It’s always the way: some horndog dude decides to prong a woman, then ends up dissatisfied with the results. So he has a tantrum. The tantrum may take one, or a combination, of many interesting forms.
Sometimes the woman doesn’t want him around anymore, so he stalks her. Sometimes she makes him hate her so much that he emails naked pictures of her to the whole school. Sometimes she gets old or fat so he keeps her around to do his laundry but starts pronging a younger woman on the DL. Sometimes she stops putting out so he fires her from her job. Sometimes the woman interprets the pronging as rape, so he calls her a liar and tortures her with mental cruelty and courtroom drama and ends up doing no jail time.
And sometimes he makes the woman pregnant. In this case he can choose from many, many popular options. He might he murder her, beat her, abandon her, marry her, slut-shame her, or, as in today’s case, appeal to the patriarchal justice system to enforce his wishes as to what should be done with the contents of her personal uterus.
I allude to Greg Bruell, a dude who, having some time ago made the personal decision to father no further children, proceeded to prong his girlfriend anyway (as reported in Salon).
Here I interject some No.1 Science Information, information that, had Greg Bruell been apprised of it, might have prevented all of his piteous suffering. That information is this: heterosexual pronging ranks Number One in the World as the most efficacious method of all time for obtaining pregnancy. You might think Greg Bruell had been at least dimly aware of the consequences of heterosexual pronging, since he has already fathered two children. However, Greg Bruell has apparently failed to grasp the connection between his lusty throbbing and the pitter-patter of little feet. Men, who are born with the right to prong anything that moves, are not typically required to understand this kind of cause and effect, since, as I mentioned above, they can easily oil out of any untoward consequences of their actions merely by invoking any of the buttload of traditional exemptions: claiming ignorance, deceit, she asked for it, she cuckolded him, or — an oldie but goodie — that the burden of pregnancy is totally a chick problem.
Anyway, Greg Bruell claims that he and his girlfriend agreed that she would terminate her next pregnancy “without waffling.” So when she boldly asserted human agency, kept the kid, and sued him for child support, Bruell blew a wheel. His gambit for oiling out of his responsibility? He owns the uterus! The National Center for Men took up the cause, saying (according to Salon):
“When a man and woman have discussed what they want and have an agreement, I do not think she has a right to impose her change of mind.”
You heard that right. The “I” in the above quotation is our old pal, antifeminist knob Mel Feit, who thinks women don’t have a right to change their minds.
Taken to its logical conclusion, this crackpot ideology would turn all women’s interactions with men into legally binding contracts permitting men to use them according to their whim. The contracts can be verbal (“She didn’t say ‘no’!”), sartorial (“she dressed like a whore so my hands were tied!), alcoholical (“if she didn’t want to have sex she shouldn’t have passed out at my party”), or body-language-ical (“she winked at me. What was I supposed to do, not rape her?”).
If for some unexplained reason you acquiesce to sex with a dude, and then, after reconsidering, change your mind three minutes later, tough shit, lady. He doesn’t have to stop, because you already said yes. It won’t be rape, because you already said yes. A yes, once given, exists in perpetuity! It’s a binding contract.
How is this possible in the tiny mind of Mel Feit? Well, according to the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women, women exist in a perpetual state of “yes.” This state of “yes” extends not only to sexual availability, but to compliance with male wishes in any quarter, across the board. To wit:
Bruell’s girlfriend supposedly agreed she would have an abortion if he ever knocked her up again. At that moment of yes, according to the Feit, this woman gave up her own autonomy and ceded control of her personal sovereignty to representative of the state Greg Bruell. Because she had agreed to be an occasional receptacle for his ejaculate, her uterus actually became the property of Greg Bruell. Greg Bruell thinks his ownership of the uterus should have afforded him the opportunity to force her to abort the fetus. And now that she’s defied his authority and had the kid anyway, he’s claiming she “deceived” him.
What? No!
Hey Greg Bruell: your genetic material is under your jurisdiction only as long as you keep it locked up in your gunk box. The instant you give your sticky little wad its joyous send-off, and the two of you part company, its fate becomes the purview of another host body. It is no longer your property, and you can’t say dick about what happens to it. However, it’s only fair that you should pay a fine for littering.
Don’t want women suing you for child support? Zip it up, you fucking dipshit!
Why can’t the same argument be turned around and applied to women?
Because women are an oppressed class without fully human status. The pervasiveness and normalization of rape culture strips women of the same quality of autonomy that men enjoy. Women are not always permitted to opt out of perpetual sexual availability without suffering harmful consequences.
Because, in other words, of the patriarchy.
This Mel Feit guy, in case you’ve forgotten, is the author of much virulent misogynist MRA crap. Such as these gems:
“At a certain point during arousal, we don’t have complete control over our ability to stop. To equate that with brutal, violent rape weakens the whole concept of rape.” [cite]
Because, duh, men should define rape.
“When will public discussions about sexuality recognize that, in this culture, women already make most of the decisions about sexual intercourse?” [ibid.]
Even if this were true — a fantastical contingency is almost too ludicrous to contemplate — what would be so terrible about it? Since women are forced to bear all the consequences of “sexuality”– from self-destructive beauty practices torape, pregnancy, child-rearing, and beyond, it would make the most sense if women actually did have some power in this quarter.
Only women have the extraordinary freedom to enjoy sexual intimacy free from the fear of forced parenthood. [cite]
Whaoah! That’s a hot one! Obviously, by “women with extraordinary freedom” he means “mythical creatures whose legal right to an abortion is not obstructed at every turn by puritanical godbag misogynist legislation.”
But I am a Western, privileged internet feminist, which means that all I care about is clothes, so here is my favorite:
[...] A woman has a greater freedom when she gets dressed in the morning. She can wear what she wants to wear because she can be what she wants to be. She can wear traditionally male clothing because she can do traditionally male things, work in traditionally male jobs, assume traditionally male roles and personality traits. She can cross over into a man’s world, share men’s experiences, then return to a world where no men are allowed. You might say she can choose to wear the pants in the family. She has free choice in fashion because she has free choice in life. [cite]
Mel Feit is bummed out on accounta a supposedly feminist woman in a pair of pants told him she wouldn’t fuck him because — I do not lie — he likes to wear skirts. This unspeakable tragedy has forced Mel Feit to dream up all kinds of wacky fantasies about how liberating it is to be a woman in our society, and about how selfish women are for refusing to share our magnificent skirt-freedoms with him.
Jesus in a jetpack, like anyone really gives a shit if Mel fucking Feit wears a skirt! I will personally donate all of my skirts to Mel Feit, if he will just promise to wear them to all future christenings, bar mitzvas, weddings, business meetings, and talk show tapings.
O if only I had all day to huddle at the desk and make fun of old skirt-coveting Mel Feit who can’t get laid by women in pants. But unfortunately I’ve got to sit around and watch the grass grow.
[Thanks, Ashley]
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