Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Julie Bindel, writing in The Guardian has a number of interesting points about a research project she participated in by interviewing men who volunteered and/or otherwise agreed to discuss being customers of prostitutes.

The most interesting point in her article, by far?

One of the most interesting findings was that many believed men would “need” to rape if they could not pay for sex on demand. One told me, “Sometimes you might rape someone: you can go to a prostitute instead.” Another put it like this: “A desperate man who wants sex so bad, he needs sex to be relieved. He might rape.” I concluded from this that it’s not feminists such as Andrea Dworkin and myself who are responsible for the idea that all men are potential rapists – it’s sometimes men themselves.

She said it here.

One really, seriously cool thing about Bindel’s article? She links to an ungated copy of the research report(pdf)! That’s very cool.

One reason it’s cool is that if you read the report you can see stuff like, oh, say, who the co-authors and sponsors of the study were. And one of whom was the not always exactly correct activist Catharine A. MacKinnon. Which lets you know to pick up a grain of salt while reading.

Skepticism notwithstanding, while there’s a distinct possibility that the quotes were cherry-picked there’s no reason on earth to doubt they found men who actually said those things.

Not least because it’s close to conventional wisdom: lots, and lots, and lots of people believe men are such borderline-criminal, verging-on-rapist, impulse-control-of-a-three-year-old-child animals.

Oddly, as Bindel points out, a demoralizing number of men believe it.

Lest one leap to accuse contemporary feminists for spreading that belief I’ll just point out the idea substantially predates contemporary feminism, which only really cropped up in the late 1960s. Whereas the idea that prostitution prevents rape was already current in the 1360!

Anyway, Bindel’s quotes nicely illustrate that whatever minor problems feminism might have with men it’s usually nothing compared to the abiding misandry of non-feminists and anti-feminists.

(Clue: Of course most men are actually perfectly capable of controlling their urges. Hello! Masturbation?)