Feminist Fred

 

Do men dominate women because they lack empathy?

Over at I Blame the Patriarchy, the feminists are exchanging comments with some of the rare feminist friendly humans (with male parts) over the reasons why we are aroused by porn. Feminists with female parts tend to think that men have a simple desire to dominate women, and lack the empathy to put themselves in the place of a woman, who, they like to think, dislikes domination and wishes to avoid it.

The question is raised because one blamer with male parts claimed that a man who empathizes with women’s suffering can use empathy to drive pornographic thoughts from his head. 

Yet, his idea is pretty directly contradicted by women who fantasize about rape or coercion even though they have been raped themselves. How can they lack empathy when they have suffered directly from the brutalization of women? Obviously there’s more going on here than simply saying “I hate being dominated, therefore it can’t arouse me; and because I have been dominated, and I hated it, I am immune from arousal that is created by it.”

I may be quite wrong about everything I say on this blog. But one thing that I go back to again and again is the idea that arousal can be forced on us all by the conditioning of our culture and the self-hypnosis that masturbation creates. I’m not anti-masturbation, but I am highly suspicious of the hypnotic nature of porn and fantasy that we use to create the arousal and get off.

I’m an old human, past fifty now. My level of arousal has declined from the feverish heights of my teenaged years. Yet, before I changed my life due to feminist enlightenment, I was still trying to push the orgasm button almost as frequently as I did as a child. The addiction we develop over a lifetime of stimulation is pretty profound. 

Getting to orgasm becomes more and more difficult, though, and here is where I think we tend to use the sickness of forcible arousal to force ourselves to get off. It’s all one big clusterfuck of dominance and submission when you see it this way, and it transcends completely any male or female roles in the person getting themselves off. 

My thought is that because arousal is something we crave, and we don’t really feel strongly enough to complete a sexual act with ourselves, we seek out ideas of sex as an irresistible force that overcomes our lack of desire and fills it with the submission to this feeling that leads to orgasm. 

This is worded in such a poor way because I’m trying to put into the words the universality of my conception of arousal as something we all force on ourselves in order to feel that orgasm. Men force themselves to feel arousal by forcing women to feel arousal, either by love and attraction and flowery kittens-and-rainbows sex when young and attractive and possessed of actual magnetism, or through the fantasy of pretending that women become overcome by desire by being dominated, from the coercion of seduction to the rape-like horrors of BDSM.

My take on sexuality is based on m belief that all sexual roles are culturally-based. There is no natural or inherent bias. Everything we think of as gendered is ingrained in us from birth by our culture. Men buy into all this more easily than women because they can fool themselves into thinking that it’s essentially female to be overcome with lust and give into a degrading sexual experience. Yet, at the same time, men force themselves to come all the time when they jack off, essentially raping themselves without ever realizing it. 

I think there is a strong undercurrent of male sexuality that accepts the idea that since you enjoy forcing yourself to become aroused and to get off, that women should like it when you do them the same favor. 

So mere empathy for women is just a part of the methods by which we can detach ourselves from degrading sexual fantasies and porn. The other part is also realizing on some level that we are all trying to force ourselves to arousal and orgasm more often than we really need to be. And here is where the deepest resistance will always lie for those, like me, who willfully addicted themselves to the orgasm button decades ago.