Feminist Fred

I’m beginning to sense a drift in the Patriarchal Borg mind. It’s one with the swift drift toward ever more violent and degrading pornography. It mirrors the now solid acceptance of the once-deplored vice of casino gambling. One glances toward Nevada, and one sees a horrific door opening up to a dystopian future I think of as Porn World.

The drift has become slightly easier to see because of the late scandal of Governor Spitzer, who was caught using prostitutes for evacuating his foul seed into. Such a scandal causes all the manly men, like my friends Misogynist Mike and Pornsick Pat, to instantly wallow in the freedom of constant fantasies of endless supplies of porn star looking prostituted women everywhere. And cheap enough for them, too.

Mike says to Pat, “What’s the big deal? A guy’s got to have some warm place to blow his wad into, doesn’t he? The problem is that it isn’t cheap enough, if you ask me.”

“If I was a girl, hell, I’d do it in a minute!” Pat replies, nodding sagely in his infinite understanding of how women would really think if they just had as much sense as men, “It’s just hypocritical bullshit, women not charging for sex. Hell, they make you pay out the ass for dinner and a show and then make you feel like a jerk just because you try to get them to reciprocate with a little blow job or something. It’s nothing but a fuckin’ racket!”

Mike nods in total agreement, even though neither one of them can even remember the last time they actually went out on a date matching that description. Pat usually confines his dates to the stacks of porn DVDs or a lengthy cruise through increasingly vile internet sites, while Mike prefers to date rape girls he bullies away from their girlfriends at singles bars.

“They’ll never get rid of it!” Mike says, “It’s the world’s oldest profession! It’s just bullshit prohibition, and you know that never works. They oughta just legalize it and get it over with.”

They look at each other in apelike delight. Why, it makes perfect sense! It’s not like you can try to stop manly men from trying every kind of coercion imaginable to use women sexually anyway. A man’s freedom to make women obedient to his sexual whims is the most important freedom of all, when you think about it.

“If it was legal, just think how cheap it would get.” Pat noted.

“Every whore out there would immediately start charging for it outright, instead of just insisting you buy them drinks and dinner. It would be a buyer’s market.” Mike added eagerly.

“They legalized gambling, didn’t they? And it’s already legal in Nevada. Hell, it’s just around the corner.” Pat rhapsodized. Let’s leave our two anti-heroes to their dick-swelling bliss and return to the world of real women.

Does anyone out there have any doubt that this coming? The next step towards fulfilling male privilege must be legalizing prostitution. Reducing women to objects has already been advancing quite nicely, with women scared into conforming to alien beauty norms, modeling themselves after porn stars and Bratz Dolls, exercising on stripper poles, and in millions of other examples. The next step in expanding male privilege is legalizing prostitution, so that men can enjoy even more unfettered access to using women, with even less choice in the matter for the women involved.

Why don’t these people get a life and stop dissing women-empowering porn?

101 Things You can Do To Combat Pornography

Pat is amused by the idea that the tidal wave of porn can be restricted in any way. Like most men, he really enjoys the kind of shows they have on this site that talk about how terrible pron is for women while making the explicit point that it sells TV shows condemning porn just as well as anything else.

Pornsick Pat will be a popular fellow with commentators, I assume. Everybody loves to complain about porn, or else they love to defend it. It’s kind of scary, but I’m going to attempt to write in the voice of a typical male porn user. Scary, but also easy, since I used to use porn myself and I know all too well how terrible it is for men.

How terrible it is for women is the point of most feminist discussions of porn, as it should be. It’s not too hard to convince most women that porn can be at least somewhat unsettling, especially in the early days of the millennium, when what was once considered hardcore is now absolutely mainstream, and what was once considered inconceivable is now the easily-available hard core. But on this blog I will assume that most of the women, at least, will have a high level of intolerance for all the forms of porn out there, if not my own level of semi-militant disgust.

Men who use porn create the problem of porn. There are far too few voices out there telling them why porn might make them sick and reduce their humanity. Feminist women, having even less empathy than most about the lure of porn, might like help with making men see the obvious degradation of porn, and men need to have the opportunity to hear men discuss their problems with porn in a way that encourages them to decrease or understand their problem.

I find it alarming that men get anti-porn messages from the religious right and feminists only. It used to be normal to see porn as degrading, because what is now seen as a matter of relative degradation was once a categorical label.

Pornsick Pat will defend porn in the sheepish, half-hearted voice of a man defending the indefensible from a woman he loves. He won’t be unapologetically pro-porn. But he will say, hopefully, most of things you hear from any man when you discover some hidden evidence of his private vices.

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.