Men’s Rights Advocates will go on and on about how they think a woman is going to trap them in to a pregnancy (why not get male birth control then?) but in reality, men are more likely to try to trap women to stay with them with a forced/unwanted pregnancy.
There’s even a whole fetish for forced impregnation.
“But why don’t you trust men” men will cry, when there are entire swaths of entitled men dedicating themselves to deceiving women at every turn.
According to the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, about 10% of men and 9% of women have experienced reproductive coercion (lying to your partner about birth control, sabotaging your partner’s birth control, refusing to use a condom).
I think it’s a mistake for campaigns to raise awareness about forms of domestic violence and intimate partner abuse to try to divide the male and female victims of reproductive coercion like this. There are abusers of both genders who lie about birth control, sabotage condoms or take them off during sex, and ignore their partner’s autonomy in reproductive decision making; there are victims of both genders who have experienced this behavior. We can raise awareness about abuse without implying that men who have been abused in this way, or who fear being abused in this way, are lying.
In general, if you are writing about abuse and intimate partner violence and your instinct is to say “oh, people say that [this group of people] suffers from this, but in reality, [this group of people] are the ones really suffering from this!!” what you are communicating to abuse victims is that unless they’re in the right category, their abuse doesn’t matter, awareness and solidarity are not for them, and they should stop talking so as not to distract from the real victims.
Instead, the right way to address the content of the article is to say “lots of women experience reproductive coercion, and awareness of reproductive coercion is important! Here’s what it looks like, here’s how widespread it is, here’s how to protect yourself if you’re in a relationship with someone who engages in it.” No need to imply that other abuse isn’t real or doesn’t matter as much.
Inform and empower people, don’t try to recruit them to one side in The Discourse.
Oh I wrote an angry post about this Huffington Article! Copypaste here:
The Huffington Post posted this article, which talks about the phenomenon of men secretly removing condoms before sex.
This is definitely a terrible thing and I agree it happens to women. The article was careful to frame this as such:
“One can note,” Brodsky writes, “that proponents of ‘stealthing’ root their support in an ideology of male supremacy in which violence is a man’s natural right.”
Because of the connection between stealthing and sexual assault, and the fact that both acts are rooted in beliefs of male dominance and supremacy…
Brodsky highlights the online communities who defend stealthing as a male “right,” particularly a right of every man to “spread his seed” ― regardless of if said man is engaging in straight or gay penetrative sex
OKAY. HOLD UP.
1. The ‘community’ of men stealthing women seems to come mostly from this link right here. In the study she implies that there are multiple sources: “One commenter on an article“ and “Another defender, commenting on a blog post detailing one man’s “strategy” for stealthing” are references to the same link above. All further quotes she cites for the misogynistic stealthing of women come from that one page. My google searches for further men-stealthing-women only turned up that one page.
2. That last quote was originally ““So you’ve got a condom watcher[.] Someone who is monitoring too closely for a tip-off broken condom or to slip it off mid-fuck,” he says. “How are you going to breed[?]” from the study. The original quote is on the forum here. This is entirely about gay sex, on a gay sex forum, and even is clarified as gay in the original study. When the Huffington Post quotes it, however, it’s careful to qualify it as: “regardless of if said man is engaging in straight or gay penetrative sex”
3. By far, the longest stealthing-promoting community online is the Bareback Brotherhood, which is an entirely gay community. In fact, nearly every single stealthing advocate online I could find was in the gay community.
—–
In the Huffington Post article, every single victim the author lists is female. I had a hard time finding any personal reports online about being a victim of stealth seeding, except for this one, who is male.
Basically, if we’re going off ‘online communities,’ as this article is, stealth seeding is probably mostly an issue in the gay community, with men as victims.
…huh. Thank you for looking into that. The erasure of male victims is horrible either way but the use of quotes about abuse of men, decontextualized to make it seem like they’re about women and then spread around to claim that only women are victimized, really raises it to a whole new level of horrible.
