Feminist Fred

In my last post a Patriarchy-Blamer from the great feminist blog I Blame The Patriarchy thanked me for coddling the dudes so that Twisty doesn’t have to. I got a laugh out of that, since no feminist hates dudes as much as I do. Well, probably they do, but still, I hate them dudes to death. Well, maybe not death. But I still think it needless for them to continue to sport penises, which they only use to abuse themselves and women; since the subtraction of a sex organ is a minor affair to someone who thinks of them as marginal bodily ornaments when not being used to continue the species, in which case they actually have some objective use, even if overpopulation happens to be rendering our planet toxic.

As a person burdened with male parts, I have read enough radical feminist theory to understand that sex roles are not essential to my personality, but are these cultural obligations that I have learned to think of as me. I dimly grasped that women who see themselves as sovereign human beings with agency can come to reject the very ideas of femininity. While I have been well trained by our patriarchal culture to respond to feminine beauty tropes, I understand that inhabiting those costumes and living up to those standards can be not only demeaning but completely untenable over the course of a lifetime.

So it was with considerable relief that I came across John Stoltenberg’s essay “Refusing to be a Man“. If the women I most respected could reject being a female, then I could reject being a dude. It’s not that this wasn’t a big step for me. For my whole life I had been struggling to define and live up to what it is to be a good man, and this was, on the surface, a rejection of that. But it was actually sidestepping the entire confusing issue with the plain and universal idea of trying to become a good human being.

Interestingly, the one thing that stopped me from taking the obvious step of rejecting masculinity, even after I had already realized it was merely a cultural construct, was the age-old fear of femininity that men have internalized so deeply that they barely even acknowledge it. Luckily for me, I came to the idea after being taught by all my radical feminist teachers around the internet and in the few books I’ve read that femininity is not the point or the object of rejecting masculinity. They taught me, over and over, that many of the traits I associated with masculinity weren’t masculine, but simply human, and belong as much to women who reject femininity as they do to men. It’s just that men tend to assign any good human qualities to men specifically and woman only conditionally.

So I don’t think of myself as a dude coddler. But I do think that I, unlike Twisty, have a certain responsibility to answer to the needs of men who might want to seek a solution to their own gender confusion via feminism. Women have quite enough to deal with just trying to shake their own patriarchal programming without dealing with clueless dudes who deny even their own supremacy in an obviously male supremacist world.

The delightful commenter belenen has written to offer a carefully-considered explanation of how men are also oppressed by their own supremacy. 

Well, men don’t suffer in an oppressed way, true, but they do suffer from sexism. I don’t think that they actually feel the sting of it until after becoming aware of how much women suffer and are oppressed, which is an odd irony. There’s the fake ’suffering’ where women supposedly have ‘power of the pussy’ as you pointed out, and then there is the suffering an aware, compassionate human being feels when ze realizes ze has hurt / is hurting others. And I know some of this is just me imagining how I would feel, but some of it is what I have heard/felt from feminist males that I know, such as my partner and another close friend of mine. So yeah, that’s a rambling way of saying “men are not oppressed, but are yet harmed by sexism.”

I think it is just as damaging for a child to learn that ze is better than others by simple fact of body shape/skin/size as it is for a child to learn that ze is lesser. Do you know what I mean? obviously the oppressor has all the material perks, but they aren’t really positive when you consider the price of harming others. Hm. I feel like I am not explaining this very well. I suppose it comes down to a philosophy of mine — that by harming others you yourself are harmed, and that one cannot gain any true joy by harming others. The ‘joy’ some get from harming others I would call false, like the ‘joy’ that comes from intoxication. Oppressors like Hugh Hefner are constantly drugged with lust and power but they are not happy. Not that we should allow them to continue harming others! But just to realize that they are not to be envied.

I have been accustomed to avoiding discussions of how the poor men suffer so from having to oppress everyone without really wanting to oppress anyone. Generally, such discussions are started by Men’s Rights Advocates (MRAs) who are actually suffering the unendurable pangs of privilege thwarted. Such whines and snivels are all along the lines of “As long as there exists anywhere a female who refuses to open her legs, I suffer and women have all the real power” and “Complaining about and pointing out the obvious truth that men are bossy, aggressive, hostile and needy makes me feel bad about myself and makes me want to punch someone, preferably someone female who won’t hurt much if she punches back” and suchlike absurdities.

But belenen points out how men who are aware of and critical of male supremacy - we call them feminists because there really isn’t a better term for it, since humanist is taken and means something quite different - can become and may have always been acutely aware of the social burdens of living up to the male stereotype. She seems to be pointing out that everyone who grows up in a patriarchal world is damaged. 

As someone who has enjoyed both drugs and booze with a certain amount of caution that has only increased with exposure to the double-edged sword of intoxication, I have to agree that male supremacy is a kind of drug, as is sexual stimulation. Like any drug, it will make you sick if you look up and notice the damage it can do to your body and the lives of those around you. If you deny or refuse to acknowledge these bitter effects, real sickness sets in, along with addiction and traumatic violence to anyone around you. 

My bottom line is that I benefit from opting out as far as I can from the trap of male identity and sexism. It’s not the point, this benefit. It’s rather a feeling that, once I believe that women are not different, don’t enjoy being oppressed, hate being the constant targets of male sexual aggression, from catcalls, to rape, to murder; once I get that simple idea in mind, it’s rather hard to live with myself knowing that I enjoy the same supremacy in any way, whether I ask for it or not.

I was replying to one of the very few who comment on this blog and thought I should take the time to make it a short post. I’m very sorry, BTW, that my blog-handling chops are so primitive that I couldn’t figure out how to manage this blog without requiring memberships. I also would like to apologize for the infrequency with which I post. I have a family and a job and they come first, though reducing and eventually evolving beyond male supremacy is always on my mind. 

You can get a little heartsick, if you think about injustice constantly. I really want to enjoy life, too. Anyway, I finished a new book about feminism.

It’s a great book for men that’s about porn and how it affects men, that could go a long way to explaining to feminist-friendly men about what they are participating in when they view porn to get off. It’s called Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity. Don’t read it yourself unless you need to find out how truly sickening the world of porn can be. 

The same wires carrying this to you are used far more often to help men hypnotize themselves into an orgasm by proving to them, over and over again, that women love being degraded and debased. This has got to be stopped. Free speech is one thing, but porn is not speech! Ask Catherine MacKinnon.
 

I just got my copy of Catherine MacKinnon’s Only Words in the mail and it is breathtaking. I’m afraid to even show it to my wife because I almost cried three times in the first five pages. She ruthlessly and beautifully lays out the hideous lies about pornography in the most stunning prose, effortlessly building from one undeniable truth to the next. It’s one of the greatest works of feminist thought I’ve ever read. 

Which brings me to my thought about the wanna-be feminist in The Guardian this week. He wants to help the feminist movement and is outraged that he isn’t being welcomed as God’s gift to women. We don’t need any men telling us about how it feels to be an oppressed woman, and we don’t need any men trying to help when we’ve got god-like geniuses like MacKinnon and Dworkin and even my personal hero Twisty Faster who can do it so much better than he could ever hope to. 

I’ve noticed, through the years of reading Twisty Faster’s hilarious blog, that we are periodically inflicted with scientific studies about sex that are hopelessly biased and constructed around misogynistic premisses, like “Why are women so dumb?” or “Why won’t teh women fucks us a lot likes we wants to feck them, huh? Huh?”

Lately I’ve been perusing the Science Daily site, so I decided to look at some of the recent sex studies. They were all quite stupid, as usual, and I finally noticed why, because seeing a bunch of them together revealed a universal weakness that struck me instantly. Most of them were studies of arousal based on responses to porn.

I’m a man, so it’s not at all difficult for me to imagine the high level of sniggering and wisecracking that passes for science when these pornsick pervs are postulating their theories. “God, bisexual bitches are so hot! Let’s study them.” says lead scientist Misogynist Mike. “But are there enough sufficiently hot bi-sexual bitches out there for us to study?” asks his colleague, Pornsick Pat. “There seems to be a mysterious paucity of pornified bimbos out there willing to perform hot three-ways with their girlfriends, if my own experience is any indication.”

“I’ve got it,” says supergenius Misogynist Mike, chest swelling with virility and male pride, “Let’s do a study where we show hot lesbo porn and hot straight porn to a bunch of girls and see how many of them show arousal at both!” And a study was born, of the desires and porn-centric worldview of a few academic creeps.

What about some studies that show that all our ideas about arousal come from porn? We are taught, from birth, that arousal is created by superficial and artificial emphasis on graphic representations of women who never existed becoming aroused and doing things that indicate an almost insane need for them to debase themselves in order to achieve sexual satisfaction that could come from far simpler sources. Why not some studies that examine why sex with dignity and love is actually not arousing, while sex that is degrading is? And how did we learn to be aroused at what arouses us?

I used to argue that arousal causes male behavior, but feminist theory has opened my eyes to the far more fundamental question: What teaches us to be aroused by what?

I have to also add that sexual arousal seems to be like a Pandora’s Box, where, once you have learned something arouses you, you can’t really ever completely deny this arousal ever again.

Male sexuality, according to studies, is less bisexual than female. The explanation that comes to my mind is simple and probably difficult to disprove: Women are exposed to tons of lesbian pornography if they are straight, whereas men rarely even see gay porn. Where are the studies that show us how men who repeatedly view gay porn think of sex?

A world where our girlfriends constantly badger us into looking at gay and straight porn mixed together doesn’t exist for men. If it did, I think some studies could clear up this particular difference between the sexes quickly.

Twisty Faster nails some hard truths about Sex-Positive Feminism. She also linked to a blog called Pervocracy where the young woman writes posts detailing her sexual pleasures, which don’t sound too pleasurable to me.

Between the two of them you should get a good idea about what the rift might be between two women who both are basically feminists with different ways of dealing with our hypersexualized world.

Age makes a huge and terrible difference in how you see oppression.

Comments about prostitution take place in a sphere of human thought that assumes that sex is without any kind of importance, like any other kind of work. When the radical feminist attempts to ascribe a definite weight to the act, by establishing the political atmosphere it takes place within (patriarchy, oppression), there is considerable resistance to this contextualization.

I hear nothing but confusion whenever I read comments defending prostitution. The basis of the confusion comes from the insistence that women are not prostituted, that they are simply selling a service like any other, and that denying them this ‘freedom’ is unjust.

It’s not about degrading the act of sex to the point where it nothing more than a service for men. It’s about freedom!

Nobody wants to look at intercourse as a huge battlefield. Oppression and cultural bias are so firmly ingrained that it renders us incapable of treating the act of sex as a simple service. Many women would love to believe that intercourse is implicitly disconnected with issues of male privilege, the beauty myths, and oppression. Then they can claim it truly is a service conducted in some fantasy land where oppression doesn’t exist, and therefore, can’t be considered rape.

If you try to point out that no woman has the ability to have sex without the healthy crutch of denial, a denial that assures us that sex is completely devoid of politics, some would claim that this is to infantilize the woman. But it is the male culture that infantilizes the woman, not the act of pointing it out.

Feminism is a way of looking at sex that, unlike any other philosophy, assumes that there is much importance to be found in the sex act, and the sexual separation of human beings. To defend the idea of prostitution by lowering our views of intercourse to the point where it can be happily bought and sold is to also accept just as happily the idea that a woman is an object.

I don’t understand why it’s OK for men to objectify and use a woman as long as he pays for it. It should never be OK.

Where feminism fears to tread is idea that intercourse is something far more important than a mere service to be bought and sold freely. You can argue it back and forth forever and never get down to the real issue: Do men hate women, or do they love them? And what do we mean by hate and love?

If love is possession and control, then men do love women. If love is to wish to nurture and cherish, maybe they don’t. A man who truly loves women would never pay to have sex with them, because the idea would mean that he nurtures them in exchange for sex. No matter which way I look at prostitution, it’s nothing but men oppressing women, and I’m astonished so many feminists see it any other way.

I’m beginning to sense a drift in the Patriarchal Borg mind. It’s one with the swift drift toward ever more violent and degrading pornography. It mirrors the now solid acceptance of the once-deplored vice of casino gambling. One glances toward Nevada, and one sees a horrific door opening up to a dystopian future I think of as Porn World.

The drift has become slightly easier to see because of the late scandal of Governor Spitzer, who was caught using prostitutes for evacuating his foul seed into. Such a scandal causes all the manly men, like my friends Misogynist Mike and Pornsick Pat, to instantly wallow in the freedom of constant fantasies of endless supplies of porn star looking prostituted women everywhere. And cheap enough for them, too.

Mike says to Pat, “What’s the big deal? A guy’s got to have some warm place to blow his wad into, doesn’t he? The problem is that it isn’t cheap enough, if you ask me.”

“If I was a girl, hell, I’d do it in a minute!” Pat replies, nodding sagely in his infinite understanding of how women would really think if they just had as much sense as men, “It’s just hypocritical bullshit, women not charging for sex. Hell, they make you pay out the ass for dinner and a show and then make you feel like a jerk just because you try to get them to reciprocate with a little blow job or something. It’s nothing but a fuckin’ racket!”

Mike nods in total agreement, even though neither one of them can even remember the last time they actually went out on a date matching that description. Pat usually confines his dates to the stacks of porn DVDs or a lengthy cruise through increasingly vile internet sites, while Mike prefers to date rape girls he bullies away from their girlfriends at singles bars.

“They’ll never get rid of it!” Mike says, “It’s the world’s oldest profession! It’s just bullshit prohibition, and you know that never works. They oughta just legalize it and get it over with.”

They look at each other in apelike delight. Why, it makes perfect sense! It’s not like you can try to stop manly men from trying every kind of coercion imaginable to use women sexually anyway. A man’s freedom to make women obedient to his sexual whims is the most important freedom of all, when you think about it.

“If it was legal, just think how cheap it would get.” Pat noted.

“Every whore out there would immediately start charging for it outright, instead of just insisting you buy them drinks and dinner. It would be a buyer’s market.” Mike added eagerly.

“They legalized gambling, didn’t they? And it’s already legal in Nevada. Hell, it’s just around the corner.” Pat rhapsodized. Let’s leave our two anti-heroes to their dick-swelling bliss and return to the world of real women.

Does anyone out there have any doubt that this coming? The next step towards fulfilling male privilege must be legalizing prostitution. Reducing women to objects has already been advancing quite nicely, with women scared into conforming to alien beauty norms, modeling themselves after porn stars and Bratz Dolls, exercising on stripper poles, and in millions of other examples. The next step in expanding male privilege is legalizing prostitution, so that men can enjoy even more unfettered access to using women, with even less choice in the matter for the women involved.

Feminism is the only branch of philosophy to actually criticize what we think of sex, and because of it, it tends to repel and offend anyone in a position of privilege or anyone who bases their worth on defending the privileges of those who oppress them.

Go up to any dude in our dude-centric world today and tell him that his entire conception of sex is based on dominance and submission, rape and coercion, and you’ll get a strangely defensive response of some kind instantly.

This, to the standard feminist, is nothing more complicated than male privilege defending its own; but as a man living in a misogynist world, I have to point out some of the complications that arise from the mixed bag of emotions aroused by contemplating your own misogyny. They may be undercurrents compared to the limitless oceans of selfishness that make up the bulk of a male viewpoint, but underneath every male, no matter how well-trained he might be by our patriarchal culture, there is a human being.

I submit that it is the cultural perversion of sex that corrupts us completely. In our culture, there is no real application of the idea that sex is something rare and magical, sacred and untouchable. We all have a sense of this in our hearts, but how many of us have it destroyed by all the evils of the world before we even get to try it for ourselves?

The sex-positive feminists and their dudely acolytes, who swarm the internet loudly proclaiming their feminism, yelling for the rights of a woman to prostitute herself, are so far from understanding sex as something positive that they have no idea what I’m even talking about when I proclaim sex is something rare and sacred. To them sex is something as common as dirt, as unimportant as any other bodily evacuation, and has no higher meaning than a squirt of spunk over the face of an empowered woman on her knees before them. Sacred! They say. What a laugh.

To the sex-positive feminists, all sex is just masturbation with partners, two people - or more - doing nothing any more special than jerking themselves off with company. It’s a circle-jerk world, boys and girls, together or apart. The mere idea that sex could be anything higher than this simple animal act can only enrage them.

But I say it can be; and it is. It’s a much higher form of communication between a man and a woman than I could ever explain. It’s a mutual exchange that can lead to something nobody can ever fully comprehend or duplicate: the creation of a human life. To reduce this to nothing more than orgasmic degradation is lunacy and madness, and it’s easily shown to be so by looking at how quickly mere animal sex degenerates into dominance and submission, lust and control.

If someone tells you they are sex-positive from behind a stripper pole, or while hooking their way through grad school, you should tell them “You know nothing about sex!”

So many people these days have only enacted pornographic fantasies in the company of another person enacting a fantasy. How many have ever really known sex?

Is sex something sacred or profane? Deep down inside, even the most worthless dude knows that it must be something more than spewing his filthy spunk without reason or emotion.

I’ve only read a few chapters of Intercourse, only the second feminist book I’ve ever read. It’s amazing how different it is to read a book by Dworkin than it is to read about Dworkin. The shocking slogans and out-of-context quotes are all I’ve ever heard, and they’re so unfair. You simply have to read the entire book to get a real idea of the enormous complexity of her thoughts on sex in our culture. Most of it is simply pointing out things famous writers have actually written about sex, love and reducing women to lovely things to be fucked.

She was a hero to me from the time I first heard that she had joined forces with the right wing to try to limit the spread of pornography. To be blunt, I don’t care who helps me to get this stuff back under the bed, under the counter, and in the closet once again; it just has to be done. To live in a world that openly condones the increasingly violent excesses of porn just to try to prove itself sex-positive is intolerable to anyone who has a distaste to being degraded and degrading others.

It’s not that I’m anti-sex. I love sex, but more than sex, I love to love, and that’s something that encompasses and surpasses sex; sex being merely a subset of love. To love, in my mind, is like the Italians put it - volere bene - to wish someone wellness. To wish all good for someone, to want to give without getting back. Unconditionally, regardless of sex.

To say that you are sex-positive and support the rapelike porn sex of our modern world - whether you are a woman or a man - is willful ignorance. Dragging sex down into an insensitive animal level in order to continue to deliver ever-increasing shocks to your jaded sex-sickened body and mind isn’t positive.

I’ve read a lot of negative crap about Dworkin and I can see that it’s all hooey. She’s an easy target, telling the truth we don’t want to hear, and the criticism that she doesn’t offer us a solution to the problem of sexual imbalance is just whining. She seems to expect us to feel free to imagine a solution for ourselves. If she were truly angry, she would have given us all up without ever writing a word.