Wingnuts and Women

© <a href='http://www.dreamstime.com/Rcmathiraj_info'>Raja Rc</a> | <a href='http://www.dreamstime.com/'>Dreamstime.com</a>

How Wingnuts View Women
© Raja Rc | Dreamstime.com

R.S. McCain–the guy who thinks it’s perfectly normal to raise girl children to be sex slaves, as long as you’re Christian–shows us how a male wingnut understands women — not as human beings, but objects that men do things to.

I agree with Jesse Taylor — there’s a lot of pathology on display here.

Update: It’s astonishing to me that I have to spell this out more explicitly, but apparently I do — If you want to know what shocked me about McCain’s post, please read again what I wrote above — the male wingnut understands women not as human beings, but as objects that men do things to. Note also the photograph. These are clues.

Basically, what McCain says in his post is that women are objects who must be either used or protected by men. He gives women no respect as autonomous human beings. To McCain, women are projections of men — of lust, scorn, idealism, whatever.

I bolded the two sentence above because it gets to the heart of my problem with McCain’s post. He may see himself as “chivalrous,” but his attitude toward women is the same as a rapist’s attitude. That he has assigned himself the role of “protector” makes little difference; it’s just the flip side of the same uber-patronizing coin. McCain may not rape women physically, but he is a rapist nonetheless because he denies their humanity.

Now, let’s walk through McCain’s post. This paragraph:

Who cares that she’s not even old enough to buy a pack of cigarettes legally? Get her drunk on wine coolers, get what you want, then the next morning, take her to CVS to get Plan B and make sure there’s no chance the slut will show up in a few months talking child support payments and DNA tests.

First off, the narrative above describes what is commonly called “date rape.” Let’s be clear about that.

Second, who is not actually participating in this narrative? The woman is not participating. The man gets her drunk, uses her body, and then takes her to CVS for Plan B. At no point in this narrative is the woman presented as a person with free will who can decide for herself what to do. The man is the only participant. The woman is just a doll. She is not a human being, but an object. This is a rapists’ attitude, of course.

Next paragraph:

So guys, if you screw a 17-year-old and “forget” to use a condom, remember: Nothing says “thanks a lot, you cheap whore” like the gift of Plan B!

As joan 16 says, “cheap whore” was a slip of the mask. It may be that he was mimicking the attitude of a man using a 17-year-old for sex, but where is his concern for the 17-year-old who has been used? Does he think 17-year-old girls were never used for sex before Plan B was available? Does he think that denying Plan B to a 17-year-old who has been raped is an act of compassion for her? Does he think that men who date rape women are thinking of long-term consequences at all at the time?

Further, does he think that all 17-year-olds who have sex do so in a date rape scenario? Isn’t it possible that two teenagers sometimes give in to nature’s most compelling temptation? One may not approve of sex outside marriage, but the girl who gives in to the temptation is no less a human being afterward than the boy, and she is entitled to the same respects and considerations due to any other human being.

Instead, McCain is saying girls must conform to his projected expectation of being “pure,” or he will re-assign them the alternative projected status of “cheap whore.” Out of his sight, she has no reality at all. He has no perception of or empathy with her life and the realities of an unplanned pregnancy.

For those of you who didn’t see that, I rather doubt that my spelling it out is going to make any difference. But there it is.

51 thoughts on “Wingnuts and Women

  1. You’ve made no actual point.

    Where you are concerned that appears to be true, since you don’t get the point. It’s not a matter of substituting his premise for mine. The point is to point to a huge blind spot in McCain’s moral view. McCain arrives at his premise by denying the humanity of women. He assumes his judgments are more important than a woman’s moral agency and her own experience of her own life.

    And rather than waste more time trying to reason with meatheads, I’m closing comments.

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