Feminist Fred

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.