Feminist Fred

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.