Feminist Fred

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.

I’m going to start reading Andrea Dworkin’s recently reissued book Intercourse. I’m eager to see what I might have missed that she has to say, and to get it from the source instead of second hand.

I’m especially interested in seeing where she leaves us, and where we might go. I’m interested in figuring out what sex should be, since I’ve got a pretty dark idea already of what it is.

What sex has become since she wrote this book might even be far worse than what she imagined.

I have a daughter who is now just four years old. Any tendencies I have towards feminism are directly attributable to her, my mother and my wife.

When I look at my daughter, I feel an identification that I could be her that helps to strip away many ingrained layers of misogyny.

Every dad feels the anxiety of the potential sexual exploitation of their daughter. We hope against hope that our little innocent kids will somehow escape the very exploitation that we cheer on and defend every time we look at porn or stuff a dollar down a stripper’s g-string. How dads manage to compartmentalize this stuff is more than a thinking person can comprehend.

The other day my first opportunity ever to give her some idea about the evil of men came up, and I hope I handled it right. I don’t want her to be horribly afraid of the world, no matter how evil it is, even though I do want her to understand that evil people do exist and must be watched for and avoided as much as possible.
We were getting up; I was lying in bed in my pajamas and she was bouncing around in her sleeper, and I had to get up and make her breakfast and turn on the TV so she could enjoy her morning ration of TV, which she loves with a terrible love I find hard to oppose.

She usually runs around or leaves me for a couple of seconds at some point in the morning, but this morning she was adhering and I needed to get those pajamas off and put on my clothes. I have these terrible memories of seeing my parents naked as a kid. They didn’t flaunt themselves at me, but once each I did see their sex organs and each sighting was seared into my brain. We live in a culture that hides our actual genitals yet loves to highlight our artificial sexual differences to the point of insanity, i.e. boob jobs. So I’ve never allowed her to see me entirely naked, and never will, since in our culture, like it or not, such a thing would be considered a deviant sex act if we weren’t related, and is a controversial one even when you are.
I realized she wasn’t going to toddle off on her own.

“OK, I’m going in the bathroom for a second. Wait here and I’ll be right out to get you your breakfast.” I told her.

“I want to go with you, daddy” she says. After all, I’m always going into the bathroom with her to read her books while she pees, it was one of our techniques for potty training her.

“No, I need to be alone in there, I’m changing into my underwear.”

“Why can’t I come?” Her tone was just a touch emotional, and I knew I had to give her a good reason, and I paused to think exactly what I should say at this delicate juncture.

“A grownup man should never let you see him naked. If he does, he’s being very bad and you should tell someone right away.”

She looked at me and I saw that she got some of the idea.

“If they do, they should be punished. It’s very bad.”

My feeling is that such things should be constantly said, but never at length.

Was I right? Did I go too far? How much is too much when you’re trying to prepare your daughter for the evils of misogyny; evils that seem to be growing and expanding every day?

Try to see beyond the allure, the addictive pleasures of our hypersexual culture. Examine more deeply why porn makes you feel good. Is it just sex, as you might think? It’s not just sex for most of us, if you think that just sex would mean there is a woman present. By just sex, do we mean masturbation is sex?

Masturbation was presented to me as an adolescent as an inevitable reality that only someone destined for mental problems would even seek to avoid. I never thought of it as sex, since sex was something far greater that I was hoping to get to do some day, with a girl who wanted to do it with me.

Is masturbation sex? Here’s a question men should ask themselves: Is masturbation having sex with myself? Just me and my dick, enjoying the purely physical sensation? No, it’s not. You can’t prove this any other way than by not lying to yourself and figuring that you are probably not that much different from most other guys. But who out there is man enough to just lie there, thinking of nothing but hand, cock, and the sensations they provide? What man masturbates with no thoughts of anything but themselves?

Hence, porn. Porn can be completely in the realm of personal fantasy, with no external references except those provided by the world around you. And yet, because these fantasies are not real, they are still porn. Porn can be fantasies of projected wishes of being with someone you love, yet this is still porn. Porn can be any desire that replaces the real presence of another with the imagined presence of another. It’s all abstract substitutions of imagery and imagined actions with actuality.

When I have sex I’m in the moment with someone I’m really into, if not in love with. I can’t invoke the porn feeling of abstraction when I have the actual flesh in front of me. Maybe this has caused problems of arousal for me, maybe this has made it easier for me to be a better lover, maybe this has kept me from invoking that same abstract arousal in another and led to the kind of semi-failure of arousal men fear. But I can distinguish easily between how great sex is with a woman and how masturbation gives me a really mixed bag of chaotic emotions that I find hard to examine, and therefore cannot understand.

Men are ashamed to admit they masturbate. It indicates so many negative things they don’t want to think about themselves that they refuse to even think about consciously, that they typically just avoid the subject completely, with themselves and with anyone who might bring the subject up.

A man who masturbates uses porn of some kind to get himself excited enough to do it and to make himself excited enough to come. Only rarely, in the heat of youth, when hormones flow like flooding rivers, do men ever get excited for no reason and come with little stimulus. Even young men, excited by their ability to come over and over again, will use porn to arouse themselves to higher and higher levels of orgasmic achievement, so that they achieve a state of hypersexual arousal from sheer habit.

Why shouldn’t this all be just fine, the way men like to see it? Why be ashamed? Where’s the negative? The negative is the porn. The negative is the idea that arousal as men know it depends on some kind of imagery or imagined actions in order to take place at all. Men would like to think they are just so incredibly virile that they can have all this sex, and all their masturbation is some kind of practice or some kind of proof that they could do this with a girl, too. But the reality, they suspect, and which I think is horribly true, is that it is the porn that takes them to this level, and that if you take away the porn, you take away much of the ability that porn promises.

Men also feel unloved and unappreciated when they masturbate, of course. They feel like they are going to waste. What a great feeling, what a big hard cock, it feels so good, why isn’t there anyone here to share it with me? They feel reduced to a lower, unlovable and undesirable level. Men who masturbate feel debased by having to resort to masturbation. If they were as great as they wanted to be, they would never have to jack off again. No man can honestly deny this feeling, no matter how hard he tries to hide it from himself.

Next post I will try to explain further how using porn to masturbate debases men, and how this feeling can be turned outward to create a need to debase women, too. Or maybe some of you can help me by leaving comments.