Sage Gerard, the head of KSU Men and contributor to the men’s rights website A Voice for Men, has been accused of being a sexist creeper on more than one occasion. He recorded himself sneaking into campus restrooms at night — including the women’s restroom — in order to put up stickers advertising AVFM. And then there was the bizarre rape comments and non-consensual touching at last year’s First International Conference on Men’s Issues. Again, weird. But then there’s this piece for AVFM where he asks his readers if they’re “okay” with his sexuality, and claims that his “urges are taboo”:

I’m a sucker for gothic brunette locks of hair that look sapphire blue under a bright light. Mascara is nice, but only just enough to create contrast for a pair of veinless, white eyeballs peaked with irises colored a spine-freezing azure. I’m not crazy about lipstick, but a natural pink, supple cover for a glacier-melting smile is enough to make me evaporate into a cloud.

I could go on to describe my preferred proportions of jiggly torso protrusions, but I figure the standards of a twenty-something young man are understood. But considering what you can find on the Internet, my tastes are tame, if not predictably dull.

. . .

For some reason, my urges are taboo. I can’t even so much as glance at a pin-up of Denise Milani without hearing the tired wails of the Objectification Brigade femsplaining why my feelings of attraction reduce women’s humanity to that of a lubricated Shop Vac.

Look, it’s obviously inappropriate to describe scat porn at a Starkist corporate luncheon, but when did it become uncouth for men to express their sexuality at all?

To call courtship a “minefield” is optimistic because no one gives men a minesweeper. It’s more like making a colorblind Parkinson’s victim try to defuse a bomb with a vibrator. The only reason the poor sap even tries is because part of him wants to believe the bomb might like him enough to explode into a heap of pussy. Or something like that. I’m bad at analogies.

When I was younger I had to learn to overcome the hurdle of expressing my interests to women I liked. Naturally, I had insecurities about rejection to outgrow. But today, it is not rejection I fear, it’s the social consequences that could follow a rejection:

• I risk a false allegation of sexual assault that could put me in prison.
• I risk others initiating toxic rumors that can end friendships.
• I risk suffering vigilante action brought on by a woman’s friends and family, if not the greater public.

I risk all of these things, even if I do nothing wrong and it is only the feelings of others that dictate I should be punished. Don’t tell me I’m being paranoid, because a university professor told cops that I am a potential serial killer because I put up stickers saying men were human.

. . .

[A] pervasive difference between men and women is that men risk far more even before they know what boundaries to respect! Men risk retaliation for approaching a boundary as if they crossed it, and the attitude indicating that risk is no better articulated by Phaedra Starling in Schrödinger’s Rapist. You, a man, are a potential rapist, therefore you will be treated as such until you prove that you are not a threat. Never mind the sexism in that, just man up, right?

There is nothing wrong with me offering or requesting sex with any woman, and it is not embarrassing for me to express my desires since I respect boundaries anyway. It’s not like I can’t walk ten feet to talk to a second woman if the first shows no interest. The problem is that men can’t make a move without risking way more than they should. A woman saying “no” before parting ways is not an excuse to report sexual assault and try to ruin a man’s life.

. . .

If you are a woman, then I may want to have sex with you. Depending on your level of attractiveness, my fantasies about you may range from getting a work visa just to move a continent away, to exploding into the kind of rabid rated-X deep-dish fucking that causes respiratory failure and makes the fire department bring Jaws of Life and a crucifix.

Can you, as a woman, live with me having sexual urges about you at first sight? My urges are natural, and it is perfectly okay for me to want to get in your pants. If you do not reciprocate that interest, that’s understandable and worthy of respect.

However, my urges are not my actions. I don’t move to have sex on sight, because I only sleep with mature, stable, intelligent women whom I know and trust, and who feel the same in return. I prefer women who don’t have chips on their shoulders, and who won’t shame me or other men for feeling attracted to them. These women understand that pointing a finger and using their feelings to harm men who have done nothing wrong is both bigoted and unfair. No amount of police intervention and male shaming makes any man responsible for the bigotry of an insecure woman, no matter how attractive or popular she happens to be.

I am a white able-bodied male cis-gender shitlord from Hell that will totally take a bundle of curves and smiles to bed for a night of sex and pizza.

And no one is going to stop me.

This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while now. For every decent comment I receive, I end up with twice the number of abusive/spam comments which I have to end up deleting. It gets to be a hassle, and subjectively determining what I should consider a violation of the rules on any given occasion grows tiresome. Plus, I was struck by what Popular Science had to say about comment sections of articles and their effect on readers’ perceptions of the articles themselves:

In one study led by University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Dominique Brossard, 1,183 Americans read a fake blog post on nanotechnology and revealed in survey questions how they felt about the subject (are they wary of the benefits or supportive?). Then, through a randomly assigned condition, they read either epithet- and insult-laden comments (“If you don’t see the benefits of using nanotechnology in these kinds of products, you’re an idiot” ) or civil comments. The results, as Brossard and coauthor Dietram A. Scheufele wrote in a New York Times op-ed:

Uncivil comments not only polarized readers, but they often changed a participant’s interpretation of the news story itself.

In the civil group, those who initially did or did not support the technology — whom we identified with preliminary survey questions — continued to feel the same way after reading the comments. Those exposed to rude comments, however, ended up with a much more polarized understanding of the risks connected with the technology.

Simply including an ad hominem attack in a reader comment was enough to make study participants think the downside of the reported technology was greater than they’d previously thought.

Another, similarly designed study found that just firmly worded (but not uncivil) disagreements between commenters impacted readers’ perception of science.

If you carry out those results to their logical end–commenters shape public opinion; public opinion shapes public policy; public policy shapes how and whether and what research gets funded–you start to see why we feel compelled to hit the “off” switch.

This might be a good idea for me. So, starting tomorrow I’m going to try shutting down the comment capability on this blog. You can still feel free to like the posts if you’re so inclined, but no one will be able to comment on any of my posts.