As I’ve often said, MRAs and feminists are basically the same critter. Both groups have a small fraction of thoughtful individuals who are genuinely interested in examining the ways in which society treats their gender unjustly, both have a larger minority who are bat-shit crazy and suffer from delusions of persecution, and both are mostly made up of unhappy individuals looking for something to believe in. The more unhinged members of both groups are obsessed with kindergarten notions of “fairness”; for feminists this usually looks something like, “Waaaaah, it’s not FAIR that men tend to be bigger and stronger than women, and that women don’t usually make as much money as men merely because we actually want lives and aren’t willing to sell our souls to corporations! Waaaaaaaaaah!” And for MRAs it usually looks something like, “Waaaaaaaah, why do I have to pay women to fuck me? It’s not FAIR that men usually want sex more than women, so women can put conditions on men having sex with them! I should be able to have all the sex I want without paying or jumping through hoops, Waaaaaaaaaaaah!” Most of the time, whiny-baby feminists avoid me because I’m a whore and therefore anathema to their weltanschauung, but often whiny-baby MRAs will approach me online because they’re laboring under the serious misapprehension that because the deranged feminists hate me I must be on their side (Republicans and Democrats often make the same Very Stupid Error, but that’s a discussion for another day). Well, on Wednesday one such individual got on my last nerve, and so I decided to carpet-truth-bomb him thus:
Hi, welcome to this place called “physical reality”. Here, matter is organized into many different forms with varying degrees of scarcity. Naturally, scarcer resources are more prized. So there’s a field of study called “economics”, which studies how sentient beings interact with each other in order to get the resources they need by trading other resources they have more of. Resources are not distributed “evenly” or “fairly”; for example, the sun has a whopping huge supply of helium (it’s a waste product there), while on Earth it’s scarce and getting scarcer. This isn’t because of “capitalism” or “patriarchy” or “privilege” or anything else; it’s just the nature of physical existence. I as a sentient being found something I have a lot of, namely sex appeal, and I trade on that to get things I otherwise have a lot of trouble getting & holding on to, such as money. If you don’t have anything you can trade, sell or negotiate with to get something I want or need, you won’t be able to get what you might want from me, just like if I can’t get the money the grocery store wants, I won’t be able to get the groceries I want from it. This is reality. Learn it. What you need to do is stop bitching about life being “unfair” (no shit) and find something you have that others want & will pay you for, such as labor. That’s all. Everybody is in that boat. Sex is a resource, and so is money. One can be traded to get the other, just like any resource can be traded to get other things. The end.
I honestly can’t comprehend how anyone over the age of 8 can fail to comprehend that the world isn’t “fair” and can never be; the only way it could be would be for everything to be reduced to a thin haze of hydrogen spread evenly through a static universe. Some people have more of one resource and some of another; that’s why commerce was invented. And even though some individuals do have more resources and advantages than others, most individuals are still lacking in other areas (which is, of course, why commerce works in the first place). Yes, I have more than my “fair share” of sex appeal, intelligence, personality force and general health…and far less than my fair share of other nice things, such as emotional stability, consistent orgasmicity, the ability to navigate formal systems, the ability to sleep more than three hours without sedation and the ability to move around and position my body any way I like without becoming violently ill (and that’s by no means a complete list). Money can’t make up for any of those defects, but it can purchase workarounds for many of them, and my sex appeal can get me money. And that to me seems like a far more adult, realistic and practical life-strategy than sitting around whining that it isn’t “fair” that I can’t enjoy air travel, vibrators and many other things large numbers of people take for granted.
