Feminist Fred

Alice Marian Mills (née Harbord-Hamond), Lady Hillingdon

Vibrating Liz, a commentator on the blog I Blame the Patriarchy, educated Twisty’s commentators on the origin of the oft-quoted catch phrase of every decent patriarchal marriage: “Just lie back and think of England!”

Men find this idea unsurprising and quite rational, and will applaud any woman who cares to express it, while reserving some quietly constructive criticism on various ways a woman should actually enjoy submission to involuntary sex. Men like to think that woman actually enjoy sex when they are forced to enjoy it, either by their own “better” natures as illustrated by this phrase, or by some voodoo sex magic that they think will work, usually gleaned from a thorough and lifelong study of the pornographic tricks that bring about results; ranging from mercilessly chomping between a woman’s legs to spanking, humiliations, or that classic favorite, dick size.

The real quote is very good, from a letter Alice Marian Mills (née Harbord-Hamond), Lady Hillingdon, sent to her mother. “I am happy now that George calls on my bedchamber less frequently than of old. As it is, I now endure but two calls a week, and when I hear his steps outside my door I lie down on my bed, close my eyes, open my legs and think of England.”

This is as perfect a description of rape as you would ever care to read. And I say this in full knowledge of how much worse it could be – after a beating, with a stranger, at gunpoint, in a back seat in a dark alley, afraid of death. In both cases there comes a point where you just lie there and take it. In both cases there’s nothing in it for you but the humiliation of knowing that you must submit. Violence makes very little difference.

My friend Twisty had a very intelligent commentator on this post say:

Women need to know men hate them… [their] refusal to accept men’s hatred [is] why patriarchy is so fearsome.

The essential confusion that analyzing gender creates doesn’t come from nature, from the physical body that can be typed as female or male, but from the cultural construction of femininity and masculinity. You can truthfully state that men hate women, but when you say men you are speaking of a cultural construction called men that includes a great many people who disagree on what masculinity is and how they need to express it. The same with women.

Under the cultural role that men take on to become what they consider manly, there is still a human being who is capable of having normal emotions about other humans. Even the manliest man will allow himself human feelings in his dealings with certain other men, like fathers and sons can have. So we become confused by the human apart from the role he plays. The human may be decent, and feel decent, and still will aspire to being manly in many ways, some more destructive than others, but all of them just as superficial as the social construction of masculinity.

So we have this deep gut feeling towards the humans we know with male parts who we love, and can still feel the unthinking hatred of the superficial acting out of masculine tropes that define us and that men use to define themselves. Therefore many men aren’t lying when they say that they don’t hate women. Under the cultural role they play, they really don’t hate women. But when you spend your life striving to be manly and think that women want you to be manly, you spend your life acting in ways that degrade and devalue women, and approve of all of it completely, thinking that your underlying feelings are more essential and true than your actions and words and assumptions.

As long as you identify yourself as a man, and define your personality on a foundation of adherence to cultural norms for masculinity, you act and think in ways that assume your superiority over women. Your assumptions about masculinity could marginalize women sexually if you are gay, for example, but you would still be thinking of yourself as a class of person who is male, and regard women as essentially feminine, and still end up in the same place: On top of all of them, as part and parcel of being in the same class with straight men.

It’s interesting to note that straight men lump gay men in with women, since both are regarded as passive recipients of aggressive male sexual attention. Both are seen as encouraging and even demanding masculinity from men as a prerequisite for relationships of any kind. Gay men can accept a manly man’s straightness if he presents himself as too straight to consider a partner, through the expression of heightened masculinity, for example. And straight men distinguish between gay men and women in terms of sexual preference that they present as masculinity. Some straight men see themselves as so masculine that they can have sex with men or women, seeing every other human as a target for sexual aggression. Within gay relationships there are often subtle variations on masculine and feminine roles that are used to recreate the status of pursuer and pursued, with varying levels of flexibility due to the freedom to identify as masculine, feminine, or opt out of it altogether and try for humans together.

It’s easy to see why feminist women are somewhat for lesbian relationships, since the possibility to transcend gender roles is higher between two people who are both physically identified as not being masculine, and masculine is the default superior sex in cultural terms. But to aspire to creating genderless roles between men and women is important for many women and men. So even though men hate women, and most of the definitions of men contain seeds of a broad assumption of superiority, especially when viewed in contrast to feminine identity, a human who rejects masculinity can aspire to transcend this hatred by removing and living without masculine traits.

The problem with doing this is that we tend to see losing masculinity as acquiring femininity, as if there were only two ways of existing as a human being. What helps men to realize that this is not right, and if this is what you’re doing, you’re doing it wrong, is to also reject femininity. All of the traits of any human that we assign to each sex belong equally to all humans. It’s just that aligning ourselves with a sex to assert a superiority over the other sex is wrong. If you want to rid yourself of the burden of masculinity, you have to give up the expectation of femininity. And embrace mutual humanity in the place of these externally-imposed cultural roles.

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.