Men's Rights Memes Episode Seven: Ignorance is Sexist

Hello and welcome to episode seven of Men's Rights Memes, the show where I sink my teeth into the juicy misogyny present in nearly every facet of the thinly-veiled hate group known as the Men's Rights Movement. Without further ado, here's this episode's offending image.

Okay, this is yet another variation on that ever-popular MRA talking point that anti-rape campaigns don't work because people already know that rape is wrong, and you cannot educate people out of their sexuality. I've heard some people try to illustrate that last point by comparing the abysmal success rate of gay conversion therapy. "You clearly can't educate homosexual people into being straight, so why should we assume that anti-rape initiatives will change anything?" This is a flawed idea for an innumerable number of reasons, the largest few of which I'll go over today.

I would first like to tackle the comparison of rapists to gay people. As a gay person myself, this is incredibly homophobic. It assumes that the two things are one and the same, which, intentionally or not, casts actual gay people in a negative light. But MRAs aren't really known for seeing people with differing opinions as human beings, so I'll let my appeal to emotion go. The comparison is also idiotic for factual reasons. What do I mean by that? Well, maybe if you'd shut the fuck up and let me finish this thing, I'd be able to tell you. I mean that rape is not about uncontrollable sexual desire. Indeed, it isn't about sex at all. Think about it. When that twelve-year-old on Call of Duty claims that he raped you at the end of a match, he doesn't mean that he forced a sexual act upon you. He means that he dominated you, that he made you feel small. That's also what rapists mean. It's about taking power away from women and transferring it to the rapist himself. Honestly, I'm surprised the MRAs have so much trouble understanding this point. After all, they have the same mental capacity as the twelve-year-old boy who is unwittingly making the comparison.

Now, you could argue that painting rape in as a dominance issue doesn't actually prove my point, because the rapist is still a power-mad psychopath, he just isn't necessarily channeling it into a sexual context. Given that we know that curing psychopaths takes decades of personal therapy, and that a broad anti-rape initiative isn't going to fix anything. That actually makes a degree of sense, but we'll get back to that.

First, I'd like to talk about the implications of the narrative described above. If you can't fix the rapists, what do you do? Do you force women to take precautions? Do you legally mandate that they put shrouds over their heads before they go out at night? I don't know about you, but that sounds a whole hell of a lot like fascism or a dictatorship to me.

After that short detour, let's get back to the factual argument in favor of feminist anti-rape campaigns. The MRA above, and indeed every one of those zombified assholes, like to argue that they don't work. Again, people already know rape is wrong, and that hasn't actually changed anything. Except, oh wait, yes it fucking has.

This chart is based on data from the National Crime Victimization Survey, which tracks the incidence of rape over the past thirty years. And, hey, look, it's on the downswing! Who'd'a thunk it? Well, anyone with more than one brain cell, of course. Then again, I suppose that immediately discounts the majority of MRAs, so there you go. Some have criticized the methodology of the study in that it undercuts the incidence of rape. But even if that is true, the trend is clear. And I think it's painfully obvious that this is all due to an increased understanding and awareness of what rape actually means. Hey, guess who started all those discussions about rape and sexism. Feminists!

Chew on that, you dumb neckbeard fucks.