Feminist Fred

I have a daughter who is now just four years old. Any tendencies I have towards feminism are directly attributable to her, my mother and my wife.

When I look at my daughter, I feel an identification that I could be her that helps to strip away many ingrained layers of misogyny.

Every dad feels the anxiety of the potential sexual exploitation of their daughter. We hope against hope that our little innocent kids will somehow escape the very exploitation that we cheer on and defend every time we look at porn or stuff a dollar down a stripper’s g-string. How dads manage to compartmentalize this stuff is more than a thinking person can comprehend.

The other day my first opportunity ever to give her some idea about the evil of men came up, and I hope I handled it right. I don’t want her to be horribly afraid of the world, no matter how evil it is, even though I do want her to understand that evil people do exist and must be watched for and avoided as much as possible.
We were getting up; I was lying in bed in my pajamas and she was bouncing around in her sleeper, and I had to get up and make her breakfast and turn on the TV so she could enjoy her morning ration of TV, which she loves with a terrible love I find hard to oppose.

She usually runs around or leaves me for a couple of seconds at some point in the morning, but this morning she was adhering and I needed to get those pajamas off and put on my clothes. I have these terrible memories of seeing my parents naked as a kid. They didn’t flaunt themselves at me, but once each I did see their sex organs and each sighting was seared into my brain. We live in a culture that hides our actual genitals yet loves to highlight our artificial sexual differences to the point of insanity, i.e. boob jobs. So I’ve never allowed her to see me entirely naked, and never will, since in our culture, like it or not, such a thing would be considered a deviant sex act if we weren’t related, and is a controversial one even when you are.
I realized she wasn’t going to toddle off on her own.

“OK, I’m going in the bathroom for a second. Wait here and I’ll be right out to get you your breakfast.” I told her.

“I want to go with you, daddy” she says. After all, I’m always going into the bathroom with her to read her books while she pees, it was one of our techniques for potty training her.

“No, I need to be alone in there, I’m changing into my underwear.”

“Why can’t I come?” Her tone was just a touch emotional, and I knew I had to give her a good reason, and I paused to think exactly what I should say at this delicate juncture.

“A grownup man should never let you see him naked. If he does, he’s being very bad and you should tell someone right away.”

She looked at me and I saw that she got some of the idea.

“If they do, they should be punished. It’s very bad.”

My feeling is that such things should be constantly said, but never at length.

Was I right? Did I go too far? How much is too much when you’re trying to prepare your daughter for the evils of misogyny; evils that seem to be growing and expanding every day?

Try to see beyond the allure, the addictive pleasures of our hypersexual culture. Examine more deeply why porn makes you feel good. Is it just sex, as you might think? It’s not just sex for most of us, if you think that just sex would mean there is a woman present. By just sex, do we mean masturbation is sex?

Masturbation was presented to me as an adolescent as an inevitable reality that only someone destined for mental problems would even seek to avoid. I never thought of it as sex, since sex was something far greater that I was hoping to get to do some day, with a girl who wanted to do it with me.

Is masturbation sex? Here’s a question men should ask themselves: Is masturbation having sex with myself? Just me and my dick, enjoying the purely physical sensation? No, it’s not. You can’t prove this any other way than by not lying to yourself and figuring that you are probably not that much different from most other guys. But who out there is man enough to just lie there, thinking of nothing but hand, cock, and the sensations they provide? What man masturbates with no thoughts of anything but themselves?

Hence, porn. Porn can be completely in the realm of personal fantasy, with no external references except those provided by the world around you. And yet, because these fantasies are not real, they are still porn. Porn can be fantasies of projected wishes of being with someone you love, yet this is still porn. Porn can be any desire that replaces the real presence of another with the imagined presence of another. It’s all abstract substitutions of imagery and imagined actions with actuality.

When I have sex I’m in the moment with someone I’m really into, if not in love with. I can’t invoke the porn feeling of abstraction when I have the actual flesh in front of me. Maybe this has caused problems of arousal for me, maybe this has made it easier for me to be a better lover, maybe this has kept me from invoking that same abstract arousal in another and led to the kind of semi-failure of arousal men fear. But I can distinguish easily between how great sex is with a woman and how masturbation gives me a really mixed bag of chaotic emotions that I find hard to examine, and therefore cannot understand.

Men are ashamed to admit they masturbate. It indicates so many negative things they don’t want to think about themselves that they refuse to even think about consciously, that they typically just avoid the subject completely, with themselves and with anyone who might bring the subject up.

A man who masturbates uses porn of some kind to get himself excited enough to do it and to make himself excited enough to come. Only rarely, in the heat of youth, when hormones flow like flooding rivers, do men ever get excited for no reason and come with little stimulus. Even young men, excited by their ability to come over and over again, will use porn to arouse themselves to higher and higher levels of orgasmic achievement, so that they achieve a state of hypersexual arousal from sheer habit.

Why shouldn’t this all be just fine, the way men like to see it? Why be ashamed? Where’s the negative? The negative is the porn. The negative is the idea that arousal as men know it depends on some kind of imagery or imagined actions in order to take place at all. Men would like to think they are just so incredibly virile that they can have all this sex, and all their masturbation is some kind of practice or some kind of proof that they could do this with a girl, too. But the reality, they suspect, and which I think is horribly true, is that it is the porn that takes them to this level, and that if you take away the porn, you take away much of the ability that porn promises.

Men also feel unloved and unappreciated when they masturbate, of course. They feel like they are going to waste. What a great feeling, what a big hard cock, it feels so good, why isn’t there anyone here to share it with me? They feel reduced to a lower, unlovable and undesirable level. Men who masturbate feel debased by having to resort to masturbation. If they were as great as they wanted to be, they would never have to jack off again. No man can honestly deny this feeling, no matter how hard he tries to hide it from himself.

Next post I will try to explain further how using porn to masturbate debases men, and how this feeling can be turned outward to create a need to debase women, too. Or maybe some of you can help me by leaving comments.

First, there’s this list of facts about the state of women in the world today, Thanksgiving, Life and Death, and Anti-feminism. I feel the need to direct any readers I might have to this because I don’t say much about the indisputable need for everyone, especially men, to understand that being pro-feminist is just plain normal and being anti-feminist is morally corrupt and soulless.

Blue Milk informs me that today is White Ribbon Day. I grimace at the dutiful and sanctimonious wearing of ribbons and suchlike demonstrations of solidarity that are better expressed through actions than gestures, but I applaud the idea that we should all support any consciousness-raising efforts. The idea that much of the world supports violence towards women, rather than deploring it, makes these two posts must reading for those who might not understand why I go to the effort of trying to blog about feminism at all.

Men really think this is true. Yet they act as if it were the dick that really rules.

I asked my conservative dad to send me anything anti-feminist that comes his way, since, like many older people on the net, he is in the middle of a never-ending deluge of refrigerator-magnet-style philosophy, sentiment and right wing crap allegedly spewed by George Carlin and suchlike Snopes fodder and nonsense.

It brought me back to the profound belief that men hold so dearly; that women, by virtue of arousing men against their will - against the man’s will, mind you - control men completely. A trained feminist will instantly bristle at the slightest hint that a woman has any power over her oppressor. A woman brainwashed and living in denial about her position in our culture will relish the thought, and the younger she is, the more likely she will buy into it.

Men live in a world where they expect and ever-higher level of privilege and deference given to their dicks. Any reduction in the imaginary privileges they expect will result in the baby rash cries of privilege thwarted. The slightest curtailment of the deference they expect results in a feeling of being controlled, because they expect to be in complete control at all times.

If you can see this from the standpoint of a man, you can understand how the slightest effort to remove women from servitude to their needs - like doing the dishes once a week - is seen as not just balancing the scales a little but as an infringement of privilege that, if it passes unprotested, leads to a downward slope where men are wearing dresses and high heels and makeup and being fucked in the ass by other men who didn’t fall for these fiendish tricks.

Men who intuit that relinquishing privileges will lead to them being reduced to the feminine state that they consciously assert is the one in control and making the rules will fight with all the strength they have to prevent themselves from degenerating to the same state they claim makes the rules. It’s a delicious paradox. So revolting and stupid, once you think it through.

Men claim that women make the rules as a way to excuse themselves for keeping women in their place. By reminding women and other men that women make the rules, they give themselves permission to rebel against any and all attempts to curtail sexist behavior.

She’s back.

When you read her account of a woman plagued by a man who raped her you will go into a righteous feminist rage. I find it difficult to believe that anyone could think their way around this woman’s problem. Because women who have been raped are unprotected by law or common civility.

Here’s a perfect way to figure out if Your Nigel will ever get feminism or not. Tell him this story and ask him what he’d do. When he offers up something lame, ask him if there might be any problems doing that if he were this woman.

Put him in her place. There’s no need to examine or criticize his points, because the point would be for him to walk in a woman’s shoes a while. The more men think about what it would be like to be raped by a man and how hard it would be to do anything about it, the less time they spend thinking about how terrible it would be if some bitch claimed that they raped her. Which is what men always fear first - the very idea that one of their loving advances might be misunderstood as rape is more on their minds than being raped. Once on this line of thinking men go nowhere but backwards.

This is because every man, deep in his heart, knows that manly sex done by real men is more like rape than the kind of sex women seem to like. And it makes them very defensive and afraid.

Why don’t these people get a life and stop dissing women-empowering porn?

101 Things You can Do To Combat Pornography

Pat is amused by the idea that the tidal wave of porn can be restricted in any way. Like most men, he really enjoys the kind of shows they have on this site that talk about how terrible pron is for women while making the explicit point that it sells TV shows condemning porn just as well as anything else.

After looking over a few of the comments submitted, I saw that one concept floated to the top pretty quickly. Men generally look on feminism as a personal affront; almost an insult. To acknowledge sexism is a form of anger, and feels aggressive and confrontational to men. Challenging male privilege is a hate crime to Misogynist Mike.

Well, of course, this makes a feminist angry, too. Because, as my Aunt Twisty always says, it’s not all about the men. It’s all about the oppression women feel, which is caused by, promoted and championed by men. Men look at their privileges as rights, and justify them by inventing parallels with nature that are easily revealed as shallow, self-serving excuses rather than scientific facts beyond any alternative interpretation.

A man finds little in our culture to encourage him to criticize himself in any manner, much less constructively. How can we get in there and start the process of reexamining assumptions when we are facing this wall of denial?

The anger that men exhibit, either subtly or overtly, when confronted with their own culturally-inculcated sexism arouses our anger. So the discussion becomes a fight, whether we want it to or not. And in a fight, men have a neurotic and potentially dangerous greed for winning. A fight with a man, once started, can get so vicious and arouse such a bestial desire to dominate that it can’t even be conceded to the man; since he will continue to beat on his own sick and sorry arguments even long after you’ve given up on him.

I’m not saying this has to be something uncivilized; actually, when it comes to your Nigel, the whole thing might take place over the course of a couple of chilly, civil, polite minutes.

The first thing to establish is that this is not about the man you are talking to. It is, but it isn’t. Take the personal away and move it to the universal and a man can have a chance to look at it a little more objectively. I like to start by stealing Twisty’s famous and useful pronouncement: “I Blame The Patriarchy!” If you want, you can just say you blame the culture we live in. But starting with universals, you can establish truths that can be reduced to specifics that can lead to increased awareness of a woman’s point of view.

We live in a patriarchy, where fathers pass on names to sons, men lead most of the businesses and hold most of the positions of authority, and where women are expected to act like men (domineering, childless, competitive to the point of obsession) in order to share in the patriarchal spoils. If you can get there, you might be able to get further. If you can get some agreement on this without lapsing into the specious and indefensible position that women have all the real power because of the inestimable Power Of The Pussy, then you can try to get across the idea that these things weigh more heavily on women than they even care to acknowledge, and that most women use a certain amount of denial just to get through the day because of it.

I personally think that working on men in stages, slowly, over time, is more effective than trying to force a feminist perspective from scratch in one session. So I’m going to stop here, as I would with Misogynist Mike of Pornsick Pat, and wait a week or two for it to sink in.

Now if anyone please has any suggestions or criticisms of this approach, let me have them. Getting to something that works to awaken men to the common sense truths of feminism is my goal here.

I’m going to try to start a list of common things men say about sexism, feminism and strong women who act like human beings instead of like sexbot man-pleasing domestic slaves. I would appreciate any and all help from everyone, especially women, who have heard this crap so long and so often that they probably don’t even notice it any more. By getting a grip on this stuff, we can then figure out what works in rebuttal, and what doesn’t, and of course, what we’d like to scream in their ignorant, delusional faces!

I could go on and on. But I want to address these as topics, one by one, so this is kind of a topic suggestion box. I’m trying to keep the topics about how bad men are, and what we can do to improve them, and will try to steer clear of women’s ideas about other women. That is what I hope the strength of this blog will prove to be - a place where women get together, with like-minded men, to find common problems with men and talk about successful ideas to change them for the better.

The voice of Misogynist Mike is the third fake identity I will assume for this blog. I’m trying to use these three voices to illustrate the various failings common to men who have no conception of feminism, or their own privilege in a world they dominate unthinkingly.

All men are misogynists whether they care to admit it or not. They have no control over it, and have not freely chosen to be misogynists. But there is no credible way to deny that in our western culture that white men are the top of the pecking order. But Misogynist Mike will deny it to his dying day, all the while insisting on everyone treating him as if it were true.

It’s the same way with racism, but while this blog is interested in racism, it is only from the standpoint of how racism shares awareness and oppression with the more universal problem of feminism. (I think years of considering racism and my sincere desire to reduce it in my life made it easier to understand feminism when I finally started to get, by the way) So racism is never off topic if it can relate in some way to helping men understand they are on top, and everyone else knows it.

Misogynist Mike is the kind of guy who would shut down the discussion in a heartbeat if he even heard the word misogynist. He loves being a manly man and hates fags, because they are like women. He claims to love women, because he loves sex so much, but hates marriage and “high maintenance” women and has no use for women who are less than attractive. Mike likes to hang out with his friends almost as much as he likes women, because only among men can he feel and express himself freely. He sees no connection between this inclination (towards emotional intimacy with men) and his own hatred of women, which he denies. He will freely admit that he doesn’t understand women and complain bitterly that they don’t understand him, and that the nature of women is responsible for this problem, not him.

Mike is also pornsick, of course, and tends to demand and expect porn-styled sex from his casual partners. He is not a completely pathetic loser like Pornsick Pat; his viewpoint is more that of the man who patterns his sex life after porn delusions. Pornsick Pat thinks he can compartmentalize his porn use away from the rest of his emotional and sexual life, since the two are so dissimilar, while Mike thinks porn is what life can be if he just finds a woman who has some sense. Mike shows us how men use sex to get what he wants from women.

Mike is the voice that you can scream at on this blog, though I expect you all to discuss him from any and all angles you want. But just think; on this blog there will be three fake voices for you to argue with who will never argue back. Since they don’t really exist, the women and feminist-identifying men who get past my slow moderation will be able to address him with the highest level of freedom they can manage.