at her.
Another was convicted of assault for putting his hands up to block a woman trying to stab him in the throat with a pencil, because when he did he caught her in the jaw. The woman was not even arrested... because gender made him popping her once in the jaw a worse offense than her repeated attempts to murder him with a sharp object.
Another case involved a woman who blocked the only exit to an upstairs room with her body and threw every small but heavy object within her reach at her husband. When he squeezed past her to flee the conflict, she called police and he was arrested, later convicted, and spent 18 months in jail.
Domestic violence victim's advocates consider it battery when a man slaps or pushes a woman even if it leaves no injury, not even marks. There is no reason the same condition should not be considered domestic violence when a woman is the perpetrator.
Further, violent women don't just slap and quit. They push and nag and hit and harass until the guy can't take it any more and responds. And restraining her is, by many advocates, considered domestic violence as well - so he's damned if he does, damned if he doesn't... and that's if he doesn't end up like Travis Alexander at the hands of his murdering girlfriend Jodi Arias.
When a woman is the victim, advocates label this type of continued, prolonged attack "emotional abuse" and treat it as a direct cause all kinds of dysfunctional behavior in the victim, from withdrawal from social connections to addiction to co-battery and even criminal behavior against third parties, all on the basis that the pattern of abuse affects the victim's mental state. Where do you think you get off denying that the same experience might have the same impact on men?
Jennifer Langhinrichsen-Rohling stated in her report, Rates of bi-directional vs uni-directional intimate partner violence: A comprehensive review, published in Partner Abuse, vol. 3, no. 2, 2012, that 58% of violent relationships are bi-directional, and 28% are uni-directional perpetration by women against their partners, leaving only 14% of domestic violence as the uni-directional male-on-female partner violence feminists portray as the majority.
Not only do women engage in domestic violence against men, the CDC's National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence surveys have found that a higher percentage of lesbian relationships than heterosexual relationships are violent. According to the CDC's 2010 NISVS, the Lifetime Prevalence of Rape, Physical Violence, and/or Stalking by an Intimate Partner was 43% of lesbians vs 35% of heterosexual women, and only 26% for gay men. Approximately 1 in 3 lesbian women vs 1 in 4 heterosexual women reported at least one form of severe physical violence from an intimate partner, vs approximately 1 in 6 gay men. If men were naturally more violent than women, the most violence per capita would be found in relationships with two men, not those with two women.
Women also are more likely than men to be violent toward their children. Health department data shows women as the majority of perpetrators during the last decade, with a decline in their percentage concurrent with a decline in overall perpetration as paternal custody has slowly increased during that time.
Why does all of this matter? I'll bet if you took the time to watch this, you're sitting there thinking, "But I agree with you that men deserve equal remedy! Why are the numbers important if I say men deserve help getting out of abusive relationships?"
I have three answers for this.
First, it's the truth, and the truth matters, even if confronting it is uncomfortable.
Second, feminist lobbying groups which have established themselves as expert advisers to legislative and other policy making bodies have used the claim that men rarely experience domestic violence, and when they do it's usually not serious, to deny men equal assistance. They made that argument in 1978 when they lobbied Congress for domestic violence law.
The Family Violence Prevention and Services Act of 1984 provided funds to states for programs to prevent family violence and provide shelter to family members attempting to escape it, but didn't give feminists the gender-specific stipulations they wanted. They spent the next 10 years trying to get congress to make the law gender specific on the basis of their claim that women are the vast majority of victims and deserve the lion's share of funding. Lobbying for the Violence Against Women act of 1994 included the same claims made in 1978, despite the existence of information contradicting them. Feminist lobbyists succeeded in persuading congress to gender the language of the law to follow the Duluth model which presumes family violence to be mainly male perpetrated and female experienced, so that the vast majority of shelters would be women-only.
They also succeeded in persuading congress to create a funding incentive for mandatory arrest, prosecution, conviction, sentencing, and sentence enforcement policies guaranteeing an accusation-to-prison pipeline that feeds on men involved in family conflicts, whether they're the actual primary aggressor, or not. They also persuaded congress to fund research based on traffic through these women-only shelters, guaranteeing the production of a body of bias-created "evidence" to support their claims that family violence is gendered. Victims should not be denied either assistance in recovery, or justice, merely because of their gender, or because of of the gender of their perpetrator... but male victims are, especially when victimized by women, and a large part of the reason is that feminists have worked so hard to marginalize them.
And third, if you need a self-serving reason, that would be because reducing female violence would result in an overall reduction in domestic violence from both sexes, as a large percentage of two-way violence involves the female partner assaulting and emotionally abusing the male partner until he snaps and reacts violently. Many women feel entitled to slap or hit if they feel offended, and to push the other person involved in a conflict until they get the response they want. Girls don't grow up with the same admonition to refrain from hitting the opposite sex that boys are given; for them, hitting girls is taboo. For girls, it's not only accepted, it's widely portrayed in television and movies as normal behavior. That mirrors prevailing social attitudes.
When a man hits a woman, the standard response of others is to rush to her aid.
When a woman hits a man, the standard response is to wonder what he did to deserve it.
With such a pervasive attitude of acceptance in our society, why wouldn't women hit the opposite sex more than men do? Do you think that women are just naturally more ethical and caring because of their gender? If you do, why don't you recognize the sexism inherent in that belief?
If women had the same taboo against hitting men that men have against hitting women, and it was enforced with the same level of social shaming and legal ramifications, female-initiated partner abuse would be greatly reduced. And it doesn't matter if you think it's more immoral for a man to hit a woman than for a woman to hit a man. The practical result is unchanged by the gender bias of your morals.
But let's explore for a moment whether if it were affected, your morals would change the importance of acknowledging and addressing female-initiated partner violence.
You seem to think women who initiate are exempt from defensive violence and to consider it to be domestic abuse when the defender is a man, even though it's commonly asserted by domestic violence victim's advocates, when discussing female victims, that self-defense should not be considered abuse... even if she escalates the violence. In fact, that's the entire basis for the use of battered women's syndrome as a defense in assault and murder cases.
The reality is that female violence is at least as provocative as male violence, and in some cases more. When it involves a pattern of repetated, frequent, persistent, or enduring violence accompanied by emotional abuse and aggressive baiting such as getting right up in the guy's face and refusing to allow him to disengage, it is shocking and extremely distressing, and can cause the same fight or flight response a woman experiences in response to
[There is a jump scare at this point in the video]
See, reflexes aren't necessarily optional. To assume a man can just shut off that response because the willfully aggressive person eliciting it is female is not just gender biased, it's a heartless attitude toward men, especially if you're using that assumption as the basis for claiming it's not important to acknowledge that deliberately acting to elicit such a response from your partner is abusive.
Enough on that.
Let's move on to your statements on rape. First I'll address your assertions about prison rape vs prison guard perpetration.
The Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 requires the Bureau of Justice Statistics to develop national data collections on the incidence and prevalence of sexual violence within adult and juvenile correctional facilities. To fulfill that requirement, BJS statisticians have begun surveying incarcerated youth on their experiences of sexual violence while in custody.
Two reports made from these surveys are available on the BJS website: Sexual Victimization in Juvenile Facilities Reported by Youth, 2008-09 and Sexual Victimization in Juvenile Facilities Reported by Youth, 2012.
The two surveys produced similar results.
Staff at the surveyed facilities was 42% female, 58% male in 2008 and 44% female, 56% male in 2012.
92% of respondents in 2008 and 89.1% in 2012 were males reporting sexual activity with female staff only, and another 2.5% in 2008 and 3% in 2012 said they had been victimized by both male and female.
88% of youth reporting staff misconduct in the 2008/9 report and 85.9% in 2012 reported more than one incident. The 2008/8 report states that 27% of this group reported more than 10 incidents. The 2012 report states that 20.4% reported 11 or more incidents. In both reports, approximately a third of youth reporting staff misconduct reported misconduct by more than one staff member.
Based on those and other statistics listed in the report, a significant portion of this exploitation took place in broad daylight, in common areas where it should have been easier to spot and stop.
Interestingly, the majority of female respondents reporting sexual misconduct in those studies were assaulted by other (female) inmates, not male guards.
News stories about similar abuse in adult prisons describe the phenomenon as if the prisoners are responsible, and the guards are being seduced. With that as the attitude of journalists, how would you know if there is a significant difference in sexual violence perpetration by female guards against juvenile and adult male prisoners?
But let's say for a moment that the majority of male victimization in the adult detention system is perpetrated by other men. What makes you think that's a reason for you to be so dismissive of their experiences? Do you think that sharing the same gender makes them responsible for being victimized, or maybe that it's not as harmful when a man does it to them? Do you think prison statistics, which come from an entirely different environment than rape statistics on the outside, have any bearing on perpetration in the general population? Do you acknowledge that a percentage of prison rape is perpetrated by prisoners who would not perpetrate if they were not locked up? Are you aware that you have singled out the phenomenon of male prison rape as if the phenomenon of female prison rape doesn't exist and shouldn't be factored in to your beliefs about the tendency to perpetrate? Or are you so bent on denying the female capacity for predation that you're willing to selectively consider and present information in order to maintain your outlook?
With respect to the general population, the U.S. Centers for Disease control contradicts your claim that when men are raped, men are the vast majority of perpetrators. However, to find that contradiction, you have to actually look past statistics to the methodology of the NISVS itself, which defines rape as "other sexual assault" when a woman is the perpetrator in order to not record female perpetration of rape in the numbers it would show if it were accurately defined. This alternate definition for female perpetration of rape was established by Mary Koss in the 80s and has been used in every survey-type study on sexual violence done by feminist or feminist-leaning researchers since. It was described in her paper, "Detecting the Scope of Rape : A Review of Prevalence Research Methods" in which she stated, "Although consideration of male victims is within the scope of the legal statutes, it is important to restrict the term rape to instances where male victims were penetrated by offenders. It is inappropriate to consider as a rape victim a man who engages in unwanted sexual intercourse with a woman."
How long would feminists' hissey fit last if rape of women were described as "unwanted sexual intercourse with a man" and victims were described as having engaged in it?
The significance of Koss's definition is that it prevented the type of rape most likely perpetrated against men by women - that in which the victim is forced to penetrate rather than being forcibly penetrated - from being included in rape statistics. According to the 2012 & 2014 NISVS reports, equal numbers of men and women reported in those matching categories for the previous year. Why is the previous year significant? It's the time period likely to be most fresh in their memories. As Alison Tieman reported in her article, Manufacturing female victimhood and marginalizing vulnerable men,
"Researchers into the field of traumatic memory recovery note that the longer the period of time a person is asked recall a traumatic event, the less likely they are to remember it. How this works is that surveys that ask about a traumatic event in the last six months get less false negatives than those that ask about a traumatic event in the last twelve months which, itself, gets considerably fewer false negatives than lifetime prevalence.
For men this effect is even more pronounced.
16% of men with documented cases of sexual abuse considered their early childhood experiences sexual abuse, compared with 64% of women with documented cases of sexual abuse. These gender differences may reflect inadequate measurement techniques or an unwillingness on the part of men to disclose this information (Widom and Morris 1997). Only 16% of men with documented case histories of child sexual abuse disclosed that abuse on a survey intended to capture child sexual abuse. Sixteen percent of men compared to sixty-four percent of women. That amounts to a disclosure rate of child sexual abuse four times higher in women than in men."
I bet you're wondering, just as with numbers on domestic violence, why this is so important if you're acknowledging that rape happens to men. Of course, the same main reason applies: The truth matters. The same second reason applies, as well. Men who seek help after being subjected to sexual violence find scant resources and few willing to believe them. That sparcity and disbelief are even worse when the perpetrator is female, and just as with domestic violence victim's resources, feminists have fought hard for the last 40 years to reserve rape victim's resources, including law enforcement, for female victims. Again, victims should should not be denied either assistance in recovery, or justice, merely because of their gender, or because of of the gender of their perpetrator... but male victims are, especially when victimized by women, and a large part of the reason is that feminists have worked so hard to marginalize them.
Another reason is vulnerability. As long as female perpetration of sexual violence remains an invisible problem in society, female perpetrators can feel comfortably able to act with impunity. Men and boys are made vulnerable to female predators by society's denial of their experiences. Continuing to deny them is tantamount to promotion of female on male rape.
Finally, if you need a self-serving reason, multiple studies have found a high rate of victimization by female sexual predators in the history of men who rape women. While not all men and boys raped by women or girls go on to become rapists, that prevalence in the histories of those who do indicates that their experience contributes to or compounds whatever dysfunction motivates them to engage in sexual violence.
Another self-serving reason: Female victims of female perpetrators are also marginalized.
Look up a documentary called "She Stole My Voice." Don't watch it unless you can handle rape scenes graphically portrayed, but there is plenty of information about the documentary available online that you can read, and understand. Political bias and the fear of being accused of making the experience up, or being labeled homophobic, or having one's sexuality mislabeled because of one's stated objection to the experience can cause victims of lesbian rape to fear reporting. The denial of female perpetration makes it harder for any victim of a female perpetrator to come forward.
Regarding your scientific explanation of - to paraphrase your point, "why men are horrible rapey bastards!"
There are a few reasons why your carefully crafted explanation is bullshit, starting with the fact that testosterone is not confirmed to cause physical aggression and therefore a testosterone increase would not be a contributing factor to anyone's decision to commit rape. In fact, the claim that testosterone causes physical aggression was based on flawed or limited scientific study. The conclusions from those studies can't be sufficiently duplicated to support a definitive claim of a relationship between testosterone and physical aggression, particularly not a one listing testosterone as a cause of it.
However, there is a 2009 study, The role of testosterone in social interaction, (Eisenegger, Haushofer and Fehr) which describes evidence that high levels of testosterone would make a man more likely to seek higher social status, which arguably would make him less likely to commit rape. Risking the stigma that comes with the label "rapist" would not be consistent with such a goal.
Even if testosterone could be confirmed to contribute to it, your conclusion that that would make men want to rape women is flawed. It relies on treating testosterone as the only thing that goes on during sex, ignoring the fact that you're talking about an extremely complex organism with a multitude of chemical changes taking place in and outside the nervous system during the act. It also relies on treating the male experience of sex as one-dimensional; no emotional attachment, no need to feel wanted or loved, just a primal urge to fuck, and a complete lack of standards or conditions for when or how it should happen. That is a profoundly disturbing prejudice you display with that line of thinking.
Rape is not a natural manifestation of either gender's sexuality. It's a dysfunctional response to psychological and emotional damage. Read some research on the subject, such as "Reports of Rape Perpetration by Newly Enlisted Male Navy Personnel" by McWhorter, Stander, Merrill, Thomsen, and Milner, and Repeat Rape and Multiple Offending Among Undetected Rapists by Lisak & Miller. Feminists have wrongfully touted both papers as evidence that there is an epidemic of serial rapists on modern campuses, when much of the research was not done on university students, but what it actually shows is that sexual violence is not a common behavioral issue. According to the research, it is is generally committed by a small percentage of the population, usually people who display an overall greater tendency toward criminal violence, not your average person, male or female. If testosterone were a cause, the percentage of male perpetrators would be significantly higher than the research found, and the number of victims exponentially so.
Further, although it's far from a direct cause and effect link which dooms all molestation victims to future perpetration, multiple sources indicate that a history of sexual exploitation by females during youth is a significant risk factor for later perpetration of sex crimes by men. If you want to prevent rape, don't attack testosterone levels in men. Admit the far-reaching consequences of female sexual predation, and stop being part of the widespread force of public attitude that has made it so difficult for advocates to get that issue addressed in law and policy the same as male perpetration is.
Prison sentences
Guess what: It's still sexism, regardless of whether judges are "used to" seeing female criminals or not. It's institutionalized sexism, in fact, and it actually spans the entire justice system, not just the courtroom. This is described in a report from Sonja B. Starr University of Michigan Law School, titled "Estimating Gender Disparities in Federal Criminal Cases." Social attitudes hold women less accountable for their actions, often blaming the nearest associated man. Women's actions are also treated as less impacting, even when there is evidence to the contrary. According to the report, such attitudes and beliefs affect the decisions of officers, prosecutors, and judges. Women are less likely to be arrested, prosecuted, convicted, sentenced, and made to serve their full sentence. And while these prejudices and these tendencies are partly a pre-existing part of society's general attitudes, feminists have fought to capitalize on them by advocating against equal treatment in the justice system... even to the point where some advocate closing women's prisons in favor of psychiatric treatment.
As for men committing more violent crimes, how would we know? Earlier in your video, you gave a prime example of why we don't, when you showed a willingness to dismiss the seriousness of female violence on the assumption that women are not as skilled at it as men. This attiude's prevalence in society likely covers up a significant portion of female violence. Before a violent woman doesn't get equally sentenced, she may not get convicted because her actions may not be taken as seriously. Before she doesn't get convicted, she may not be prosecuted because a city prosecutor may judge the seriousness of her crime by how the public will perceive his choice to prosecute her. Before she doesn't get prosecuted, she may not be arrested because a responding officer may not even see what she's done as genuinely violent, where the same behavior in a man would result in an arrest. And before she doesn't get arrested, her behavior may not even be reported to authorities, because her victim or witnesses to her crime may, like you, dismiss her violent behavior as less damaging, less hurtful, and therefore less of a threat.
Under the circumstances it's unlikely that any conclusion drawn from existing data on the prevalence of female perpetration in society will be accurate. It's impossible to honestly say that criminal behavior is significantly more prevalent in one gender than the other when the available data does not accurately reflect the perpetration rates of either.
Unplanned pregnancy.
Let's start with the fact that the thing you called fucking retarded is available to women twice if they should become pregnant when they don't want to raise a child... three times in nations where abortion is legal and widely available. But it's her overall set of sexual activity, partner, birth control, and post-conception choices which really justifies the men's rights position. Based on those choices, becoming a single custodial mother in the nations where MRAs advocate for paternal surrender is always a choice, even if pregnancy isn't, and even if live birth isn't.
By the time a woman reaches single custodial mother status, she has chosen:
Whether to have sex
Who to have it with
Whether to use birth control
How much birth control (1 method, or more)
Available to her are multiple choices for barrier methods, spermicides, combinations of those two items, intrauterine devices, hormonal birth control, and combinations of those two items
Whether that entails insisting on condom use
Currently, a condom is a man's only birth control option and the only option he can confirm is actually being used.
If pregnancy occurs, whether or not to use an abortion drug early following the conception
Whether or not to abort if she has passed up the drug
Whether or not to relinquish custody to the father or another family member
Whether or not to opt for adoption instead of raising the child herself
Whether or not to use a safe haven abandonment drop off
With that many choices behind her, there is no excuse to portray a single custodial mother as a victim... or for that matter, anything but totally responsible for her circumstance. As such, nobody owes her anything for her situation.
She's not only 50% responsible for her situation. She chose it; she picked up that responsibility, she is 100% responsible, and complaints on her behalf are pitiful and sexist.
When custody was traditionally passed to men following divorce, women were not expected to pay them child support. Men were expected to maintain their households themselves, even while having to pay for childcare so they could work. The only reason why the requirement exists when a woman has custody is that in the past, women weren't expected to earn the wages a man earned and therefore weren't considered capable breadwinners for their families.
Today we know that women can earn a living just like men can. It is dishonest to pretend that the inability exists and justifies the need for a man to support her if she chooses a circumstance that makes supporting herself more challenging. She would only need that if she weren't capable of doing the work required to earn a living.
Further, the creation of the modern child support system was influenced by divorce, which in the early 20th century was perceived as abandonment of a dependent wife and children by an uncaring husband and father. A woman choosing to become a single custodial mother in the face of a host of other options is a totally different ballgame. She doesn't need protected. You're arguing for her to have the right to drag a man who does not want that circumstance along with her into it against his will; essentially, you're arguing that she has the right to demand that for the duration of the baby's childhood, an unwilling man be forced to work to financially support both her choice to retain custody, and her unwillingness to take responsibility for that choice by doing the work herself and earning a living wage. In other words, you've advocated enslaving a man if a woman wants to raise his child herself, against his will. And, I might add, you've used the very same arguments anti-abortion advocates use to tell women that it's not necessary for abortion to be legal or available to women at all.
And let's be honest; the safety net you're trying to preserve is one of the reasons unwed single motherhood is so prevalent in societies where it's mandated. Women take advantage of the combination of welfare and child support to engage in bad decision making knowing that the potential consequences will be mitigated by making the man they chose to have sex with 100% financially responsible for the result of their entire series of choices.
On a side note, no, the pullout method is not as fool-proof as you claim. Precum can have sperm in it even when the urethra is clean. And your advice regarding what to do about a lack of trust is terrible. Women with entitled attitudes like yours prove that the best practice for a man is to avoid sex with women he can't trust.
Now let me explain something to you about that narrative you're promoting. You've made yourself a tool in a dehumanization campaign against men; an effort by a political movement’s influential members and leadership to reduce the perception of men's humanity, not based on exhibited behavior, but based on generalized flaws insinuated upon them defined by the inference of a common trait or common traits. Men are violent. Men are abusive. Men are rapacious. Certain things are only bad when men do them. Treating destructive traits as inherently male traits allows influential feminists and feminist leaders to level a perpetual, consistent and ever-escalating attack on male society. The general public is slowly trained to view men only as a group and a set of characteristics, rather than as individuals with unique and broadly varied personal traits. This leads to a subtly and eventually overtly bigoted perception of and response to them. The result is a combination of ‘team’ loyalty, an unsupported us-vs-them mentality, and a distorted view and growing hatred and fear of men. That, in turn, leads to being disposed to accept legal, political, and social treatment of men and boys in ways the individual would otherwise consider unfair, unjust, immoral, unethical, and inhumane... such as imposing homeless with draconian child support laws, or legally and socially marginalizing male victims of intimate partner and sexual violence.
As I said, men's rights activism is not a response to feminism. It does include, however, response to prevailing attitudes like the ones expressed in your video which are harmful to both sexes. Acceptance of female violence and lack of accountability has created a host of issues that need to be addressed, and the discrimination they cause ended. Mischaracterizing those issues and the advocates who fight for remedy to them isn't helpful.
From the lowbar:
This is a response video to one by Brave The World, titled
"The Men's Rights Movement."
http://youtu.be/svBWhzkZl30
For more information about some of the issues I discuss in this video, check the following links. I've tried to include links to everything I mentioned in the video, plus some additional sources. Some of my sources are linked in other pieces of writing, linked below.
Domestic Violence:
http://www.avoiceformen.com/feminism/feminist-lies-feminism/more-equal-than-others-bias-in-intimate-partner-and-sexual-violence-victims-advocacy/
http://www.saveservices.org/2012/02/cdc-study-more-men-than-women-victims-of-partner-abuse/
http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/judicial/280897-vawa-must-be-reformed-for-domestic-violence-rates-to-come-down
http://wordpress.clarku.edu/dhines/files/2012/01/Douglas-Hines-2011-helpseeking-experiences-of-male-victims.pdf
http://www.cdc.gov/ViolencePrevention/pdf/NISVS_SOfindings.pdf
http://breakingtheglasses.blogspot.com/2013/01/vawa-is-not-like-that.html
https://youtu.be/56Agy4bTv6Y
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EglxuSgZmY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3bIXDTr0o8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKT9FBghfKg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRCS6GGhIRc#t=2m15s
http://www.springerpub.com/media/springer-journals/FindingsAt-a-Glance.pdf
Rape
http://www.genderratic.net/?p=836
https://youtu.be/0ncjGFIFPJI
http://honeybadgerbrigade.com/2015/06/26/u-s-incarcerated-boys-report-high-rate-of-exploitation-by-female-staff-while-in-custody/
http://www.avoiceformen.com/feminism/the-new-yorkers-jeffrey-toobin-cynical-and-devious-male-inmates-abused-female-guards/
http://www.avoiceformen.com/mens-rights/dangerous-rape-myths-part-1
https://archive.is/zFO75
https://freethoughtblogs.com/hetpat/2013/09/04/the-startling-facts-on-female-sexual-aggression/
http://www.batteredmen.com/batrsexcoer.htm
http://www.menshealthaustralia.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=341&Itemid=95
http://www.rmdglobal.net/she-stole-my-voice/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MXMs-1Lsxw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37U9YgyZdHU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7dW--_m4HU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ar3vPOny0A
In response to "testosterone causes rape"
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091208132241.htm
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ouwdOsRvC4oJ:https://www.princeton.edu/~joha/publications/Eisenegger_et_al_TiCS_2011.pdf+&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
http://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/cognoculture/testosterone_and_human_aggression_or_180520
https://web.archive.org/web/20110719215946/http://www.innovations.harvard.edu/cache/documents/1348/134851.pdf
https://www.ncherm.org/documents/McWhorterVV2009.pdf
Child Support
http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1281&context=cjlpp
https://www.schr.org/action/resources/unable_to_pay_child_support_poor_parents_land_behind_bars
http://racism.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1514:fathersbehindbars&catid=53&Itemid=176&showall=&limitstart=3
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/storyline/wp/2014/09/26/locking-up-parents-for-not-paying-child-support-can-be-a-modern-day-debtors-prison/
http://honeybadgerbrigade.com/2015/03/19/custody-and-child-support-facts-vs-feminists/
http://breakingtheglasses.blogspot.com/2014/09/stupid-question-of-day.html
Great discussion about ways in which men are discriminated against:
https://www.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/3nhjwz/list_of_ways_in_which_men_are_institutionally/
The following text may differ slightly from the video in a few places because while reading I added thoughts or skipped things I'd written, but for the most part it's an accurate representation of the video's content.
TRANSCRIPT:
This is in response to the video "The Men's Rights Movement" by youtuber Brave the world.
I want to start out by saying this is one of the most ridiculous examples of the middle ground fallacy I've seen yet. You've used a combination of strawman attacks, entitlement to dictate other people's standards, and repetition of already disproved claims to bolster your own belief that "both sides of the conflict between MRAs and feminists are dysfunctional and damaging their own causes." While that approach is pretty common, your version of it is particularly shallow and sweeping, with an unusually blunt display of the bigoted belief that conditions of adversity magically have less impact on men who experience them than on women.
There is so much fail in your video that it's hard to respond to all in one statement, though what I've said so far can be taken as a decent summary.
However, I think a bit more in-depth analysis of your assertions is merited, so here goes:
The men's rights movement is not a reaction to feminism. This is a belief feminists have put forth as a way of disparaging the movement. In fact, it exists to address discriminatory conditions which men face, whether related to feminism or not, and not all of them are. The conflict between MRAs and feminists is not in a belief that "women's rights" have gone too far, but in areas where feminist lobbying has exploited discriminatory attitudes toward men for political benefit, or where feminist groups have opposed men's advocacy for relief from discrimination.
Your assessment that men's advocacy has become radicalized seems to rely on a failure to differentiate between men's rights activists and other groups which, by their nature, touch on men's issues. I would also point out that you are mistaken in thinking those groups originated from men's rights activism rather than evolving on their own, and that they're a response to feminism. Like men's activism, other male oriented groups you're calling reactionary are a response to discriminatory social and legal conditions faced by men and boys. Approaches taken by various groups within the spectrum of male responses to that environment range from treating it as a danger and abandoning it (as Men Going Their Own Way do) to advocacy for legal balance and evolution of social attitudes (as Men's Rights Advocates do) to largely bad advice with a sprinkling of knowledge about people, purporting to help young men navigate said environment while attempting to find companionship (see the Pick Up Artist community, who feminists often portray as men's rights activists against the protests of both groups.
As for your statement about the death of feminism, that movement killed itself without any help. From having had to study feminist history to respond to their territorial attitude toward myself and other women, I can tell you that feminism has never been about rights. It's about politics. And it's never been about equality. It's always been a gynocentric approach to genderless issues, treating all women and only women as victims and only victims... and men as both gods and devils. Its ideology promotes the view that female experiences and interests are uniquely relevant and meaningful, women and girls are uniquely deserving of relief or protection from discriminatory law and policy, and men and boys are uniquely guilty of causing that discrimination and accountable for providing that relief.
That combination of toxic ideology, along with an unhealthy dose of collectivism, has quite naturally evolved over time into the level of entitled pettiness that you see today among 3rd wave feminists. Seeing everything through that filter mentally "justifies" advocating for discriminatory law as long as it's men who are discriminated against and women at least appear to benefit.
One significant difference between feminism and men's rights activism is the focus. Where feminists fight to gender government response to genderless issues, MRAs fight for a genderless approach that treats the underlying issue, not the sex of the people involved, as the priority. While feminists consider female experiences and interests uniquely relevant and meaningful, and female needs paramount, MRAs want to see male experiences, needs, and interests given equal consideration; to treat everyone equally in their activism, and to see the law reformed to do the same. It's an uphill battle for us, largely because many people fail to see certain areas of discrimination as discriminatory.
Next, you threw in a series of supposedly predicted men's rights assertions, none of which would actually ever originate from men's rights advocacy positions. The closest you got was on the backlash against modern women expecting men to buy things for them as was traditional when middle & upper class women didn't work. Why should men treat women like we don't have any money when we can all earn it just like they do? Are you really that entitled?
The funny thing is, if you reverse the genders, you did mirror some feminist positions. In particular, the idea of being entitled to romantic attention despite being unattractive; feminists use the fat acceptance narrative to call straight men who have a preference for attractive, healthy women "sexist." Often, however, their belief that having standards for aesthetics is sexist does not extend to women's standards. Men who argue against those standards are labeled "creeps."
There is not only EVIDENCE that there's as much physical violence from women, there's EVIDENCE that there is more. Your claim that men (and only men) who report domestic violence are lying, or that the assaults women commit don't matter because men are stronger absolutely is a gender bias. It is intellectually dishonest of you to use the inclusion of self-reports in the data as an excuse to dismiss the data when self-reports - often well after the events described in them - are the basis for the vast majority of existing statistics supporting the belief that partner violence against women is common and pervasive in our society. Either self-reports are to be believed, or they're not. Believable when you want and unbelievable when you don't like what they imply is not a choice.
It's also a sad statement that you buy into the gender myths that
1) all men are bigger and stronger and all women are smaller and weaker and
2) being smaller means being less capable of doing damage.
Some violent women are bigger than their partners. Some use weapons, solicit proxy violence from friends and family and sometimes law enforcement, and even attack using household objects.
I know a guy whose ex-wife used to throw pots and pans, small appliances, and movable light fixtures at him. I used to know a guy whose ex-girlfriend cracked his skull with an heirloom solid glass paperweight he kept on his desk.
One friend of mine had to defend his current wife against his approximately 5 and a half foot waif of a wife, who picked up a motorized push lawnmower and threw it at her.
Another was convicted of assault for putting his hands up to block a woman trying to stab him in the throat with a pencil, because when he did he caught her in the jaw. The woman was not even arrested... because gender made him popping her once in the jaw a worse offense than her repeated attempts to murder him with a sharp object.
Another case involved a woman who blocked the only exit to an upstairs room with her body and threw every small but heavy object within her reach at her husband. When he squeezed past her to flee the conflict, she called police and he was arrested, later convicted, and spent 18 months in jail.
Domestic violence victim's advocates consider it battery when a man slaps or pushes a woman even if it leaves no injury, not even marks. There is no reason the same condition should not be considered domestic violence when a woman is the perpetrator.
Further, violent women don't just slap and quit. They push and nag and hit and harass until the guy can't take it any more and responds. And restraining her is, by many advocates, considered domestic violence as well - so he's damned if he does, damned if he doesn't... and that's if he doesn't end up like Travis Alexander at the hands of his murdering girlfriend Jodi Arias.
When a woman is the victim, advocates label this type of continued, prolonged attack "emotional abuse" and treat it as a direct cause all kinds of dysfunctional behavior in the victim, from withdrawal from social connections to addiction to co-battery and even criminal behavior against third parties, all on the basis that the pattern of abuse affects the victim's mental state. Where do you think you get off denying that the same experience might have the same impact on men?
Jennifer Langhinrichsen-Rohling stated in her report, Rates of bi-directional vs uni-directional intimate partner violence: A comprehensive review, published in Partner Abuse, vol. 3, no. 2, 2012, that 58% of violent relationships are bi-directional, and 28% are uni-directional perpetration by women against their partners, leaving only 14% of domestic violence as the uni-directional male-on-female partner violence feminists portray as the majority.
Not only do women engage in domestic violence against men, the CDC's National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence surveys have found that a higher percentage of lesbian relationships than heterosexual relationships are violent. According to the CDC's 2010 NISVS, the Lifetime Prevalence of Rape, Physical Violence, and/or Stalking by an Intimate Partner was 43% of lesbians vs 35% of heterosexual women, and only 26% for gay men. Approximately 1 in 3 lesbian women vs 1 in 4 heterosexual women reported at least one form of severe physical violence from an intimate partner, vs approximately 1 in 6 gay men. If men were naturally more violent than women, the most violence per capita would be found in relationships with two men, not those with two women.
Women also are more likely than men to be violent toward their children. Health department data shows women as the majority of perpetrators during the last decade, with a decline in their percentage concurrent with a decline in overall perpetration as paternal custody has slowly increased during that time.
Why does all of this matter? I'll bet if you took the time to watch this, you're sitting there thinking, "But I agree with you that men deserve equal remedy! Why are the numbers important if I say men deserve help getting out of abusive relationships?"
I have three answers for this.
First, it's the truth, and the truth matters, even if confronting it is uncomfortable.
Second, feminist lobbying groups which have established themselves as expert advisers to legislative and other policy making bodies have used the claim that men rarely experience domestic violence, and when they do it's usually not serious, to deny men equal assistance. They made that argument in 1978 when they lobbied Congress for domestic violence law.
The Family Violence Prevention and Services Act of 1984 provided funds to states for programs to prevent family violence and provide shelter to family members attempting to escape it, but didn't give feminists the gender-specific stipulations they wanted. They spent the next 10 years trying to get congress to make the law gender specific on the basis of their claim that women are the vast majority of victims and deserve the lion's share of funding. Lobbying for the Violence Against Women act of 1994 included the same claims made in 1978, despite the existence of information contradicting them. Feminist lobbyists succeeded in persuading congress to gender the language of the law to follow the Duluth model which presumes family violence to be mainly male perpetrated and female experienced, so that the vast majority of shelters would be women-only.
They also succeeded in persuading congress to create a funding incentive for mandatory arrest, prosecution, conviction, sentencing, and sentence enforcement policies guaranteeing an accusation-to-prison pipeline that feeds on men involved in family conflicts, whether they're the actual primary aggressor, or not. They also persuaded congress to fund research based on traffic through these women-only shelters, guaranteeing the production of a body of bias-created "evidence" to support their claims that family violence is gendered. Victims should not be denied either assistance in recovery, or justice, merely because of their gender, or because of of the gender of their perpetrator... but male victims are, especially when victimized by women, and a large part of the reason is that feminists have worked so hard to marginalize them.
And third, if you need a self-serving reason, that would be because reducing female violence would result in an overall reduction in domestic violence from both sexes, as a large percentage of two-way violence involves the female partner assaulting and emotionally abusing the male partner until he snaps and reacts violently. Many women feel entitled to slap or hit if they feel offended, and to push the other person involved in a conflict until they get the response they want. Girls don't grow up with the same admonition to refrain from hitting the opposite sex that boys are given; for them, hitting girls is taboo. For girls, it's not only accepted, it's widely portrayed in television and movies as normal behavior. That mirrors prevailing social attitudes.
When a man hits a woman, the standard response of others is to rush to her aid.
When a woman hits a man, the standard response is to wonder what he did to deserve it.
With such a pervasive attitude of acceptance in our society, why wouldn't women hit the opposite sex more than men do? Do you think that women are just naturally more ethical and caring because of their gender? If you do, why don't you recognize the sexism inherent in that belief?
If women had the same taboo against hitting men that men have against hitting women, and it was enforced with the same level of social shaming and legal ramifications, female-initiated partner abuse would be greatly reduced. And it doesn't matter if you think it's more immoral for a man to hit a woman than for a woman to hit a man. The practical result is unchanged by the gender bias of your morals.
But let's explore for a moment whether if it were affected, your morals would change the importance of acknowledging and addressing female-initiated partner violence.
You seem to think women who initiate are exempt from defensive violence and to consider it to be domestic abuse when the defender is a man, even though it's commonly asserted by domestic violence victim's advocates, when discussing female victims, that self-defense should not be considered abuse... even if she escalates the violence. In fact, that's the entire basis for the use of battered women's syndrome as a defense in assault and murder cases.
The reality is that female violence is at least as provocative as male violence, and in some cases more. When it involves a pattern of repetated, frequent, persistent, or enduring violence accompanied by emotional abuse and aggressive baiting such as getting right up in the guy's face and refusing to allow him to disengage, it is shocking and extremely distressing, and can cause the same fight or flight response a woman experiences in response to
[There is a jump scare at this point in the video]
See, reflexes aren't necessarily optional. To assume a man can just shut off that response because the willfully aggressive person eliciting it is female is not just gender biased, it's a heartless attitude toward men, especially if you're using that assumption as the basis for claiming it's not important to acknowledge that deliberately acting to elicit such a response from your partner is abusive.
Enough on that.
Let's move on to your statements on rape. First I'll address your assertions about prison rape vs prison guard perpetration.
The Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 requires the Bureau of Justice Statistics to develop national data collections on the incidence and prevalence of sexual violence within adult and juvenile correctional facilities. To fulfill that requirement, BJS statisticians have begun surveying incarcerated youth on their experiences of sexual violence while in custody.
Two reports made from these surveys are available on the BJS website: Sexual Victimization in Juvenile Facilities Reported by Youth, 2008-09 and Sexual Victimization in Juvenile Facilities Reported by Youth, 2012.
The two surveys produced similar results.
Staff at the surveyed facilities was 42% female, 58% male in 2008 and 44% female, 56% male in 2012.
92% of respondents in 2008 and 89.1% in 2012 were males reporting sexual activity with female staff only, and another 2.5% in 2008 and 3% in 2012 said they had been victimized by both male and female.
88% of youth reporting staff misconduct in the 2008/9 report and 85.9% in 2012 reported more than one incident. The 2008/8 report states that 27% of this group reported more than 10 incidents. The 2012 report states that 20.4% reported 11 or more incidents. In both reports, approximately a third of youth reporting staff misconduct reported misconduct by more than one staff member.
Based on those and other statistics listed in the report, a significant portion of this exploitation took place in broad daylight, in common areas where it should have been easier to spot and stop.
Interestingly, the majority of female respondents reporting sexual misconduct in those studies were assaulted by other (female) inmates, not male guards.
News stories about similar abuse in adult prisons describe the phenomenon as if the prisoners are responsible, and the guards are being seduced. With that as the attitude of journalists, how would you know if there is a significant difference in sexual violence perpetration by female guards against juvenile and adult male prisoners?
But let's say for a moment that the majority of male victimization in the adult detention system is perpetrated by other men. What makes you think that's a reason for you to be so dismissive of their experiences? Do you think that sharing the same gender makes them responsible for being victimized, or maybe that it's not as harmful when a man does it to them? Do you think prison statistics, which come from an entirely different environment than rape statistics on the outside, have any bearing on perpetration in the general population? Do you acknowledge that a percentage of prison rape is perpetrated by prisoners who would not perpetrate if they were not locked up? Are you aware that you have singled out the phenomenon of male prison rape as if the phenomenon of female prison rape doesn't exist and shouldn't be factored in to your beliefs about the tendency to perpetrate? Or are you so bent on denying the female capacity for predation that you're willing to selectively consider and present information in order to maintain your outlook?
With respect to the general population, the U.S. Centers for Disease control contradicts your claim that when men are raped, men are the vast majority of perpetrators. However, to find that contradiction, you have to actually look past statistics to the methodology of the NISVS itself, which defines rape as "other sexual assault" when a woman is the perpetrator in order to not record female perpetration of rape in the numbers it would show if it were accurately defined. This alternate definition for female perpetration of rape was established by Mary Koss in the 80s and has been used in every survey-type study on sexual violence done by feminist or feminist-leaning researchers since. It was described in her paper, "Detecting the Scope of Rape : A Review of Prevalence Research Methods" in which she stated, "Although consideration of male victims is within the scope of the legal statutes, it is important to restrict the term rape to instances where male victims were penetrated by offenders. It is inappropriate to consider as a rape victim a man who engages in unwanted sexual intercourse with a woman."
How long would feminists' hissey fit last if rape of women were described as "unwanted sexual intercourse with a man" and victims were described as having engaged in it?
The significance of Koss's definition is that it prevented the type of rape most likely perpetrated against men by women - that in which the victim is forced to penetrate rather than being forcibly penetrated - from being included in rape statistics. According to the 2012 & 2014 NISVS reports, equal numbers of men and women reported in those matching categories for the previous year. Why is the previous year significant? It's the time period likely to be most fresh in their memories. As Alison Tieman reported in her article, Manufacturing female victimhood and marginalizing vulnerable men,
"Researchers into the field of traumatic memory recovery note that the longer the period of time a person is asked recall a traumatic event, the less likely they are to remember it. How this works is that surveys that ask about a traumatic event in the last six months get less false negatives than those that ask about a traumatic event in the last twelve months which, itself, gets considerably fewer false negatives than lifetime prevalence.
For men this effect is even more pronounced.
16% of men with documented cases of sexual abuse considered their early childhood experiences sexual abuse, compared with 64% of women with documented cases of sexual abuse. These gender differences may reflect inadequate measurement techniques or an unwillingness on the part of men to disclose this information (Widom and Morris 1997). Only 16% of men with documented case histories of child sexual abuse disclosed that abuse on a survey intended to capture child sexual abuse. Sixteen percent of men compared to sixty-four percent of women. That amounts to a disclosure rate of child sexual abuse four times higher in women than in men."
I bet you're wondering, just as with numbers on domestic violence, why this is so important if you're acknowledging that rape happens to men. Of course, the same main reason applies: The truth matters. The same second reason applies, as well. Men who seek help after being subjected to sexual violence find scant resources and few willing to believe them. That sparcity and disbelief are even worse when the perpetrator is female, and just as with domestic violence victim's resources, feminists have fought hard for the last 40 years to reserve rape victim's resources, including law enforcement, for female victims. Again, victims should should not be denied either assistance in recovery, or justice, merely because of their gender, or because of of the gender of their perpetrator... but male victims are, especially when victimized by women, and a large part of the reason is that feminists have worked so hard to marginalize them.
Another reason is vulnerability. As long as female perpetration of sexual violence remains an invisible problem in society, female perpetrators can feel comfortably able to act with impunity. Men and boys are made vulnerable to female predators by society's denial of their experiences. Continuing to deny them is tantamount to promotion of female on male rape.
Finally, if you need a self-serving reason, multiple studies have found a high rate of victimization by female sexual predators in the history of men who rape women. While not all men and boys raped by women or girls go on to become rapists, that prevalence in the histories of those who do indicates that their experience contributes to or compounds whatever dysfunction motivates them to engage in sexual violence.
Another self-serving reason: Female victims of female perpetrators are also marginalized.
Look up a documentary called "She Stole My Voice." Don't watch it unless you can handle rape scenes graphically portrayed, but there is plenty of information about the documentary available online that you can read, and understand. Political bias and the fear of being accused of making the experience up, or being labeled homophobic, or having one's sexuality mislabeled because of one's stated objection to the experience can cause victims of lesbian rape to fear reporting. The denial of female perpetration makes it harder for any victim of a female perpetrator to come forward.
Regarding your scientific explanation of - to paraphrase your point, "why men are horrible rapey bastards!"
There are a few reasons why your carefully crafted explanation is bullshit, starting with the fact that testosterone is not confirmed to cause physical aggression and therefore a testosterone increase would not be a contributing factor to anyone's decision to commit rape. In fact, the claim that testosterone causes physical aggression was based on flawed or limited scientific study. The conclusions from those studies can't be sufficiently duplicated to support a definitive claim of a relationship between testosterone and physical aggression, particularly not a one listing testosterone as a cause of it.
However, there is a 2009 study, The role of testosterone in social interaction, (Eisenegger, Haushofer and Fehr) which describes evidence that high levels of testosterone would make a man more likely to seek higher social status, which arguably would make him less likely to commit rape. Risking the stigma that comes with the label "rapist" would not be consistent with such a goal.
Even if testosterone could be confirmed to contribute to it, your conclusion that that would make men want to rape women is flawed. It relies on treating testosterone as the only thing that goes on during sex, ignoring the fact that you're talking about an extremely complex organism with a multitude of chemical changes taking place in and outside the nervous system during the act. It also relies on treating the male experience of sex as one-dimensional; no emotional attachment, no need to feel wanted or loved, just a primal urge to fuck, and a complete lack of standards or conditions for when or how it should happen. That is a profoundly disturbing prejudice you display with that line of thinking.
Rape is not a natural manifestation of either gender's sexuality. It's a dysfunctional response to psychological and emotional damage. Read some research on the subject, such as "Reports of Rape Perpetration by Newly Enlisted Male Navy Personnel" by McWhorter, Stander, Merrill, Thomsen, and Milner, and Repeat Rape and Multiple Offending Among Undetected Rapists by Lisak & Miller. Feminists have wrongfully touted both papers as evidence that there is an epidemic of serial rapists on modern campuses, when much of the research was not done on university students, but what it actually shows is that sexual violence is not a common behavioral issue. According to the research, it is is generally committed by a small percentage of the population, usually people who display an overall greater tendency toward criminal violence, not your average person, male or female. If testosterone were a cause, the percentage of male perpetrators would be significantly higher than the research found, and the number of victims exponentially so.
Further, although it's far from a direct cause and effect link which dooms all molestation victims to future perpetration, multiple sources indicate that a history of sexual exploitation by females during youth is a significant risk factor for later perpetration of sex crimes by men. If you want to prevent rape, don't attack testosterone levels in men. Admit the far-reaching consequences of female sexual predation, and stop being part of the widespread force of public attitude that has made it so difficult for advocates to get that issue addressed in law and policy the same as male perpetration is.
Prison sentences
Guess what: It's still sexism, regardless of whether judges are "used to" seeing female criminals or not. It's institutionalized sexism, in fact, and it actually spans the entire justice system, not just the courtroom. This is described in a report from Sonja B. Starr University of Michigan Law School, titled "Estimating Gender Disparities in Federal Criminal Cases." Social attitudes hold women less accountable for their actions, often blaming the nearest associated man. Women's actions are also treated as less impacting, even when there is evidence to the contrary. According to the report, such attitudes and beliefs affect the decisions of officers, prosecutors, and judges. Women are less likely to be arrested, prosecuted, convicted, sentenced, and made to serve their full sentence. And while these prejudices and these tendencies are partly a pre-existing part of society's general attitudes, feminists have fought to capitalize on them by advocating against equal treatment in the justice system... even to the point where some advocate closing women's prisons in favor of psychiatric treatment.
As for men committing more violent crimes, how would we know? Earlier in your video, you gave a prime example of why we don't, when you showed a willingness to dismiss the seriousness of female violence on the assumption that women are not as skilled at it as men. This attiude's prevalence in society likely covers up a significant portion of female violence. Before a violent woman doesn't get equally sentenced, she may not get convicted because her actions may not be taken as seriously. Before she doesn't get convicted, she may not be prosecuted because a city prosecutor may judge the seriousness of her crime by how the public will perceive his choice to prosecute her. Before she doesn't get prosecuted, she may not be arrested because a responding officer may not even see what she's done as genuinely violent, where the same behavior in a man would result in an arrest. And before she doesn't get arrested, her behavior may not even be reported to authorities, because her victim or witnesses to her crime may, like you, dismiss her violent behavior as less damaging, less hurtful, and therefore less of a threat.
Under the circumstances it's unlikely that any conclusion drawn from existing data on the prevalence of female perpetration in society will be accurate. It's impossible to honestly say that criminal behavior is significantly more prevalent in one gender than the other when the available data does not accurately reflect the perpetration rates of either.
Unplanned pregnancy.
Let's start with the fact that the thing you called fucking retarded is available to women twice if they should become pregnant when they don't want to raise a child... three times in nations where abortion is legal and widely available. But it's her overall set of sexual activity, partner, birth control, and post-conception choices which really justifies the men's rights position. Based on those choices, becoming a single custodial mother in the nations where MRAs advocate for paternal surrender is always a choice, even if pregnancy isn't, and even if live birth isn't.
By the time a woman reaches single custodial mother status, she has chosen:
Whether to have sex
Who to have it with
Whether to use birth control
How much birth control (1 method, or more)
Available to her are multiple choices for barrier methods, spermicides, combinations of those two items, intrauterine devices, hormonal birth control, and combinations of those two items
Whether that entails insisting on condom use
Currently, a condom is a man's only birth control option and the only option he can confirm is actually being used.
If pregnancy occurs, whether or not to use an abortion drug early following the conception
Whether or not to abort if she has passed up the drug
Whether or not to relinquish custody to the father or another family member
Whether or not to opt for adoption instead of raising the child herself
Whether or not to use a safe haven abandonment drop off
With that many choices behind her, there is no excuse to portray a single custodial mother as a victim... or for that matter, anything but totally responsible for her circumstance. As such, nobody owes her anything for her situation.
She's not only 50% responsible for her situation. She chose it; she picked up that responsibility, she is 100% responsible, and complaints on her behalf are pitiful and sexist.
When custody was traditionally passed to men following divorce, women were not expected to pay them child support. Men were expected to maintain their households themselves, even while having to pay for childcare so they could work. The only reason why the requirement exists when a woman has custody is that in the past, women weren't expected to earn the wages a man earned and therefore weren't considered capable breadwinners for their families.
Today we know that women can earn a living just like men can. It is dishonest to pretend that the inability exists and justifies the need for a man to support her if she chooses a circumstance that makes supporting herself more challenging. She would only need that if she weren't capable of doing the work required to earn a living.
Further, the creation of the modern child support system was influenced by divorce, which in the early 20th century was perceived as abandonment of a dependent wife and children by an uncaring husband and father. A woman choosing to become a single custodial mother in the face of a host of other options is a totally different ballgame. She doesn't need protected. You're arguing for her to have the right to drag a man who does not want that circumstance along with her into it against his will; essentially, you're arguing that she has the right to demand that for the duration of the baby's childhood, an unwilling man be forced to work to financially support both her choice to retain custody, and her unwillingness to take responsibility for that choice by doing the work herself and earning a living wage. In other words, you've advocated enslaving a man if a woman wants to raise his child herself, against his will. And, I might add, you've used the very same arguments anti-abortion advocates use to tell women that it's not necessary for abortion to be legal or available to women at all.
And let's be honest; the safety net you're trying to preserve is one of the reasons unwed single motherhood is so prevalent in societies where it's mandated. Women take advantage of the combination of welfare and child support to engage in bad decision making knowing that the potential consequences will be mitigated by making the man they chose to have sex with 100% financially responsible for the result of their entire series of choices.
On a side note, no, the pullout method is not as fool-proof as you claim. Precum can have sperm in it even when the urethra is clean. And your advice regarding what to do about a lack of trust is terrible. Women with entitled attitudes like yours prove that the best practice for a man is to avoid sex with women he can't trust.
Now let me explain something to you about that narrative you're promoting. You've made yourself a tool in a dehumanization campaign against men; an effort by a political movement’s influential members and leadership to reduce the perception of men's humanity, not based on exhibited behavior, but based on generalized flaws insinuated upon them defined by the inference of a common trait or common traits. Men are violent. Men are abusive. Men are rapacious. Certain things are only bad when men do them. Treating destructive traits as inherently male traits allows influential feminists and feminist leaders to level a perpetual, consistent and ever-escalating attack on male society. The general public is slowly trained to view men only as a group and a set of characteristics, rather than as individuals with unique and broadly varied personal traits. This leads to a subtly and eventually overtly bigoted perception of and response to them. The result is a combination of ‘team’ loyalty, an unsupported us-vs-them mentality, and a distorted view and growing hatred and fear of men. That, in turn, leads to being disposed to accept legal, political, and social treatment of men and boys in ways the individual would otherwise consider unfair, unjust, immoral, unethical, and inhumane... such as imposing homeless with draconian child support laws, or legally and socially marginalizing male victims of intimate partner and sexual violence.
As I said, men's rights activism is not a response to feminism. It does include, however, response to prevailing attitudes like the ones expressed in your video which are harmful to both sexes. Acceptance of female violence and lack of accountability has created a host of issues that need to be addressed, and the discrimination they cause ended. Mischaracterizing those issues and the advocates who fight for remedy to them isn't helpful.
From the lowbar:
This is a response video to one by Brave The World, titled
"The Men's Rights Movement."
http://youtu.be/svBWhzkZl30
For more information about some of the issues I discuss in this video, check the following links. I've tried to include links to everything I mentioned in the video, plus some additional sources. Some of my sources are linked in other pieces of writing, linked below.
Domestic Violence:
http://www.avoiceformen.com/feminism/feminist-lies-feminism/more-equal-than-others-bias-in-intimate-partner-and-sexual-violence-victims-advocacy/
http://www.saveservices.org/2012/02/cdc-study-more-men-than-women-victims-of-partner-abuse/
http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/judicial/280897-vawa-must-be-reformed-for-domestic-violence-rates-to-come-down
http://wordpress.clarku.edu/dhines/files/2012/01/Douglas-Hines-2011-helpseeking-experiences-of-male-victims.pdf
http://www.cdc.gov/ViolencePrevention/pdf/NISVS_SOfindings.pdf
http://breakingtheglasses.blogspot.com/2013/01/vawa-is-not-like-that.html
https://youtu.be/56Agy4bTv6Y
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EglxuSgZmY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3bIXDTr0o8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKT9FBghfKg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRCS6GGhIRc#t=2m15s
http://www.springerpub.com/media/springer-journals/FindingsAt-a-Glance.pdf
Rape
http://www.genderratic.net/?p=836
https://youtu.be/0ncjGFIFPJI
http://honeybadgerbrigade.com/2015/06/26/u-s-incarcerated-boys-report-high-rate-of-exploitation-by-female-staff-while-in-custody/
http://www.avoiceformen.com/feminism/the-new-yorkers-jeffrey-toobin-cynical-and-devious-male-inmates-abused-female-guards/
http://www.avoiceformen.com/mens-rights/dangerous-rape-myths-part-1
https://archive.is/zFO75
https://freethoughtblogs.com/hetpat/2013/09/04/the-startling-facts-on-female-sexual-aggression/
http://www.batteredmen.com/batrsexcoer.htm
http://www.menshealthaustralia.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=341&Itemid=95
http://www.rmdglobal.net/she-stole-my-voice/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MXMs-1Lsxw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37U9YgyZdHU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7dW--_m4HU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ar3vPOny0A
In response to "testosterone causes rape"
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091208132241.htm
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ouwdOsRvC4oJ:https://www.princeton.edu/~joha/publications/Eisenegger_et_al_TiCS_2011.pdf+&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
http://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/cognoculture/testosterone_and_human_aggression_or_180520
https://web.archive.org/web/20110719215946/http://www.innovations.harvard.edu/cache/documents/1348/134851.pdf
https://www.ncherm.org/documents/McWhorterVV2009.pdf
Child Support
http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1281&context=cjlpp
https://www.schr.org/action/resources/unable_to_pay_child_support_poor_parents_land_behind_bars
http://racism.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1514:fathersbehindbars&catid=53&Itemid=176&showall=&limitstart=3
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/storyline/wp/2014/09/26/locking-up-parents-for-not-paying-child-support-can-be-a-modern-day-debtors-prison/
http://honeybadgerbrigade.com/2015/03/19/custody-and-child-support-facts-vs-feminists/
http://breakingtheglasses.blogspot.com/2014/09/stupid-question-of-day.html
Great discussion about ways in which men are discriminated against:
https://www.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/3nhjwz/list_of_ways_in_which_men_are_institutionally/
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