Tammy Wynette is one of the best country singers ever. Something about her voice, which she typically starts out real low and subtle and which eventually climbs to a power and glory that make my heart almost pop from the beauty. Country music is as full of sexism as Rock, most of it tied to the glorification of a woman’s subordinate place serving a man, rather than outright sexual objectification.

But this song has it both ways, and almost questions the status quo in a way that a man can hardly argue with, which it has to, in order to avoid tripping any all-too-sensitive male kneejerk reactions to the slightest threats to their hegemony.

I’ve never seen the inside of a bar room
Or listened to a jukebox all night long
But I see these are the things that bring you pleasure
So I’m gonna make some changes in our home

I’ve heard it said: “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em”
So if that’s the way you’ve wanted me to be
I’ll change if it takes that to make you happy
From now on you’re gonna see a different me.

Because your good girl’s gonna go bad
I’m gonna be the swingin’est swinger you’ve ever had
If you like ‘em painted up powdered up
Then you oughta be glad
‘Cause your good girl’s gonna go bad.

I’ll even learn to like the taste of whiskey
In fact, you’ll hardly recognize your wife
I’ll buy some brand new clothes and dress up fancy
For my journey to the wilder side of life.

Because your good girl’s gonna go bad
I’m gonna be the swingin’est swinger you’ve ever had
If you like ‘em painted up powdered up
Then you oughta be glad
‘Cause your good girl’s gonna go bad.

Oh Yeah Your good girl’s gonna go bad.

Because it dares to create a possibility of questioning why a woman’s role can be both reviled and glorified for close to the same reasons, I’d call this song almost feminist.

I was about 12 years old when this song was a hit, and it made me feel very nervous about what it meant to be a man. The air of menace is pretty extreme in this song, from the obvious resemblance of the title to the word “rapist”, to the warning, finger-shaking tone of blame it takes toward the women in the world who need to beware of the Rapper, to the description of his techniques in seducing women, which are threatening, manipulative and evil.

Hey girl, I bet you
There’s someone out to get you.
You’ll find him anywhere
On a bus, in a bar, in a grocery store.
He’ll say “Excuse me, haven’t I seen you somewhere before?”

Rap, rap, rap, they call him the Rapper.
Rap, rap, rap, you know what he’s after.

So, he starts his rappin’
Hoping something will happen.
He’ll say he needs you,
A companion, a girl he can talk to.
He’s made up his mind.
He needs someone to sock it to.

Rap, rap, rap, they call him the Rapper.
Rap, rap, rap, you know what he’s after.

He’s made an impression,
So he makes a suggestion.
“Come up to my place
For some coffee or tea or me.”
He’s got you where he wants you.
Girl, you’ve gotta face reality.

Rap, rap, rap, they call him the Rapper.
Rap, rap, rap, you know what he’s after

How’s a boy supposed to distinguish between what this rapist is doing and what he’s been taught to do in order to earn the romantic attentions of the girls he longs to love? And it’s confusing to think how menacing and dangerous it sounds to be the prey of what sounds like a fairly non-coercive seduction technique. Then, after all this sinister hinting around, the girl is instructed to simply face reality.

Something I have often thought about but rarely articulated is that men are not only taught how to be men in haphazard and slapdash ways, but also are taught many overtly contradictory ways of expressing masculinity, of varying degrees of evilness and aggression.

I think even the manliest man you have ever met is, at heart, completely uncertain as to just what a man is supposed to do or what is expected of him, and this uncertainty causes a great deal of misunderstood anxiety, which is most handily identified by men as anger and resentment toward women, who he thinks have invented and have sole responsibility for all masculine behavior through the all mighty power of the pussy, before which he trembles in abject fear.

This song does double duty, threatening both men and women with a dark vision of manipulation, coercion and rape.

I got a rare comment from a man who is confused about why I say that men “hate” women:

He notes that men are often kind to women, “…it’s not self-evident – to me at least – such everyday observations of apparent kindness can be reconciled with the view of men as creatures of hate.”

I wrote a long response about men and women not being all one thing or the other, but relative as all things are. And more about the social constructs of masculinity and femininity. But it’s kind of an appropriate introduction to my next misogynist song, wherein the naked, seething hate of a man for a woman he loves is exposed without any filters at all, Jesse Belvin’s doo-wop song “Mess You Up”.

Listen to me, it ain’t fair,
She run around here and there,
I’ll hit her, I declare, I don’t mind going to the electric chair.

I’ll mess you up, hurt you bad,
I laugh and joke but baby, I don’t play.

Been running round with my friend Joe
Ya’ll didn’t think that I would ever know
Now you no-good so-and-so
You gonna reap just what you sow.

I’ll mess you up, hurt you bad,
I laugh and joke but baby, I don’t play.

I thought you loved me like I love you
Why you wanna do the things you do?
I saw you grinnin’ at Jimmy and Jack
I think I’ll disconnect your back.

I’ll mess you up, hurt you bad,
I laugh and joke but baby, I don’t play.

Don’t come messin’ round with me
I’m just about as mad as I can be
I killed a lion when I was only three
Davy Crockett ain’t got a thing on me.

I’ll mess you up, hurt you bad,
I laugh and joke but baby, I don’t play.

I’ll chain down the lightning and ride the thunder
Pin the wind in a jug and beat it with a club

I’ll mess you up, hurt you bad,
I laugh and joke but baby, I don’t play.

It’s easy to laugh at the ferocity in this song if you’re a man wrapped safely in the privilege of exception from such enmity. But if you stop and consider that women are killed and assaulted everyday in ways just like this all over the world, it becomes too sad to crack a cynical grin ever again.

Here’s a uniquely evil song that charted in the sixties. It turns out there’s a whole genre of songs about being forced into prostitution by your own mother. This fits into my theory about the 1960s in America being the most misogynist culture ever.

I was lucky enough to get a comment about heavy metal songs being misogynist, too. I have to admit that if we start looking into hard rock and rock music in general the shit will get to be so thick that it is almost limitless.

“Well, I remember it all very well lookin’ back
It was the summer that I turned eighteen.
We lived in a one-room, run down shack
on the outskirts of New Orleans.

We didn’t have money for food or rent
to say the least we was hard-pressed
when Momma spent every last penny we had
to buy me a dancin’ dress.

Well, Momma washed and combed and curled my hair,
then she painted my eyes and lips.
Then I stepped into the satin dancin’ dress.
It had a split in the side clean up to my hips.

It was red, velvet-trimmed, and it fit me good
and standin’ back from the lookin’ glass
was a woman
where a half grown kid had stood.

She said, “Here’s your last chance, Fancy, don’t let me down!
Here’s your last chance, Fancy, don’t let me down.
God forgive me for what I do,
but if you want out girl it’s up to you.
Now get on out, you better start sleepin’ uptown.”

Momma dabbed a little bit of perfume
on my neck and she kissed my cheek
Then I saw the tears welling up
in her troubled eyes as she started to speak

She looked at our pitiful shack and then
she looked at me and took a ragged breath
She said, Your Pa’s runned off, and I’m real sick
and the baby’s gonna starve to death.

She handed me a heart-shaped locket that said
“To thine own self be true”
and I shivered as I watched a roach crawl across
the toe of my high-healed shoe

It sounded like somebody else was talkin’
askin’, “Momma what do I do?”
She said, “Just be nice to the gentlemen, Fancy.
They’ll be nice to you.”

She said, “Here’s your last chance, Fancy, don’t let me down!
Here’s your last chance, Fancy, don’t let me down.
God forgive me for what I do,
But if you want out girl it’s up to you
Now don’t let me down,
now get on out, you better start sleepin’ uptown.”

That was the last time I saw my momma
when I left that rickety shack
The welfare people came and took the baby.
Momma died and I ain’t been back.

But the wheels of fate had started to turn
and for me there was no other way out.
It wasn’t very long after that I knew exactly
what my momma was talkin’ ’bout.

I knew what I had to do.
Then I made myself this solemn vow:
I’s gonna to be a lady someday
though I didn’t know when or how.

But I couldn’t see spendin’ the rest of my life
with my head hung down in shame.
You know I mighta been born just plain white trash.
but Fancy was my name.

She said, “Here’s your last chance, Fancy, don’t let me down!
Here’s your last chance, Fancy, don’t let me down.
God forgive me for what I do,
but if you want out girl it’s up to you.
Now get on out, you better start sleepin’ uptown.”

Wasn’t long after that a benevolent man
took me in off the streets
One week later I was pourin’ his tea
in a five roomed penthouse suite.

Since then I’ve charmed a king, a congressman
and an occasional aristocrat
and I got me an elegant Georgia mansion
and a New York townhouse flat.

Now I ain’t done bad

Now in this world there’s a lot of self-righteous
hypocrites who call me bad.
They criticize Momma for turning me out
No matter how little we had.

But I haven’t had to worry ’bout nothin’
now for nigh on fifteen years
But I can still hear the desperation
in my poor mommas voice ringin’ in my ears.

“Here’s your last chance, Fancy, don’t let me down!
Oh, here’s your last chance, Fancy, don’t let me down.
God forgive me for what I do,
but if you want out girl it’s up to you.
Now get on out, you better start sleepin’ uptown.”

Like Wives & Lovers, there’s a strong theme of resignation and surrender in this song. How normal it was for women to feel this way is what I find the most horrible part about these lyrics. The one way out – capitulation to male desires – is all about becoming fully invested in being a member of the sex class. The uselessness of women unless they are objects of desire.

Even as women become more conscious of being worth more than just being used by men, the rise in porn culture attacks from the secret places that men hide their midnight desires, trying to undermine men’s ability to realize the obvious humanity of the women all around them.

It’s the image of patriarchy-pleasing handed down from mother to daughter that creeps me out the most about this song. An obvious male fantasy, yet one that makes twisted sense if you accept your fate as an oppressed and poverty-stricken person in a world of money and men. A simple update to becoming an empowered stripper would make this song as relevant today as it was then.

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.

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.

Go get ‘em!

Men who are raped are a strange lot. In the larger view of the constant daily rape of women, it’s not much of an issue at all. Most feminists (I use “feminists” to identify humans with uteruses, versus Feminist Freds, who are simply friendly to the idea of feminist revolution) will snort derisively at the the very thought of wasting time considering the circumstances and particulars of men who are raped. But on this blog, it’s a useful tool for helping men to understand the depth of feelings our oppressed women friends experience.

Empathy and understanding of what constitutes rape can be gleaned from a consideration of men who are raped. Piercing the thick skin of men who live in a bubble of male privilege and who have been trained from birth to never, ever allow themselves to see anything through the eyes of women, is an almost insurmountable struggle. 

Feminists grow up in a culture that is based entirely on the viewpoint of mankind being male. This makes it hard to see how one-sided the ability to understand what the other gender experiences is for men. Women grow up almost completely within a male identity, and are acutely aware of their femininity as different from humanity. Women don’t have to try to imagine the world from a man’s viewpoint, it is shoved down their throats constantly, because male is the default state of humanity. Women see themselves as men plus femininity, because they are human, and to be human is to be a man.

This is how I started to understand one of the proofs that women are oppressed. Realizing that women are allowed, even forced, to see things as if through a man’s eyes, and that most women see most things as if they too were men and that their own oppression was to be defended and encouraged, was a big step in understanding why not all women are feminists, even though it seems paradoxical that women would fight their own liberation from oppression. What is normal in a patriarchal culture like ours is to see yourself as a male, as right, as on top, as a winner. To identify with and collaborate with the men who are the eternal winners, the default top dogs, is only natural in those who see the world as a contest where you seek to win and someone else must thereby lose. Getting as far up the pyramid as you can means you must justify your allegiance to the winners who can reward you with a place beneath them, but above many others.

Men, though, are so actively discouraged from seeing anything through women’s eyes, from any hint of empathy or understanding, that women are probably incapable of even guessing at the barriers that men erect and defend against any consideration of the female point of view.

Men feel that to open yourself to the female viewpoint, you must feminize yourself, you must consider yourself inferior to men, you must be a loser in life’s hierarchy, literally debase yourself to an extent that women would find just as difficult to consider, since it is deeply insulting to women to admit that seeing the world through women’s eyes is anything like this. Women, who prefer to see the world from a male viewpoint, but who also know where they stand and what being a woman can mean in relation to the threat of male domination without male protection, would prefer to imagine that men see themselves as they see themselves, as men with additional aspects, rather than as men see them, as unfathomable people who are less than men because they exist to be used as domestic servants or to fill sexual needs. And men see femininity as mysterious and incomprehensible mostly because they can’t allow themselves to enter into any kind of consideration of living a life as a number two human to men’s number one, a life of domestic drudgery or of being tricked, pursued and used sexually by men.

When men are raped, a window opens up into the world as women see it, since women are quite familiar with the constant threat of rape they walk around with. Men, unless considering jail time, are never in any fear of rape. Men will even joke loudly and with great joy that they would like to be raped, since for them, rape is a wonderful thing that happens when a person gets what they really want anyway: sex. 

Lately my buddy Misogynist Mike was telling me some stories about his days hanging around New Orleans, crashing at the tiny apartment of a plump little stripper named Sheila. After a few days, Sheila made some overtures to him indicating that she would be open to sex. Mike was younger than her, and young enough to see an older woman as still slightly mom-like; intimidating, asexual, threatening – especially since he had a roof over his head thanks to her graciousness, and she had the power to make him homeless if crossed. He had sex with her, even though he wasn’t at all attracted to her, even though it made him feel more vulnerable and dependent. He had a hard time understanding these feelings, except that she wasn’t that good looking. His feeling of discomfort while he was having sex with her was a powerful emotion, though.

“She raped me, man!” he finally realized, happy at the thought he was once good looking and desirable enough to be raped, since men see being raped as a good thing. “I didn’t want to, but I was afraid she’d throw me out in the rain that very night, so I did it any way. That’s rape!”

Yes, it was rape, and if he wasn’t so happy at the idea that rape wasn’t so bad when you were a man being raped by a woman, he might have been able to take it to an understanding of how constantly women feel threatened by the same kind of rape. Sex without true attraction, with someone who intimidates and threatens you with dire social problems like hunger and homelessness; we call that marriage.

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.