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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   33939 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025

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A few thoughts on the male feminist sex pest.

With the (in internet terms, not very) recent news of Neil Gaiman's escapades, a lot has been said about the agency (or lack thereof) of women, and to the corrupting effect of fame on men, but I've been giving some thought again to the Male Feminist Sex Pest phenomenon.

Most people here are probably aware of it, it's notable enough to get a comic from good ol' Stonetoss. Basically, the idea is that male feminists are disproportionately prone to acts of sexual misconduct.

What is the reason for this? I've been thinking about a few possible ones:

  • The MFSP as a predator: The classic right-wing stereotype. Guys of dubious moral character will take up an ideology with the intent of making potential victims lower their guards.

  • The MFSP as salience bias: Basically, male feminists are not particularly rapey, it's just more suprising so it makes the news. This could be true, but is basically impossible to verify in either direction.

  • The Male Feminist as a man struck with guilt: In this formulation, the man's bad behaviour is in their past, and their male feminist views are, in a way, compensation for the fact that he has behaved shittily towards women.

  • The Male Feminist as a man seeking absolution: If all or most men behave poorly, then the male feminist's past behaviour is not particularly noteworthy. By subscribing to the most deranged feminist assumptions, the male feminist can morph from a "bad man" to just "a man", or even a "good man", because at least they're willing to fight their deplorable male instincts.

  • The Male Feminist as a man stuck in time: For this man, being a feminist means some vague notion of "equal rights" and it being acceptable to have non-committal sex with younger girls. This is not in line with which more modern feminists believe, as he might eventually find out.

I am aware this is not the audience most in tune with the mentioned cohort, but what do you guys think? Any of the above resonate more? A little bit of each? Something else entirely?

As an aside, the last few explanations imply a type of person that people here might be very familiar with: the nerdy anti-feminist nice guy (no capitalization). It is perfectly possible, as an upper-middle class guy in a moderately to very liberal environment who doesn't like partying or going clubbing, to never notice the behaviour many women complain about (because neither you, nor your close friends and family engage in it), see that they don't seem to be particularly disadvantaged in any of the environments they interact with them, see that their ire is directed very broadly at men in general, and conclude that the whole thing might just be a scam.

The simplest explanation in my eyes is:

  1. Male feminists, being feminists, tend to hang around with female feminists.

  2. Female feminists are more likely to make sexual misconduct accusations at any given level of sexual pestiness than are non-feminist women.

It’s Simpson’s Paradox all the way down.

Am I more likely to make sexual misconduct accusations at any given level of sexual pestiness? That’s news to me. What evidence do you have that maintains that belief? And what is a “non-feminist” woman, according to you?

Am I more likely to make sexual misconduct accusations at any given level of sexual pestiness? That’s news to me.

One of Feminism's main pushes 2014-2020 was explicitly to make sexual misconduct allegations require less proof and to have more consequences, and to increase the rate of report generally while explicitly arguing that safeguards against false accusations must be systematically removed. Notable early examples included Atheism+, #ListenAndBelieve, Jackie's story, #TeamHarpies, We Need to Talk About Jian, along with too many smaller ones to name; on a policy level, we had the Title IX "Dear Colleague" letter implementing these as policies in the university system, and "affirmative consent" laws in California. This led to #MeToo, which culminated with the farce of the Kavanaugh accusations. This is a very abbreviated list, and this particular set of demands has been at least arguably the dominant one within Feminism over the last decade.

Maybe you are an atypical feminist, but to the degree that Feminism is a coherent category that can be analyzed, "dramatically lower threshold for sexual assault accusations" seems very clearly to be one of its most prominent characteristics.

And what is a “non-feminist” woman, according to you?

I would define it as a woman who does not identify with the presently-dominant ideological form of Feminism. This would describe my wife, sister and mother, as well as a number of other women in my life.

farce of the Kavanaugh accusations

I'm tempted to claim that the Kavanaugh accusations were the tragedy and E Jean Carroll's allegations against Trump were the farce.

Even if you want to set the threshold of tragedy at Blasey Ford, which I'd consider rather inflammatory, we went from tragedy to farce by Julie Swetnick.

“Sexual misconduct allegations requiring less proof”, “increasing the rate of reports” and “arguing that safeguards against false accusations must be systematically removed” all, to me, run afoul of the definition of feminism, which is “a social movement that advocates for equality between men and women in all aspects of life”, so that’s not feminist.

Well, except things are what they do, and feminists consistently advocate for these things, therefore they are feminist.

There’s nothing inherently Republican about driving a pickup truck. But, uh.

You can have ridiculous no true Scotsman definitions that exclude any bad behavior from your own side. They’re just wrong.

But uh what? I don’t think there’s something inherently Republican about driving a pickup truck.

As a feminist myself, I'd agree that that's not the type of stuff that I support as a feminist (in fact, I've spoken out against other feminists who espouse them). Unfortunately, feminists like you or me tend to be either rare or quiet (for me, personally, I chose to be the latter due to noticing that speaking out in the way you did in this comment tended to be met with extremely harsh abuse from other feminists), so I have to admit that comments like Quantumfreakonomics's or FCfromSSC's in this thread are entirely accurate when describing the general group of people who both call themselves feminists and who other people recognize as feminists. I've just had to learn to leave my ego at the door and not feel attacked when people talk about "feminists" supporting [thing I, as a feminist, oppose]. I think having relatively unpopular or at least less-loud (we could be a silent majority among feminists, and I actually suspect that that's the case!) perspective within a particular ideological group unfortunately tends to require this kind of thinking, and this forum in particular tends to have a high proportion of people with fairly idiosyncratic opinions that make them relatively unpopular or, again, less loud compared to the common, mainstream ones within any given ideology.

I think feminists “like” you and me are quite loud and common. They’re just not very reactionary and tend to be busy doing things instead of participating in online flame wars. That there are people on Twitter posting sexists takes and arguing that it’s not sexist and getting a bunch of other people angry doesn’t change the fact they aren’t feminists and it’s wrong to regard them as such. If they get together in a group and say they’re feminists their numbers sadly don’t change the definition. If that group makes noise and mainstream news outlets pay attention to it, that still makes them not feminist, and if some Congress people call them feminists that’s a lot of wrong Congressmen and a very wrong mainstream that is using the wrong word. It’s Pharisees all the way up and down, in my opinion.

They’re just not very reactionary and tend to be busy doing things instead of participating in online flame wars.

Well, besides online flame wars, these self-described "feminists" also tend to run actual policy and companies and write essays in mainstream publications and books. These are the people that the layman picture when they hear the word "feminist," even if they don't meet your or my personal standard for what constitutes a "feminist." And they are certainly far more influential in modern USA politics than feminists of your or my sort (though the recent election might be evidence that that is changing).

That there are people on Twitter posting sexists takes and arguing that it’s not sexist and getting a bunch of other people angry doesn’t change the fact they aren’t feminists and it’s wrong to regard them as such. If they get together in a group and say they’re feminists their numbers sadly don’t change the definition.

I disagree, but our disagreement here doesn't matter. God didn't hand us a tablet that says "the English word that starts with 'f,' ends with 't,' and has 'eminis' in between shall forever be defined as XYZ." If enough people use a word to mean something, and they all agree with how it's used, then people like you or me with unpopular definitions don't get to walk in and demand that they submit to our own idiosyncratic definition of the term.

In any case, again, this disagreement doesn't matter. You are free to believe in a prescriptive model of word definitions rather than a descriptive one. But what should be understood is that other people, including likely most on this website, see the word "feminist" as meaning something different from you, and they have zero problems communicating with each other this way. If this semantics issue is too much of a hump for you, I wonder if a mental trick of replacing "feminist" with a new made-up word "pheminist," where it's prescriptively defined as something like "person that people on TheMotte generally agree is being described when they use the word 'feminist.'" would be helpful. At the very least, that'd be a way to escape from feeling like you yourself are being scrutinized or discussed.

Gonna have to agree to disagree for sure. To me, by your logic Jesus should have submitted to the judgement of the Pharisees because a majority of people agreed with them, and yet we can all universally agree he was right to call them un-Christian and he was right to flip tables in the temple. God didn’t hand us the tablet, we wrote it ourselves. A bunch of sexists being sexists and calling themselves feminists is no different than a bunch of people thinking beating their children into submission is God-approved and Christian. That sexist people go into governmental work and try to enact sexist policies while calling it feminism still doesn’t make them feminists. And if people want to talk about sexism on this site and call it feminism that still doesn’t change the definition of it. “A person that people on TheMotte generally agree is being described when they use the word 'feminist’” would be, to me, a sexist.

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I wish more feminists were more like you, then. But I think it would be hard to argue that the things FC listed weren't advocated by feminists as feminism, and you were cleared out of the room.

I'm sympathetic to people like you who may have been boxed out by a wayward media machine - in much the same way I think many reasonable LGBTQ voices got boxed out by the strident 'blockers before 18' movement sucking all the oxygen out of the room. But I can't help but be suspicious that both groups suppressed their misgivings due to outgroup fear, the want to not be a 'bad ally', or were content to soak up the secondary benefits up until it looked like they might be drying up.

I think most feminists are like me, because a feminist promotes equality between men and women, the end. If a bunch of misandrist Pharisees wanna call themselves feminists, and some news outlets call them feminists, and outraged people call them feminists, I could care less than Jesus, and, like his Holy Word, the principle of feminism still stands.

Leaving aside that I think "equality between men and women" is a fairly empty balloon with a lot of details to be filled in - you must appreciate that the kind of feminism promoted in the meanstream are the materials we have to work with.

I respect your position on an interpersonal basis. But it doesn't really mean much outside of that. I think my disposition is still fairly liberal in the 90s/00s sense of the term. And I can fully see the argument that 'liberalism' today is far more authoritarian and fails to live up to its own namesake. But at a certain point, I am wasting everybody's time if I insist that wokescolds aren't 'liberal'.

Maybe that could change, and it will fold back on itself and meet me where I planted my feet a decade ago. I will have reclaimed 'liberalism'. But in the meantime, I'm not going to fight how the term is used in most conversations. I might put down an asterisk, but the conversation must proceed.

a feminist promotes equality between men and women, the end.

If that's the entirety of the definition, why aren't we calling them masculinists instead? It would be same difference.

I don’t know, I don’t make up the rules lol. The whole thing falls under egalitarianism of which feminism is a subset of it. I’m sure if you want to call yourself a “masculinist” you can, you just might have to re-explain the definition a lot.

A text that was popular when you were still in high school, so you might have not encountered it:

So what you're saying is that you, a commenter using a username on an internet forum are the true feminist, and the feminists actually responsible for changing the laws, writing the academic theory, teaching the courses, influencing the public policies, and the massive, well-funded feminist organizations with thousands and thousands of members all of whom call themselves feminists... they are not "real feminists".

That's not just "no true Scotsman". That's delusional self deception.

Listen, if you want to call yourself a feminist, I don't care. I've been investigating feminism for more than 9 years now, and people like you used to piss me off, because to my mind all you were doing was providing cover and ballast for the powerful political and academic feminists you claim are just jerks. And believe me, they ARE jerks. If you knew half of what I know about the things they've done under the banner of feminism, maybe you'd stop calling yourself one.

But I want you to know. You don't matter. You're not the director of the Feminist Majority Foundation and editor of Ms. Magazine, Katherine Spillar, who said of domestic violence: "Well, that's just a clean-up word for wife-beating," and went on to add that regarding male victims of dating violence, "we know it's not girls beating up boys, it's boys beating up girls."

You're not Jan Reimer, former mayor of Edmonton and long-time head of Alberta's Network of Women's Shelters, who just a few years ago refused to appear on a TV program discussing male victims of domestic violence, because for her to even show up and discuss it would lend legitimacy to the idea that they exist.

You're not Mary P Koss, who describes male victims of female rapists in her academic papers as being not rape victims because they were "ambivalent about their sexual desires" (if you don't know what that means, it's that they actually wanted it), and then went on to define them out of the definition of rape in the CDC's research because it's inappropriate to consider what happened to them rape.

You're not the National Organization for Women, and its associated legal foundations, who lobbied to replace the gender neutral federal Family Violence Prevention and Services Act of 1984 with the obscenely gendered Violence Against Women Act of 1994. The passing of that law cut male victims out of support services and legal assistance in more than 60 passages, just because they were male.

You're not the Florida chapter of the NOW, who successfully lobbied to have Governor Rick Scott veto not one, but two alimony reform bills in the last ten years, bills that had passed both houses with overwhelming bipartisan support, and were supported by more than 70% of the electorate.

You're not the feminist group in Maryland who convinced every female member of the House on both sides of the aisle to walk off the floor when a shared parenting bill came up for a vote, meaning the quorum could not be met and the bill died then and there.

You're not the feminists in Canada agitating to remove sexual assault from the normal criminal courts, into quasi-criminal courts of equity where the burden of proof would be lowered, the defendant could be compelled to testify, discovery would go both ways, and defendants would not be entitled to a public defender.

You're not Professor Elizabeth Sheehy, who wrote a book advocating that women not only have the right to murder their husbands without fear of prosecution if they make a claim of abuse, but that they have the moral responsibility to murder their husbands.

You're not the feminist legal scholars and advocates who successfully changed rape laws such that a woman's history of making multiple false allegations of rape can be excluded from evidence at trial because it's "part of her sexual history."

You're not the feminists who splattered the media with the false claim that putting your penis in a passed-out woman's mouth is "not a crime" in Oklahoma, because the prosecutor was incompetent and charged the defendant under an inappropriate statute (forcible sodomy) and the higher court refused to expand the definition of that statute beyond its intended scope when there was already a perfectly good one (sexual battery) already there. You're not the idiot feminists lying to the public and potentially putting women in Oklahoma at risk by telling potential offenders there's a "legal" way to rape them.

And you're none of the hundreds or thousands of feminist scholars, writers, thinkers, researchers, teachers and philosophers who constructed and propagate the body of bunkum theories upon which all of these atrocities are based.

You're the true feminist. Some random person on the internet.

That a bunch of people are wrong about feminism and a bunch of other people agree with them does not change the definition of a feminist or feminism for me nor does it make them less wrong. I don’t pay those people mind, because they’re not talking about feminism. If I knew half of what you know about the things non-feminists done under the banner of feminism, which I do, because I was once a self-described anti-feminist MAGA Republican who agreed with everything you just reposted, I still wouldn’t calling myself one any more than Jesus would rescind his message because a bunch of hypocritical Pharisees told him they knew God better than he did.

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For a more recent example, if lower-stakes, I'll point to Julia Serano. She was, for quite a long period of time, the go-to example in the ratsphere of a Real Feminist who Cared About Everyone. And then it turned out that her work about not dismissing the perspectives of other people was really about not "dismissing perspectives/experiences of marginalized groups".

Why is the post you're replying to "Filtered"?

Argh.

Because there's a "new user filter" baked into the codebase that we can't remove, and it auto-filters posters who haven't gotten above a certain threshold of cumulative upvotes, and because other then a very small greyed-out icon, the only way for mods to see which posts are filtered is to check a separate page.

@justawoman has been posting here for years, why would she get caught by the new user filter?

It’s the leftist plot to cancel me, they’re coming for my progressive card lol.

Because it's not a "new user filter" it's a net-upvote filter. The mods have no tools for whitelisting a specific poster, though it is possible to give it to them.

That's... odd. I've never had issues seeing her posts.

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