Feminist Fred

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.