Feminist Fred

I know that of all the feminist blogs on the internet, mine is probably the least fun to read. I’m not a gifted humorist at the best of times, being more inclined to meaningless absurdity or hurtful sarcasm than wit or whimsy. When I’m talking about oppression, I get even heavier than ever, since it weighs on my soul and aggravates what Twisty Faster calls the Obstreperal Lobe.

But I love music, too, and have a decent collection of American popular songs of the 20th century. You can’t throw a note far into this collection without smacking some really insulting lyrics for the ladies, either. Some of the very worst of them are almost comic in their bald professions of hate, contempt or patronization of women.

So I’m going to list ten of the worst antifeminist songs I know of, and when I’m done, I’ll rank them according to comments, if I can’t figure out some way to embed a poll in my Wordpress blog (help on this is very welcome).

I want to start with one the worst, and the best. Best, because the melody is by Burt Bacharach, and I do love his melodies, since he is one of the finest composers of popular song around. Hal David wrote a scolding little lyric to this song that so perfectly encapsulates male privilege that you could write a primer on it by simply annotating thes fine lyrics:

Wives And Lovers
Jack Jones
(Burt Bacharach/ Hal David)

Hey! Little Girl
Comb your hair, fix your makeup
Soon he will open the door
Don’t think because there’s a ring on your finger
You needn’t try anymore

For wives should always be lovers too
Run to his arms the moment he comes home to you
I’m warning you…

Day after day
There are girls at the office
And men will always be men
Don’t send him off with your hair still in curlers
You may not see him again

For wives should always be lovers too
Run to his arms the moment he comes home to you
He’s almost here…

Hey! Little girl
Better wear something pretty
Something you’d wear to go to the city and
Dim all the lights, pour the wine, start the music
Time to get ready for love
Time to get ready
Time to get ready for love

What an air of menace, essential to almost all of the songs I’ll be presenting! It’s not so much a song as a scolding. The idea of a woman as a member of the sex class is right up front here, with no possible way to excuse or sugar coat the concept. In a way, it’s an important song for women to hear in order to confront the idea that this is what men want from them. Whenever a woman you know denies that feminism is about the liberation of women from male oppression just sing this song. You really don’t need to add much else.

Nowhere is it so obvious as children’s clothing that the dominant culture has a fear of the gay that overrules most of the our most innocent and gender-free fantasies about childhood. 

Have you looked at clothing for little boys lately? The ultra-masculine clothing lines for even really young boys is almost brutal. Try finding clothes for a five-year old boy that aren’t black, blue or brown. Look, if you have the patience, for clothing that isn’t scratchy, rough, and constricting, as opposed to soft, stretchy and body-conforming. Clothes for little boys today are like masculinity training devices, guaranteed to toughen up the tiny tots into the stoic, spartan he-man ideals they will soon learn either to imitate or envy.

There are a few expensive exceptions to this rule if you don’t mind your little boy looking like a preppy, but the clothing is still uncomfortable and constricting. Putting a little kid in an oxford shirt is not only ridiculously inappropriate – which our brains translate, with infinite subtlety, into ‘cute’ – but insanely uncomfortable. 

Feminism has reams of things written about the traps of femininity and the unhealthy mandates for feminine beauty and weight. Much thought has been put into the hideous yet strangely appealing distortions of the high heeled shoe fetish. Even the most stalwart feminist has, at times, longed to relax into the beauty myth that has been encoded into their most basic ideas of attractiveness. These things not only indicate a patriarchy that is dominant and universal, they also are the very symbols of oppression and male ownership of the idea of femininity. But feminists, being primarily concerned with the liberation of women from oppression, have little to say about how masculinity enforces femininity by creating a violent opposition to femininity.

I believe that men can contribute to liberating women from oppression by eliminating masculinity; a state of mind and a cultural construction that helps create and maintain femininity and which increases the artificial distance between human beings with different sex organs. If you start to look at your appearance as not just male or female, but also as human – sometimes derided as androgynous – you can find much common ground between us and find many sex-derived ideas that can be avoided for the signals they send out about how you look at the opposite sex and how you wish them to see you.

As an adult, the sexual universe of male clothing contains much that can be seen as neither male or female. Men tend to limit what they will wear for the fear of seeming feminine or ‘gay’. Women have successfully claimed quite a few articles of clothing from being regarded as exclusively male. Men have reacted to this trend by allowing themselves only a limited set of colors – more of an avoidance of most colors than a real set of colors – to avoid the dreaded association with femininity. 

I have a friend, Misogynist Mike, who bought himself a watch that was ultra modern and cool, and when he wore it on a date with a much younger woman, she told him that it looked kind of gay. Mike looked at the watch, thought of how well his gay friends dressed themselves compared to his hapless straight friends, and looked at her and thanked her for the compliment. In a world where the slightest deviation from the increasingly restricted world of ultra-masculine representation is called out as ‘gay’, the very least we can do is reclaim any tiny patch of beauty we can. 

The world of masculinity has never been darker, more forbidding, more dominant looking than now. Why participate in it voluntarily once you see it for the restrictive trap it really is? Your only result will be to advertise what a woman-hating manly man you think you are.