Feminist Fred

Feminism is the only branch of philosophy to actually criticize what we think of sex, and because of it, it tends to repel and offend anyone in a position of privilege or anyone who bases their worth on defending the privileges of those who oppress them.

Go up to any dude in our dude-centric world today and tell him that his entire conception of sex is based on dominance and submission, rape and coercion, and you’ll get a strangely defensive response of some kind instantly.

This, to the standard feminist, is nothing more complicated than male privilege defending its own; but as a man living in a misogynist world, I have to point out some of the complications that arise from the mixed bag of emotions aroused by contemplating your own misogyny. They may be undercurrents compared to the limitless oceans of selfishness that make up the bulk of a male viewpoint, but underneath every male, no matter how well-trained he might be by our patriarchal culture, there is a human being.

I submit that it is the cultural perversion of sex that corrupts us completely. In our culture, there is no real application of the idea that sex is something rare and magical, sacred and untouchable. We all have a sense of this in our hearts, but how many of us have it destroyed by all the evils of the world before we even get to try it for ourselves?

The sex-positive feminists and their dudely acolytes, who swarm the internet loudly proclaiming their feminism, yelling for the rights of a woman to prostitute herself, are so far from understanding sex as something positive that they have no idea what I’m even talking about when I proclaim sex is something rare and sacred. To them sex is something as common as dirt, as unimportant as any other bodily evacuation, and has no higher meaning than a squirt of spunk over the face of an empowered woman on her knees before them. Sacred! They say. What a laugh.

To the sex-positive feminists, all sex is just masturbation with partners, two people - or more - doing nothing any more special than jerking themselves off with company. It’s a circle-jerk world, boys and girls, together or apart. The mere idea that sex could be anything higher than this simple animal act can only enrage them.

But I say it can be; and it is. It’s a much higher form of communication between a man and a woman than I could ever explain. It’s a mutual exchange that can lead to something nobody can ever fully comprehend or duplicate: the creation of a human life. To reduce this to nothing more than orgasmic degradation is lunacy and madness, and it’s easily shown to be so by looking at how quickly mere animal sex degenerates into dominance and submission, lust and control.

If someone tells you they are sex-positive from behind a stripper pole, or while hooking their way through grad school, you should tell them “You know nothing about sex!”

So many people these days have only enacted pornographic fantasies in the company of another person enacting a fantasy. How many have ever really known sex?

Is sex something sacred or profane? Deep down inside, even the most worthless dude knows that it must be something more than spewing his filthy spunk without reason or emotion.

I’ve only read a few chapters of Intercourse, only the second feminist book I’ve ever read. It’s amazing how different it is to read a book by Dworkin than it is to read about Dworkin. The shocking slogans and out-of-context quotes are all I’ve ever heard, and they’re so unfair. You simply have to read the entire book to get a real idea of the enormous complexity of her thoughts on sex in our culture. Most of it is simply pointing out things famous writers have actually written about sex, love and reducing women to lovely things to be fucked.

She was a hero to me from the time I first heard that she had joined forces with the right wing to try to limit the spread of pornography. To be blunt, I don’t care who helps me to get this stuff back under the bed, under the counter, and in the closet once again; it just has to be done. To live in a world that openly condones the increasingly violent excesses of porn just to try to prove itself sex-positive is intolerable to anyone who has a distaste to being degraded and degrading others.

It’s not that I’m anti-sex. I love sex, but more than sex, I love to love, and that’s something that encompasses and surpasses sex; sex being merely a subset of love. To love, in my mind, is like the Italians put it - volere bene - to wish someone wellness. To wish all good for someone, to want to give without getting back. Unconditionally, regardless of sex.

To say that you are sex-positive and support the rapelike porn sex of our modern world - whether you are a woman or a man - is willful ignorance. Dragging sex down into an insensitive animal level in order to continue to deliver ever-increasing shocks to your jaded sex-sickened body and mind isn’t positive.

I’ve read a lot of negative crap about Dworkin and I can see that it’s all hooey. She’s an easy target, telling the truth we don’t want to hear, and the criticism that she doesn’t offer us a solution to the problem of sexual imbalance is just whining. She seems to expect us to feel free to imagine a solution for ourselves. If she were truly angry, she would have given us all up without ever writing a word.

I’m going to start reading Andrea Dworkin’s recently reissued book Intercourse. I’m eager to see what I might have missed that she has to say, and to get it from the source instead of second hand.

I’m especially interested in seeing where she leaves us, and where we might go. I’m interested in figuring out what sex should be, since I’ve got a pretty dark idea already of what it is.

What sex has become since she wrote this book might even be far worse than what she imagined.

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?

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.

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.