I was about 12 years old when this song was a hit, and it made me feel very nervous about what it meant to be a man. The air of menace is pretty extreme in this song, from the obvious resemblance of the title to the word “rapist”, to the warning, finger-shaking tone of blame it takes toward the women in the world who need to beware of the Rapper, to the description of his techniques in seducing women, which are threatening, manipulative and evil.

Hey girl, I bet you
There’s someone out to get you.
You’ll find him anywhere
On a bus, in a bar, in a grocery store.
He’ll say “Excuse me, haven’t I seen you somewhere before?”

Rap, rap, rap, they call him the Rapper.
Rap, rap, rap, you know what he’s after.

So, he starts his rappin’
Hoping something will happen.
He’ll say he needs you,
A companion, a girl he can talk to.
He’s made up his mind.
He needs someone to sock it to.

Rap, rap, rap, they call him the Rapper.
Rap, rap, rap, you know what he’s after.

He’s made an impression,
So he makes a suggestion.
“Come up to my place
For some coffee or tea or me.”
He’s got you where he wants you.
Girl, you’ve gotta face reality.

Rap, rap, rap, they call him the Rapper.
Rap, rap, rap, you know what he’s after

How’s a boy supposed to distinguish between what this rapist is doing and what he’s been taught to do in order to earn the romantic attentions of the girls he longs to love? And it’s confusing to think how menacing and dangerous it sounds to be the prey of what sounds like a fairly non-coercive seduction technique. Then, after all this sinister hinting around, the girl is instructed to simply face reality.

Something I have often thought about but rarely articulated is that men are not only taught how to be men in haphazard and slapdash ways, but also are taught many overtly contradictory ways of expressing masculinity, of varying degrees of evilness and aggression.

I think even the manliest man you have ever met is, at heart, completely uncertain as to just what a man is supposed to do or what is expected of him, and this uncertainty causes a great deal of misunderstood anxiety, which is most handily identified by men as anger and resentment toward women, who he thinks have invented and have sole responsibility for all masculine behavior through the all mighty power of the pussy, before which he trembles in abject fear.

This song does double duty, threatening both men and women with a dark vision of manipulation, coercion and rape.

I got a rare comment from a man who is confused about why I say that men “hate” women:

He notes that men are often kind to women, “…it’s not self-evident – to me at least – such everyday observations of apparent kindness can be reconciled with the view of men as creatures of hate.”

I wrote a long response about men and women not being all one thing or the other, but relative as all things are. And more about the social constructs of masculinity and femininity. But it’s kind of an appropriate introduction to my next misogynist song, wherein the naked, seething hate of a man for a woman he loves is exposed without any filters at all, Jesse Belvin’s doo-wop song “Mess You Up”.

Listen to me, it ain’t fair,
She run around here and there,
I’ll hit her, I declare, I don’t mind going to the electric chair.

I’ll mess you up, hurt you bad,
I laugh and joke but baby, I don’t play.

Been running round with my friend Joe
Ya’ll didn’t think that I would ever know
Now you no-good so-and-so
You gonna reap just what you sow.

I’ll mess you up, hurt you bad,
I laugh and joke but baby, I don’t play.

I thought you loved me like I love you
Why you wanna do the things you do?
I saw you grinnin’ at Jimmy and Jack
I think I’ll disconnect your back.

I’ll mess you up, hurt you bad,
I laugh and joke but baby, I don’t play.

Don’t come messin’ round with me
I’m just about as mad as I can be
I killed a lion when I was only three
Davy Crockett ain’t got a thing on me.

I’ll mess you up, hurt you bad,
I laugh and joke but baby, I don’t play.

I’ll chain down the lightning and ride the thunder
Pin the wind in a jug and beat it with a club

I’ll mess you up, hurt you bad,
I laugh and joke but baby, I don’t play.

It’s easy to laugh at the ferocity in this song if you’re a man wrapped safely in the privilege of exception from such enmity. But if you stop and consider that women are killed and assaulted everyday in ways just like this all over the world, it becomes too sad to crack a cynical grin ever again.

Here’s a uniquely evil song that charted in the sixties. It turns out there’s a whole genre of songs about being forced into prostitution by your own mother. This fits into my theory about the 1960s in America being the most misogynist culture ever.

I was lucky enough to get a comment about heavy metal songs being misogynist, too. I have to admit that if we start looking into hard rock and rock music in general the shit will get to be so thick that it is almost limitless.

“Well, I remember it all very well lookin’ back
It was the summer that I turned eighteen.
We lived in a one-room, run down shack
on the outskirts of New Orleans.

We didn’t have money for food or rent
to say the least we was hard-pressed
when Momma spent every last penny we had
to buy me a dancin’ dress.

Well, Momma washed and combed and curled my hair,
then she painted my eyes and lips.
Then I stepped into the satin dancin’ dress.
It had a split in the side clean up to my hips.

It was red, velvet-trimmed, and it fit me good
and standin’ back from the lookin’ glass
was a woman
where a half grown kid had stood.

She said, “Here’s your last chance, Fancy, don’t let me down!
Here’s your last chance, Fancy, don’t let me down.
God forgive me for what I do,
but if you want out girl it’s up to you.
Now get on out, you better start sleepin’ uptown.”

Momma dabbed a little bit of perfume
on my neck and she kissed my cheek
Then I saw the tears welling up
in her troubled eyes as she started to speak

She looked at our pitiful shack and then
she looked at me and took a ragged breath
She said, Your Pa’s runned off, and I’m real sick
and the baby’s gonna starve to death.

She handed me a heart-shaped locket that said
“To thine own self be true”
and I shivered as I watched a roach crawl across
the toe of my high-healed shoe

It sounded like somebody else was talkin’
askin’, “Momma what do I do?”
She said, “Just be nice to the gentlemen, Fancy.
They’ll be nice to you.”

She said, “Here’s your last chance, Fancy, don’t let me down!
Here’s your last chance, Fancy, don’t let me down.
God forgive me for what I do,
But if you want out girl it’s up to you
Now don’t let me down,
now get on out, you better start sleepin’ uptown.”

That was the last time I saw my momma
when I left that rickety shack
The welfare people came and took the baby.
Momma died and I ain’t been back.

But the wheels of fate had started to turn
and for me there was no other way out.
It wasn’t very long after that I knew exactly
what my momma was talkin’ ’bout.

I knew what I had to do.
Then I made myself this solemn vow:
I’s gonna to be a lady someday
though I didn’t know when or how.

But I couldn’t see spendin’ the rest of my life
with my head hung down in shame.
You know I mighta been born just plain white trash.
but Fancy was my name.

She said, “Here’s your last chance, Fancy, don’t let me down!
Here’s your last chance, Fancy, don’t let me down.
God forgive me for what I do,
but if you want out girl it’s up to you.
Now get on out, you better start sleepin’ uptown.”

Wasn’t long after that a benevolent man
took me in off the streets
One week later I was pourin’ his tea
in a five roomed penthouse suite.

Since then I’ve charmed a king, a congressman
and an occasional aristocrat
and I got me an elegant Georgia mansion
and a New York townhouse flat.

Now I ain’t done bad

Now in this world there’s a lot of self-righteous
hypocrites who call me bad.
They criticize Momma for turning me out
No matter how little we had.

But I haven’t had to worry ’bout nothin’
now for nigh on fifteen years
But I can still hear the desperation
in my poor mommas voice ringin’ in my ears.

“Here’s your last chance, Fancy, don’t let me down!
Oh, here’s your last chance, Fancy, don’t let me down.
God forgive me for what I do,
but if you want out girl it’s up to you.
Now get on out, you better start sleepin’ uptown.”

Like Wives & Lovers, there’s a strong theme of resignation and surrender in this song. How normal it was for women to feel this way is what I find the most horrible part about these lyrics. The one way out – capitulation to male desires – is all about becoming fully invested in being a member of the sex class. The uselessness of women unless they are objects of desire.

Even as women become more conscious of being worth more than just being used by men, the rise in porn culture attacks from the secret places that men hide their midnight desires, trying to undermine men’s ability to realize the obvious humanity of the women all around them.

It’s the image of patriarchy-pleasing handed down from mother to daughter that creeps me out the most about this song. An obvious male fantasy, yet one that makes twisted sense if you accept your fate as an oppressed and poverty-stricken person in a world of money and men. A simple update to becoming an empowered stripper would make this song as relevant today as it was then.

I know that of all the feminist blogs on the internet, mine is probably the least fun to read. I’m not a gifted humorist at the best of times, being more inclined to meaningless absurdity or hurtful sarcasm than wit or whimsy. When I’m talking about oppression, I get even heavier than ever, since it weighs on my soul and aggravates what Twisty Faster calls the Obstreperal Lobe.

But I love music, too, and have a decent collection of American popular songs of the 20th century. You can’t throw a note far into this collection without smacking some really insulting lyrics for the ladies, either. Some of the very worst of them are almost comic in their bald professions of hate, contempt or patronization of women.

So I’m going to list ten of the worst antifeminist songs I know of, and when I’m done, I’ll rank them according to comments, if I can’t figure out some way to embed a poll in my Wordpress blog (help on this is very welcome).

I want to start with one the worst, and the best. Best, because the melody is by Burt Bacharach, and I do love his melodies, since he is one of the finest composers of popular song around. Hal David wrote a scolding little lyric to this song that so perfectly encapsulates male privilege that you could write a primer on it by simply annotating thes fine lyrics:

Wives And Lovers
Jack Jones
(Burt Bacharach/ Hal David)

Hey! Little Girl
Comb your hair, fix your makeup
Soon he will open the door
Don’t think because there’s a ring on your finger
You needn’t try anymore

For wives should always be lovers too
Run to his arms the moment he comes home to you
I’m warning you…

Day after day
There are girls at the office
And men will always be men
Don’t send him off with your hair still in curlers
You may not see him again

For wives should always be lovers too
Run to his arms the moment he comes home to you
He’s almost here…

Hey! Little girl
Better wear something pretty
Something you’d wear to go to the city and
Dim all the lights, pour the wine, start the music
Time to get ready for love
Time to get ready
Time to get ready for love

What an air of menace, essential to almost all of the songs I’ll be presenting! It’s not so much a song as a scolding. The idea of a woman as a member of the sex class is right up front here, with no possible way to excuse or sugar coat the concept. In a way, it’s an important song for women to hear in order to confront the idea that this is what men want from them. Whenever a woman you know denies that feminism is about the liberation of women from male oppression just sing this song. You really don’t need to add much else.

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.