Feminist Fred

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.

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.