Feminist Fred

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.

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.

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.

I’ve got this friend I’ll call Feminist Fred. He exists in my head, because I’m a man who has gradually come to accept and understand feminism as best I can. Many “true” feminists say that no man can ever be a feminist, which is something I’ve come to accept, so instead of pretending that I can be a feminist, too, I’ve invented Fred as a mouthpiece for all my attempts to understand and further the spread of feminism among men.

I had to invent several other men to populate this blog who don’t exist. Misogynist Mike, who thinks women are all stupid whores. Men like him are everywhere, and if you are one you can expect to be moderated into nonexistence on sight. But I will use his persona to illustrate the viewpoints of men like him, and show men like myself how we can slip into his ways of thought without questioning it.

Then there will be Pornsick Pat. Many a feminist male sympathizer will be much disturbed by seeing things he does and thinks are really good are also shared by this fellow. This blog will maintain a rigorous and firmly-held standard that pornography degrades women and that it also degrades men just as much, and will attempt to help men understand that this degradation is why they instinctively feel ashamed of consuming porn.

Lastly, we will have Your Nigel. This is the fellow who you date who could never be like Pornsick Pat and Misogynist Mike but who simply hides the truth from you because you could never date a guy like that and he knows it.

I will be posting on topics like rapists and those who defend them. The level of public acceptance of rape is getting to the point where it’s alarmingly close to being mainstream sex.

I’ll also touch a little on the topic of the beauty industry and examine it from the standpoint of how it creates a tendency towards pornsickness in men through constant titillation and how it creates and supports men hating women for not being as they should be, rather than from the more typical feminist viewpoint of how terribly oppressive it is for women.

I hope you like what I write, and if you don’t, let me know. I have a pretty thick skin. Comments will be heavily moderated, and might be a little slow - we shall see. Men who spew hatred of women will be banned. Men who think they know everything and want to argue until they have “won” will be banned. Women who do the same things will be banned if needed, but I expect this to be a safe place for women, and intend to keep it that way, even though the intention is to raise the consciousness of men who want to become more aware of the cruel and unsuspected effects of a misogynist world on their all-too human hearts.