Feminist Fred

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.