Word to the Wise: Never Date a Guy Who Reads Details Magazine

Posted by Jill Filipovic, Feministe at 3:19 PM on October 28, 2009.

Shorter Details: Tricky bitches will get themselves pregnant and then make you pay for it.

Imagine for a moment this perfectly plausible scenario: You’ve had a steady girlfriend for a year or so and everything’s going great. You still hold hands at the movies. Friends tell you you’re good together. You’re both around 30 years old and making plenty of money, maybe living together, but you’re nowhere near considering fatherhood. And though you occasionally get the feeling that her biological clock is set far ahead of yours, she tells you she’s “safe,” so you don’t worry. Why would you? It’s not as if you’d just picked her up on Dollar Margarita Night at Senor Frog’s. But one morning she tells you something has gone wrong. Unlikely as it sounds, she’s pregnant-and she wants to keep it. What she doesn’t tell you, though, is this: She wasn’t being safe all along. She wanted to have that baby— and the way she saw it, this was the only way to make it happen.

You know where this is going, right?

A few experts discuss the “trend” of women tricking men into impregnating them, without offering any hard information or statistics. A few odd people are interviewed, and they confirm that they’ve heard that other odd people are getting pregant accidently-on-purpose. And then we get to “Roe v. Wade for men”:

Last year, Matt Dubay, a 25-year-old computer programmer in Saginaw, Michigan, says he had the same reaction when his girlfriend, Lauren Wells, allegedly pulled something similar. Dubay claims she told him she was infertile and was using a contraceptive “as an extra layer of assurance and protection.” But when she got pregnant anyway and told Dubay she was keeping the baby, he said he wanted no part of it. Earlier this year, he argued in court that her alleged deception should exempt him from having to pay child support. His lawyer, Jeffrey Cojocar, reasoned that Michigan’s paternity law violated the Constitution’s equal-protection clause: If the situation were reversed and Dubay had gotten Wells pregnant after claiming he was sterile, he’d have no way of forcing her either to keep or to abort the child. The judge didn’t buy his argument, but it’s helped open a broadening national dialogue: Where do you draw the line between deadbeat dad and victim of deceit?

Of course the National Organization for Men, a men’s rights group, is all over it:

“Matt is asking for the reproductive choice he would have had if he were ‘Mattilda,’” the website says. The NCM doesn’t have much contact with men who acquiesce to their role as new fathers. The guys who come to the organization see their situations as deception in its purest form.

“A lot of these men feel like they have no control,” says Mel Feit, the NCM’s executive director. “The courts are ruthless in enforcing getting money and not asking questions. Judges aren’t allowing the fraud argument, either.”

Interestingly, Matt does have the same amount of reproductive control he would have if he were Matthilda — he can do what he wants with his own reproductive capacity. Matt and Matthilda’s reproductive capacities differ — the window for Matt to exercise his reproductive rights may end before Matthilda’s — but both of their reproductive rights begin and end with their own bodies. No one is telling men that they can’t wear condoms or use birth control or get sterilized. In fact, Matt could probably try to have an abortion if he wanted to, but it sounds like he’s a cisgender dude and it’s not going to work out. So it’s unfortunate that he feels he has “no control,” but what he actually wants is the right to control his female partner. Or, at the very least, he wants the right to not have to be responsible for a child he helped to create.

No, it’s not “fair” that some men don’t get to decide whether or not to have a baby when their female partner gets pregnant. It’s also not fair that some women have to push something the size of a football out a hole the size of pencil. Welcome to biology. You don’t see us suing over it.

It is an unfortunate fact of life that some people are jerks. Some people are also manipulative, abusive and selfish. Some of those people are women. I do not doubt that some women, somewhere, have lied about being on birth control in order to get pregnant. But some manipulative jerks does not a trend make. I feel bad for any man who is manipulated or lied to so that his partner can get pregnant against his wishes. That is a really bizarre, selfish and terrible thing. But it doesn’t justify subverting the basic bodily autonomy rights of an entire class of people (or even the basic bodily autonomy rights of the jerk in question). The way around manipulative jerks who would lie about being on birth control is to use birth control yourself. You know that “control” you feel like you’re missing? Here’s how you get it: Wear a condom. Get your tubes tied. Put some pressure on drug companies to come up with male birth control — the reason they aren’t developing or marketing it is because they don’t think there’s a demand.

You know what is an actual established problem, bolstered by research? Men sabotaging their partners’ birth control pills as a form of control and abuse. Just sayin’.

What men like Matt want isn’t reproductive rights; they want reproductive veto rights over someone else’s body. Or they at least want to be able to get out of having to pay for a child once it’s born, because they were tricked into having unprotected sex.

The National Center for Men and all the Matts of the world would probably be better off agitating for male birth control or other forms of actual reproductive rights for men, rather than just targeting women and trying to get out of paying child support. And Details would probably be better off writing about actual problems rather than the misogynist fantasies of men’s rights activists — this article almost tops their “Is It OK to Demand Anal Sex?” feature.

At the very least, Details provides us all with a handy dating tool — if you see a copy in a dude’s apartment, run the other way and run fast.

Jill Filipovic is a New York-based freelance writer and a law student at NYU. More of her writing is available online at her blog, Feministe.