A Note from History (Sexual Distribution)

#TheWomeAreSpeaking | #PayAttention

This is a flashback, circa 2014, and for precisely not quite no reason under the sun:

This sort of rhetoric is fairly common on some of the more embittered PUA forums, and the “men’s rights” forums that have quite a bit of overlap with them. (Jaclyn Friedman wrote about the “men’s rights” (MRA) movement for the Prospect . . . .) The argument that it’s not women who are oppressed, but men who are kept down by women’s “unfair” systems of distributing sexual favors (for PUAs and MRAs, sex is a commodity, not really an activity) is the central organizing principle of both pick-up artistry and “men’s rights” organizing, so much so that the main text of “men’s rights”—Warren Farrell’s The Myth of Male Power—features a woman’s naked butt on the cover, to drive home how men are supposedly helpless pawns of women’s game of sexual distribution.

(Marcotte)

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Marcotte, Amanda. “How ‘Pick-Up Artist’ Philosophy and Its More Misogynist Backlash Shaped Mind of Alleged Killer Elliot Rodger”. The American Prospect. 25 May 2014.

Another Day in America

Our Lede of the Day comes from Steven Hoffer at Huffington Post:

An Ohio attorney is accused of raping a woman in a courthouse conference room after she refused to have sex with a judge.

For his part, the accused attorney, Javier Armengau, said last week, “I have not engaged in any wrongful conduct nor have I done anything that should warrant a complaint.” The trial already seems a spectacle as Armengau’s attorneys work to discredit the witness. As John Futty of The Columbus Dispatch reported:

The 48-year-old woman became increasingly frustrated and combative with one of Armengau’s attorneys, who tried to point out inconsistencies between her testimony and statements she made to Columbus police.

“I don’t know where you’re getting this,” the woman said of her interview with police, “but I’d love to see it” ….

…. The woman is the third accuser to testify against Armengau in his trial on charges of rape, sexual battery, gross sexual imposition, kidnapping and public indecency. The allegations were brought by five women, each of whom had some connection to Armengau’s work as a criminal defense attorney.