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.

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.

The delightful commenter belenen has written to offer a carefully-considered explanation of how men are also oppressed by their own supremacy. 

Well, men don’t suffer in an oppressed way, true, but they do suffer from sexism. I don’t think that they actually feel the sting of it until after becoming aware of how much women suffer and are oppressed, which is an odd irony. There’s the fake ’suffering’ where women supposedly have ‘power of the pussy’ as you pointed out, and then there is the suffering an aware, compassionate human being feels when ze realizes ze has hurt / is hurting others. And I know some of this is just me imagining how I would feel, but some of it is what I have heard/felt from feminist males that I know, such as my partner and another close friend of mine. So yeah, that’s a rambling way of saying “men are not oppressed, but are yet harmed by sexism.”

I think it is just as damaging for a child to learn that ze is better than others by simple fact of body shape/skin/size as it is for a child to learn that ze is lesser. Do you know what I mean? obviously the oppressor has all the material perks, but they aren’t really positive when you consider the price of harming others. Hm. I feel like I am not explaining this very well. I suppose it comes down to a philosophy of mine — that by harming others you yourself are harmed, and that one cannot gain any true joy by harming others. The ‘joy’ some get from harming others I would call false, like the ‘joy’ that comes from intoxication. Oppressors like Hugh Hefner are constantly drugged with lust and power but they are not happy. Not that we should allow them to continue harming others! But just to realize that they are not to be envied.

I have been accustomed to avoiding discussions of how the poor men suffer so from having to oppress everyone without really wanting to oppress anyone. Generally, such discussions are started by Men’s Rights Advocates (MRAs) who are actually suffering the unendurable pangs of privilege thwarted. Such whines and snivels are all along the lines of “As long as there exists anywhere a female who refuses to open her legs, I suffer and women have all the real power” and “Complaining about and pointing out the obvious truth that men are bossy, aggressive, hostile and needy makes me feel bad about myself and makes me want to punch someone, preferably someone female who won’t hurt much if she punches back” and suchlike absurdities.

But belenen points out how men who are aware of and critical of male supremacy - we call them feminists because there really isn’t a better term for it, since humanist is taken and means something quite different - can become and may have always been acutely aware of the social burdens of living up to the male stereotype. She seems to be pointing out that everyone who grows up in a patriarchal world is damaged. 

As someone who has enjoyed both drugs and booze with a certain amount of caution that has only increased with exposure to the double-edged sword of intoxication, I have to agree that male supremacy is a kind of drug, as is sexual stimulation. Like any drug, it will make you sick if you look up and notice the damage it can do to your body and the lives of those around you. If you deny or refuse to acknowledge these bitter effects, real sickness sets in, along with addiction and traumatic violence to anyone around you. 

My bottom line is that I benefit from opting out as far as I can from the trap of male identity and sexism. It’s not the point, this benefit. It’s rather a feeling that, once I believe that women are not different, don’t enjoy being oppressed, hate being the constant targets of male sexual aggression, from catcalls, to rape, to murder; once I get that simple idea in mind, it’s rather hard to live with myself knowing that I enjoy the same supremacy in any way, whether I ask for it or not.

I was replying to one of the very few who comment on this blog and thought I should take the time to make it a short post. I’m very sorry, BTW, that my blog-handling chops are so primitive that I couldn’t figure out how to manage this blog without requiring memberships. I also would like to apologize for the infrequency with which I post. I have a family and a job and they come first, though reducing and eventually evolving beyond male supremacy is always on my mind. 

You can get a little heartsick, if you think about injustice constantly. I really want to enjoy life, too. Anyway, I finished a new book about feminism.

It’s a great book for men that’s about porn and how it affects men, that could go a long way to explaining to feminist-friendly men about what they are participating in when they view porn to get off. It’s called Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity. Don’t read it yourself unless you need to find out how truly sickening the world of porn can be. 

The same wires carrying this to you are used far more often to help men hypnotize themselves into an orgasm by proving to them, over and over again, that women love being degraded and debased. This has got to be stopped. Free speech is one thing, but porn is not speech! Ask Catherine MacKinnon.
 

Which brings me to my thought about the wanna-be feminist in The Guardian this week. He wants to help the feminist movement and is outraged that he isn’t being welcomed as God’s gift to women. We don’t need any men telling us about how it feels to be an oppressed woman, and we don’t need any men trying to help when we’ve got god-like geniuses like MacKinnon and Dworkin and even my personal hero Twisty Faster who can do it so much better than he could ever hope to. 

I’ve noticed, through the years of reading Twisty Faster’s hilarious blog, that we are periodically inflicted with scientific studies about sex that are hopelessly biased and constructed around misogynistic premisses, like “Why are women so dumb?” or “Why won’t teh women fucks us a lot likes we wants to feck them, huh? Huh?”

Lately I’ve been perusing the Science Daily site, so I decided to look at some of the recent sex studies. They were all quite stupid, as usual, and I finally noticed why, because seeing a bunch of them together revealed a universal weakness that struck me instantly. Most of them were studies of arousal based on responses to porn.

I’m a man, so it’s not at all difficult for me to imagine the high level of sniggering and wisecracking that passes for science when these pornsick pervs are postulating their theories. “God, bisexual bitches are so hot! Let’s study them.” says lead scientist Misogynist Mike. “But are there enough sufficiently hot bi-sexual bitches out there for us to study?” asks his colleague, Pornsick Pat. “There seems to be a mysterious paucity of pornified bimbos out there willing to perform hot three-ways with their girlfriends, if my own experience is any indication.”

“I’ve got it,” says supergenius Misogynist Mike, chest swelling with virility and male pride, “Let’s do a study where we show hot lesbo porn and hot straight porn to a bunch of girls and see how many of them show arousal at both!” And a study was born, of the desires and porn-centric worldview of a few academic creeps.

What about some studies that show that all our ideas about arousal come from porn? We are taught, from birth, that arousal is created by superficial and artificial emphasis on graphic representations of women who never existed becoming aroused and doing things that indicate an almost insane need for them to debase themselves in order to achieve sexual satisfaction that could come from far simpler sources. Why not some studies that examine why sex with dignity and love is actually not arousing, while sex that is degrading is? And how did we learn to be aroused at what arouses us?

I used to argue that arousal causes male behavior, but feminist theory has opened my eyes to the far more fundamental question: What teaches us to be aroused by what?

I have to also add that sexual arousal seems to be like a Pandora’s Box, where, once you have learned something arouses you, you can’t really ever completely deny this arousal ever again.

Male sexuality, according to studies, is less bisexual than female. The explanation that comes to my mind is simple and probably difficult to disprove: Women are exposed to tons of lesbian pornography if they are straight, whereas men rarely even see gay porn. Where are the studies that show us how men who repeatedly view gay porn think of sex?

A world where our girlfriends constantly badger us into looking at gay and straight porn mixed together doesn’t exist for men. If it did, I think some studies could clear up this particular difference between the sexes quickly.