Feminist Fred

She’s back.

When you read her account of a woman plagued by a man who raped her you will go into a righteous feminist rage. I find it difficult to believe that anyone could think their way around this woman’s problem. Because women who have been raped are unprotected by law or common civility.

Here’s a perfect way to figure out if Your Nigel will ever get feminism or not. Tell him this story and ask him what he’d do. When he offers up something lame, ask him if there might be any problems doing that if he were this woman.

Put him in her place. There’s no need to examine or criticize his points, because the point would be for him to walk in a woman’s shoes a while. The more men think about what it would be like to be raped by a man and how hard it would be to do anything about it, the less time they spend thinking about how terrible it would be if some bitch claimed that they raped her. Which is what men always fear first - the very idea that one of their loving advances might be misunderstood as rape is more on their minds than being raped. Once on this line of thinking men go nowhere but backwards.

This is because every man, deep in his heart, knows that manly sex done by real men is more like rape than the kind of sex women seem to like. And it makes them very defensive and afraid.

Why don’t these people get a life and stop dissing women-empowering porn?

101 Things You can Do To Combat Pornography

Pat is amused by the idea that the tidal wave of porn can be restricted in any way. Like most men, he really enjoys the kind of shows they have on this site that talk about how terrible pron is for women while making the explicit point that it sells TV shows condemning porn just as well as anything else.

After looking over a few of the comments submitted, I saw that one concept floated to the top pretty quickly. Men generally look on feminism as a personal affront; almost an insult. To acknowledge sexism is a form of anger, and feels aggressive and confrontational to men. Challenging male privilege is a hate crime to Misogynist Mike.

Well, of course, this makes a feminist angry, too. Because, as my Aunt Twisty always says, it’s not all about the men. It’s all about the oppression women feel, which is caused by, promoted and championed by men. Men look at their privileges as rights, and justify them by inventing parallels with nature that are easily revealed as shallow, self-serving excuses rather than scientific facts beyond any alternative interpretation.

A man finds little in our culture to encourage him to criticize himself in any manner, much less constructively. How can we get in there and start the process of reexamining assumptions when we are facing this wall of denial?

The anger that men exhibit, either subtly or overtly, when confronted with their own culturally-inculcated sexism arouses our anger. So the discussion becomes a fight, whether we want it to or not. And in a fight, men have a neurotic and potentially dangerous greed for winning. A fight with a man, once started, can get so vicious and arouse such a bestial desire to dominate that it can’t even be conceded to the man; since he will continue to beat on his own sick and sorry arguments even long after you’ve given up on him.

I’m not saying this has to be something uncivilized; actually, when it comes to your Nigel, the whole thing might take place over the course of a couple of chilly, civil, polite minutes.

The first thing to establish is that this is not about the man you are talking to. It is, but it isn’t. Take the personal away and move it to the universal and a man can have a chance to look at it a little more objectively. I like to start by stealing Twisty’s famous and useful pronouncement: “I Blame The Patriarchy!” If you want, you can just say you blame the culture we live in. But starting with universals, you can establish truths that can be reduced to specifics that can lead to increased awareness of a woman’s point of view.

We live in a patriarchy, where fathers pass on names to sons, men lead most of the businesses and hold most of the positions of authority, and where women are expected to act like men (domineering, childless, competitive to the point of obsession) in order to share in the patriarchal spoils. If you can get there, you might be able to get further. If you can get some agreement on this without lapsing into the specious and indefensible position that women have all the real power because of the inestimable Power Of The Pussy, then you can try to get across the idea that these things weigh more heavily on women than they even care to acknowledge, and that most women use a certain amount of denial just to get through the day because of it.

I personally think that working on men in stages, slowly, over time, is more effective than trying to force a feminist perspective from scratch in one session. So I’m going to stop here, as I would with Misogynist Mike of Pornsick Pat, and wait a week or two for it to sink in.

Now if anyone please has any suggestions or criticisms of this approach, let me have them. Getting to something that works to awaken men to the common sense truths of feminism is my goal here.

I’m going to try to start a list of common things men say about sexism, feminism and strong women who act like human beings instead of like sexbot man-pleasing domestic slaves. I would appreciate any and all help from everyone, especially women, who have heard this crap so long and so often that they probably don’t even notice it any more. By getting a grip on this stuff, we can then figure out what works in rebuttal, and what doesn’t, and of course, what we’d like to scream in their ignorant, delusional faces!

I could go on and on. But I want to address these as topics, one by one, so this is kind of a topic suggestion box. I’m trying to keep the topics about how bad men are, and what we can do to improve them, and will try to steer clear of women’s ideas about other women. That is what I hope the strength of this blog will prove to be - a place where women get together, with like-minded men, to find common problems with men and talk about successful ideas to change them for the better.

The voice of Misogynist Mike is the third fake identity I will assume for this blog. I’m trying to use these three voices to illustrate the various failings common to men who have no conception of feminism, or their own privilege in a world they dominate unthinkingly.

All men are misogynists whether they care to admit it or not. They have no control over it, and have not freely chosen to be misogynists. But there is no credible way to deny that in our western culture that white men are the top of the pecking order. But Misogynist Mike will deny it to his dying day, all the while insisting on everyone treating him as if it were true.

It’s the same way with racism, but while this blog is interested in racism, it is only from the standpoint of how racism shares awareness and oppression with the more universal problem of feminism. (I think years of considering racism and my sincere desire to reduce it in my life made it easier to understand feminism when I finally started to get, by the way) So racism is never off topic if it can relate in some way to helping men understand they are on top, and everyone else knows it.

Misogynist Mike is the kind of guy who would shut down the discussion in a heartbeat if he even heard the word misogynist. He loves being a manly man and hates fags, because they are like women. He claims to love women, because he loves sex so much, but hates marriage and “high maintenance” women and has no use for women who are less than attractive. Mike likes to hang out with his friends almost as much as he likes women, because only among men can he feel and express himself freely. He sees no connection between this inclination (towards emotional intimacy with men) and his own hatred of women, which he denies. He will freely admit that he doesn’t understand women and complain bitterly that they don’t understand him, and that the nature of women is responsible for this problem, not him.

Mike is also pornsick, of course, and tends to demand and expect porn-styled sex from his casual partners. He is not a completely pathetic loser like Pornsick Pat; his viewpoint is more that of the man who patterns his sex life after porn delusions. Pornsick Pat thinks he can compartmentalize his porn use away from the rest of his emotional and sexual life, since the two are so dissimilar, while Mike thinks porn is what life can be if he just finds a woman who has some sense. Mike shows us how men use sex to get what he wants from women.

Mike is the voice that you can scream at on this blog, though I expect you all to discuss him from any and all angles you want. But just think; on this blog there will be three fake voices for you to argue with who will never argue back. Since they don’t really exist, the women and feminist-identifying men who get past my slow moderation will be able to address him with the highest level of freedom they can manage.

Pornsick Pat will be a popular fellow with commentators, I assume. Everybody loves to complain about porn, or else they love to defend it. It’s kind of scary, but I’m going to attempt to write in the voice of a typical male porn user. Scary, but also easy, since I used to use porn myself and I know all too well how terrible it is for men.

How terrible it is for women is the point of most feminist discussions of porn, as it should be. It’s not too hard to convince most women that porn can be at least somewhat unsettling, especially in the early days of the millennium, when what was once considered hardcore is now absolutely mainstream, and what was once considered inconceivable is now the easily-available hard core. But on this blog I will assume that most of the women, at least, will have a high level of intolerance for all the forms of porn out there, if not my own level of semi-militant disgust.

Men who use porn create the problem of porn. There are far too few voices out there telling them why porn might make them sick and reduce their humanity. Feminist women, having even less empathy than most about the lure of porn, might like help with making men see the obvious degradation of porn, and men need to have the opportunity to hear men discuss their problems with porn in a way that encourages them to decrease or understand their problem.

I find it alarming that men get anti-porn messages from the religious right and feminists only. It used to be normal to see porn as degrading, because what is now seen as a matter of relative degradation was once a categorical label.

Pornsick Pat will defend porn in the sheepish, half-hearted voice of a man defending the indefensible from a woman he loves. He won’t be unapologetically pro-porn. But he will say, hopefully, most of things you hear from any man when you discover some hidden evidence of his private vices.

I had some comments about Your Nigel, and of course they were about someone’s else’s Nigel. I have to define Your Nigel for the sake of the many who aren’t aware of feminist in jokes.

Every woman with a boyfriend, lover, roommate, brother, father, or husband has, in that person, a Nigel of their own. He is a person who that woman believes is much too nice to be lumped in with the rest of the Misogynist Mikes, Pornsick Pats, and general male population. The savvy feminist knows, however, that all men are misogynists, and a huge percentage of them - maybe more than 90%, are at least tolerant of porn of some kind, if only the porn to be found anywhere in a sex-saturated culture such as ours. It’s all a matter of degree, of course, but the fact that we live in a misogynist world, where no woman can be considered equal to a man in every way, makes this something you can’t consciously avoid.

In the words of the immortal Twisty Faster, I Blame The Patriarchy.

Since everyone has a different Nigel, I would like to hear about yours. Nigels are usually very good people, but they are resistant to feminist talk. As the commenter noted, her Nigel is unsettled by feminist thought. The idea that he might be in some way wrong about his generally favorable view of the world is distressing to him. That is so Nigel!

I’m going to try to write in the voices of these characters, and hope that I can also pick them apart, together with you. By using this kind of socratic dialog, we will try to understand why and how these men think, and develop ways to make them understand that it’s OK to look at the world from another viewpoint that isn’t that of white male privilege. Black male privilege, too, though that’s an even more difficult mind to understand, since black men have to deal with their own oppression, too.

I’ve got this friend I’ll call Feminist Fred. He exists in my head, because I’m a man who has gradually come to accept and understand feminism as best I can. Many “true” feminists say that no man can ever be a feminist, which is something I’ve come to accept, so instead of pretending that I can be a feminist, too, I’ve invented Fred as a mouthpiece for all my attempts to understand and further the spread of feminism among men.

I had to invent several other men to populate this blog who don’t exist. Misogynist Mike, who thinks women are all stupid whores. Men like him are everywhere, and if you are one you can expect to be moderated into nonexistence on sight. But I will use his persona to illustrate the viewpoints of men like him, and show men like myself how we can slip into his ways of thought without questioning it.

Then there will be Pornsick Pat. Many a feminist male sympathizer will be much disturbed by seeing things he does and thinks are really good are also shared by this fellow. This blog will maintain a rigorous and firmly-held standard that pornography degrades women and that it also degrades men just as much, and will attempt to help men understand that this degradation is why they instinctively feel ashamed of consuming porn.

Lastly, we will have Your Nigel. This is the fellow who you date who could never be like Pornsick Pat and Misogynist Mike but who simply hides the truth from you because you could never date a guy like that and he knows it.

I will be posting on topics like rapists and those who defend them. The level of public acceptance of rape is getting to the point where it’s alarmingly close to being mainstream sex.

I’ll also touch a little on the topic of the beauty industry and examine it from the standpoint of how it creates a tendency towards pornsickness in men through constant titillation and how it creates and supports men hating women for not being as they should be, rather than from the more typical feminist viewpoint of how terribly oppressive it is for women.

I hope you like what I write, and if you don’t, let me know. I have a pretty thick skin. Comments will be heavily moderated, and might be a little slow - we shall see. Men who spew hatred of women will be banned. Men who think they know everything and want to argue until they have “won” will be banned. Women who do the same things will be banned if needed, but I expect this to be a safe place for women, and intend to keep it that way, even though the intention is to raise the consciousness of men who want to become more aware of the cruel and unsuspected effects of a misogynist world on their all-too human hearts.