You wouldn’t knowingly support a business which enabled the continuance of something you don’t like, so why do women continue to enable teh cock by associating with it?

Your analogy doesn’t hold up for me. Even if I didn’t support a business, I wouldn’t necessarily dismiss the individuals who worked in it. I would speak out about their complicity, to be sure, but I wouldn’t hold them responsible for the institution itself.

Similarly, sexism isn’t the “fault” of any particular (male) individuals. If it were, we could eliminate them and be done with it. Men are more like the employees in the business – involved and complicit for the ways in which they benefit, but ultimately not the cause of the institution itself. And certainly not powerful enough that I could force them to end sexism by witholding sex from the handful of men who cross my path.

My life is cockless, but amazingly enough, I have not died.

And even when my life was cockless, I didn’t escape sexism. Avoiding sex with individual men hardly protects me from the institution of misogyny.

That’s the other part that bothers me about your argument: you are reducing women’s power to how they sexually influence men. If we “enable” men by associating with them, that means the only way we could disable them would be by not associating – which overlooks the vast body of feminist activism that goes beyond simple separatism.

Women’s power is not merely reactive; we can also carve out spaces for ourselves in which we take positive, powerful actions.

You are correct in noting that your comment involves blaming the underdog – you blame women for being sexually involved with men, without acknowledging if or how they are taking feminist action that doesn’t involve their personal sexual choices. Victim blaming of this sort is not allowed here, so consider this a warning. You are welcome to comment, but you must abide by the discussion rules.

If someone robbed me, and I filed a police report, and they did an investigation and took it to trial, the assumption in the court is that I’ve actually been the victim of a crime, but that I may have accused the wrong person by mistake. The assumption is not, generally, that I’m a liar or making the whole thing up.
When a woman is raped and goes to the police, there’s a major assumption that it’s possible she’s lying or mistaken. This happens all the way through the process, and through the trial. In any other crime, if it makes it to trial, we assume the victim is a victim, but with sexual assaults, for some reason, women are treated like they’re not really victims. It’s not usually “maybe this is just the wrong guy” it’s “maybe you weren’t really raped… maybe you misunderstood what happened? Maybe you didn’t actually say no?”

I don’t know… that’s the impression I get from people, at least.

It’s hard to say the following without sounding as if I’m blaming the underdog, so perhaps in some ways I am. But I am reminded that we always have a choice in how we choose to respond to most situations (immediate threats to physical safety notwithstanding). And in that response lies some amount of power, it’s just that most women choose not to use the little power we do have – even if that power is merely the withholding of response.

Most women will readily acknowledge that we live in a sexist society. And yet… they will still date teh cock, fuck teh cock, live with teh cock, and marry teh cock. WHY? My life is cockless, but amazingly enough, I have not died.

You wouldn’t knowingly support a business which enabled the continuance of something you don’t like, so why do women continue to enable teh cock by associating with it? Make up any excuse you like, it’s still an excuse.

If you need love, get a dog. If you need sex, get a vibrator. If you need shelter, get a roommate. If you need intellectual stimulation, take a class. If you need emotional support, get a friend. We don’t live in a country where women are forced to marry at gunpoint, so any associating you do is a CHOICE. A choice which enables him to go on believing that everything is just fine and he doesn’t need to change.

(Side note: sometimes a person’s inability to hear how bad things are for you stem from them being subject to those worse things, in which case I shut up and take my complaints to an ear that will hear. But that is completely and utterly beside the point.)

tekanji: Thanks.

Sara: I should clarify, that was not something other people told me. I was saying this, so that I wouldn’t give readers the impression that the response I received was that extreme. Thankfully, no one actually gave me the ‘what do you have to complain about?’ dismissal – you’re right, it is infuriating.