Feminist Fred

I have male parts dangling down there somewhere, so I try, I really try! not to comment on the enormous struggle women suffer to liberate themselves from oppression. Especially the struggle with femininity, which the radical feminist will decry and denounce from time to time.

Since I have no first hand experience with being female and suffering the oppression of male dominance, I prefer to let the women talk to the women about these issues, since they know best what feels right and should be able to understand better than I how to communicate helpfully to women who struggle with the desire to dress feminine in a world that rewards femininity and punishes the rejection of it, sometimes brutally, sometimes subtly.

In my last post I referenced the excellent blog I Blame The Patriarchy, where I started my studies of gender under the tender, witty tutelage of Twisty Faster, perhaps the most amusing and creative feminist writer who has ever lived. With scorn, sarcasm, wordplay and insight, she changed me, single handedly, from a normal pornsick dude who aspired to being a nice guy to an outraged person who aspires to a state of humanity devoid as possible of the turgid trappings of masculinity that never fit me anyway. Thanks to her I started to read the classics of radical feminist thought and found myself rethinking everything.

In this same post, Twisty’s commentariat, who have collectively taught me even more than Twisty, came back once again to the knotty and deep problem of women rejecting femininity. Twisty had made an off-hand comment asking women to at least reject some small bit of feminine baggage to show some feeling for the plight of women being killed the world over for the sake of the same system that condones killing our sisters.

There’s not much to be said about men killing women outright out of pure hatred for women. But asking women to reject femininity is harder to swallow, and leads to some real problems in the home, in the workplace, on the street. One commentator threw up her hands at the idea because a woman will be raped just as readily in rags as in stilettos. The feeling of helplessness was palpable.

Short hair, short nails, jeans and t-shirts, hairy legs, hairy pits, no make up, getting up, showering and ready. It’s so easy. Maybe you need to shave the legs - nobody wants to be stared at. The rest of it is below the radar, nobody really notices. Depending on the body shape, people can still tell you’re a woman.

I’m not saying to do it. But rejecting femininity is rejecting a lot of crap you have to buy and things you have to do. It’s not difficult, because it is verifiably easier. You find your comfort spot along the continuum from girly girl to unadorned human and that’s it.

The argument that you’re just as liable to be raped dressed up as dressed down doesn’t make sense to me. The real crime is that men, in their insufferable dominance, have staked out the unadorned human look for themselves and women comply with this ownership by continuing to regard this look as not feminine enough or even masculine.

Twisty has asked us to pass around this report from Pakistan:

ISLAMABAD, Aug 29: Balochistan Senator Sardar Israrullah Zehri stunned the upper house on Friday when he defended the recent incident of burying alive three teenage girls and two women in his province, saying it was part of “our tribal custom.”

Senator Bibi Yasmin Shah of the PML-Q raised the issue citing a newspaper report that the girls, three of them aged between 16 and 18 years, had been buried alive a month ago for wishing to marry of their own will.

I realize that male supremacy, from the standpoint of an American male, fearful of losing his precious privileges or even being mistaken for someone less than masculine at all times, is a somewhat abstract thing, because the less time spent thinking about it the better. But actually it’s all part of a global, age-old set of customs that are no different in essence from this atrocity.

When you think of liberating women from this kind of custom, or any custom that degrades, patronizes or even exaggerates the distinctions between the sexes in the name of masculine or feminine behavior, you are also thinking of liberating yourself from the cultural mandate to be an unthinking monster who oppresses half the people on earth by your very existence.

Just a short note to celebrate TCM paying tribute to Kay Francis on Thursdays all next month. I love Kay Francis. She often played strong women, had an unconventional beauty, and was a top box-office draw at Warner Brothers for most of the 1930s. Watching her pre-code movies reveals a Hollywood that catered to what women thought about and felt, even if they did mostly end with the woman in her place where she belongs. Some of the Kay Francis movies I’ve seen, like Stranded (1935), actually have Kay not submitting to the man in the end, but actually show him admitting what a fool he’s been all along, something that must have thrilled her fans.

The move by the conservative party to divide the liberal vote was pure genius. They saw a party almost split in half by sexism, and figured they could easily, without sacrificing their own unshakable belief in male supremacy, divide the party that loves to hate itself. So they chose a woman as McCain’s VP.

They didn’t choose Palin because they thought they could easily fool the vast throngs of embittered vagina-americans into thinking that theirs is the party of equality and gender justice. That would destroy the Republican party, and divide it against themselves.

They chose her because she would unleash the widespread and outspoken sexism of the liberal male loudmouths out there and this, in turn, would alienate the large and extremely important majority of liberal women who are already embittered at the defeat of Hillary Clinton. They did it to turn the liberals against themselves, with MILF jokes, with the fun tactics they have copied from Rush Limbaugh and others that condones hateful, angry woman-hating talk just because Palin is the enemy.

Look around you and listen to the men talk about Palin, as if they didn’t think women had the ears to hear or the ability to read the hate-filled screed. The Republicans may have just won the election, by simply putting in place the one weapon that can kill all the hope, all the aspiration, all the goodness that has brought the liberals and moderates together in the person of Barack. That weapon is the deeply seated desire for the liberals to divide against each other and ultimately kill all hope and turn everything back into a sickening, uninspiring choice of a lesser of two evils.

Vote for the sexist, misogynist creeps who call the only woman on the ballot a MILF and a slut and a whore and whatever else you want, or else vote for the sexist, misogynist creeps who at least are showing the decency of restraint. Or don’t vote at all, because either side makes you sick.

The Republicans have outsmarted the liberals again, using the most effective weapon of all against them: Themselves.

Amanda over at Pandagon has a post on tit-gazing that gathered dozens and dozens of eager responses, most of which were so brain dead about gender that it was classic and disheartening at the same time.

Many of the male commentators trotted out the same things I used to say to well-meaning feminists before I had a chance to really look into what women think of sexism. Things like men are “genetically coded” to look at breasts sexually and that it was a “pleasure”, one that couldn’t be denied a man unless it was for “moralistic” reasons, like only a Puritan would not look at a tit and pop a boner.

Men who claim that they can’t help staring at tits are actually claiming that they have trained themselves to to look at tits as signals of sexual availability. The excitement they feel at looking at these select tits - they must not be old, or perhaps in some case must not be small or saggy, and they must not be related to you too closely, like mothers, daughters, sister - seems to be a completely esthetic pleasure, but is actually a response to the stimulus of sexual arousal that is created by the assumption of sexual availability.

Men walk around constantly seeking signs that they have learned to interpret as sexually arousing, and these same signs tend to categorize a subset of human beings that they deem fuckable as primarily arousing and only secondarily human, if at all. This is not some deeply-seated genetic coding or other evo-psych bullshit or else it would have caused the human race to auto-distruct through inbreeding thousands of years ago.

This is just something men do because they think they need to be constantly seeking arousal in order to be sufficiently masculine. When you train yourself to recognize tits as fair game for your personal arousal, and you spot a pair that conform to whatever criteria you have established as kosher - not my Mom’s! - then you tell yourself you can’t help it. Pathetic.

On the other hand, I still look at women and see beauty. I love the way they look, and I know for a fact that I can see sexless beauty in almost any woman of any age. Sometimes a young and beautiful woman will cross my field of vision and I’ll see her youth and beauty with the same appreciation I have for a flower in full bloom or a sunset. But my gaze is relaxed and devoid of sexual intent these days. I see nothing fuckable about beautiful women any more. The arousal is gone.

The desire to see beauty everywhere has led me to try to see the beauty in old people and even though old people have many things about them that signal the body falling apart and aching, I still see beauty there, like a dried flower or the last lingering touch of a sunset past. But I still have a hard time seeing the beauty in men, since I see chronic masturbators who live in smug denial of their assumptions of privilege, rather than what they might think others would see if they were looking at them. That’s my bias.

In my last post a Patriarchy-Blamer from the great feminist blog I Blame The Patriarchy thanked me for coddling the dudes so that Twisty doesn’t have to. I got a laugh out of that, since no feminist hates dudes as much as I do. Well, probably they do, but still, I hate them dudes to death. Well, maybe not death. But I still think it needless for them to continue to sport penises, which they only use to abuse themselves and women; since the subtraction of a sex organ is a minor affair to someone who thinks of them as marginal bodily ornaments when not being used to continue the species, in which case they actually have some objective use, even if overpopulation happens to be rendering our planet toxic.

As a person burdened with male parts, I have read enough radical feminist theory to understand that sex roles are not essential to my personality, but are these cultural obligations that I have learned to think of as me. I dimly grasped that women who see themselves as sovereign human beings with agency can come to reject the very ideas of femininity. While I have been well trained by our patriarchal culture to respond to feminine beauty tropes, I understand that inhabiting those costumes and living up to those standards can be not only demeaning but completely untenable over the course of a lifetime.

So it was with considerable relief that I came across John Stoltenberg’s essay “Refusing to be a Man“. If the women I most respected could reject being a female, then I could reject being a dude. It’s not that this wasn’t a big step for me. For my whole life I had been struggling to define and live up to what it is to be a good man, and this was, on the surface, a rejection of that. But it was actually sidestepping the entire confusing issue with the plain and universal idea of trying to become a good human being.

Interestingly, the one thing that stopped me from taking the obvious step of rejecting masculinity, even after I had already realized it was merely a cultural construct, was the age-old fear of femininity that men have internalized so deeply that they barely even acknowledge it. Luckily for me, I came to the idea after being taught by all my radical feminist teachers around the internet and in the few books I’ve read that femininity is not the point or the object of rejecting masculinity. They taught me, over and over, that many of the traits I associated with masculinity weren’t masculine, but simply human, and belong as much to women who reject femininity as they do to men. It’s just that men tend to assign any good human qualities to men specifically and woman only conditionally.

So I don’t think of myself as a dude coddler. But I do think that I, unlike Twisty, have a certain responsibility to answer to the needs of men who might want to seek a solution to their own gender confusion via feminism. Women have quite enough to deal with just trying to shake their own patriarchal programming without dealing with clueless dudes who deny even their own supremacy in an obviously male supremacist world.