Feminist Fred

I was replying to one of the very few who comment on this blog and thought I should take the time to make it a short post. I’m very sorry, BTW, that my blog-handling chops are so primitive that I couldn’t figure out how to manage this blog without requiring memberships. I also would like to apologize for the infrequency with which I post. I have a family and a job and they come first, though reducing and eventually evolving beyond male supremacy is always on my mind. 

You can get a little heartsick, if you think about injustice constantly. I really want to enjoy life, too. Anyway, I finished a new book about feminism.

It’s a great book for men that’s about porn and how it affects men, that could go a long way to explaining to feminist-friendly men about what they are participating in when they view porn to get off. It’s called Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity. Don’t read it yourself unless you need to find out how truly sickening the world of porn can be. 

The same wires carrying this to you are used far more often to help men hypnotize themselves into an orgasm by proving to them, over and over again, that women love being degraded and debased. This has got to be stopped. Free speech is one thing, but porn is not speech! Ask Catherine MacKinnon.
 

I just got my copy of Catherine MacKinnon’s Only Words in the mail and it is breathtaking. I’m afraid to even show it to my wife because I almost cried three times in the first five pages. She ruthlessly and beautifully lays out the hideous lies about pornography in the most stunning prose, effortlessly building from one undeniable truth to the next. It’s one of the greatest works of feminist thought I’ve ever read. 

Which brings me to my thought about the wanna-be feminist in The Guardian this week. He wants to help the feminist movement and is outraged that he isn’t being welcomed as God’s gift to women. We don’t need any men telling us about how it feels to be an oppressed woman, and we don’t need any men trying to help when we’ve got god-like geniuses like MacKinnon and Dworkin and even my personal hero Twisty Faster who can do it so much better than he could ever hope to. 

I’ve noticed, through the years of reading Twisty Faster’s hilarious blog, that we are periodically inflicted with scientific studies about sex that are hopelessly biased and constructed around misogynistic premisses, like “Why are women so dumb?” or “Why won’t teh women fucks us a lot likes we wants to feck them, huh? Huh?”

Lately I’ve been perusing the Science Daily site, so I decided to look at some of the recent sex studies. They were all quite stupid, as usual, and I finally noticed why, because seeing a bunch of them together revealed a universal weakness that struck me instantly. Most of them were studies of arousal based on responses to porn.

I’m a man, so it’s not at all difficult for me to imagine the high level of sniggering and wisecracking that passes for science when these pornsick pervs are postulating their theories. “God, bisexual bitches are so hot! Let’s study them.” says lead scientist Misogynist Mike. “But are there enough sufficiently hot bi-sexual bitches out there for us to study?” asks his colleague, Pornsick Pat. “There seems to be a mysterious paucity of pornified bimbos out there willing to perform hot three-ways with their girlfriends, if my own experience is any indication.”

“I’ve got it,” says supergenius Misogynist Mike, chest swelling with virility and male pride, “Let’s do a study where we show hot lesbo porn and hot straight porn to a bunch of girls and see how many of them show arousal at both!” And a study was born, of the desires and porn-centric worldview of a few academic creeps.

What about some studies that show that all our ideas about arousal come from porn? We are taught, from birth, that arousal is created by superficial and artificial emphasis on graphic representations of women who never existed becoming aroused and doing things that indicate an almost insane need for them to debase themselves in order to achieve sexual satisfaction that could come from far simpler sources. Why not some studies that examine why sex with dignity and love is actually not arousing, while sex that is degrading is? And how did we learn to be aroused at what arouses us?

I used to argue that arousal causes male behavior, but feminist theory has opened my eyes to the far more fundamental question: What teaches us to be aroused by what?

I have to also add that sexual arousal seems to be like a Pandora’s Box, where, once you have learned something arouses you, you can’t really ever completely deny this arousal ever again.

Male sexuality, according to studies, is less bisexual than female. The explanation that comes to my mind is simple and probably difficult to disprove: Women are exposed to tons of lesbian pornography if they are straight, whereas men rarely even see gay porn. Where are the studies that show us how men who repeatedly view gay porn think of sex?

A world where our girlfriends constantly badger us into looking at gay and straight porn mixed together doesn’t exist for men. If it did, I think some studies could clear up this particular difference between the sexes quickly.

Try to see beyond the allure, the addictive pleasures of our hypersexual culture. Examine more deeply why porn makes you feel good. Is it just sex, as you might think? It’s not just sex for most of us, if you think that just sex would mean there is a woman present. By just sex, do we mean masturbation is sex?

Masturbation was presented to me as an adolescent as an inevitable reality that only someone destined for mental problems would even seek to avoid. I never thought of it as sex, since sex was something far greater that I was hoping to get to do some day, with a girl who wanted to do it with me.

Is masturbation sex? Here’s a question men should ask themselves: Is masturbation having sex with myself? Just me and my dick, enjoying the purely physical sensation? No, it’s not. You can’t prove this any other way than by not lying to yourself and figuring that you are probably not that much different from most other guys. But who out there is man enough to just lie there, thinking of nothing but hand, cock, and the sensations they provide? What man masturbates with no thoughts of anything but themselves?

Hence, porn. Porn can be completely in the realm of personal fantasy, with no external references except those provided by the world around you. And yet, because these fantasies are not real, they are still porn. Porn can be fantasies of projected wishes of being with someone you love, yet this is still porn. Porn can be any desire that replaces the real presence of another with the imagined presence of another. It’s all abstract substitutions of imagery and imagined actions with actuality.

When I have sex I’m in the moment with someone I’m really into, if not in love with. I can’t invoke the porn feeling of abstraction when I have the actual flesh in front of me. Maybe this has caused problems of arousal for me, maybe this has made it easier for me to be a better lover, maybe this has kept me from invoking that same abstract arousal in another and led to the kind of semi-failure of arousal men fear. But I can distinguish easily between how great sex is with a woman and how masturbation gives me a really mixed bag of chaotic emotions that I find hard to examine, and therefore cannot understand.

Men are ashamed to admit they masturbate. It indicates so many negative things they don’t want to think about themselves that they refuse to even think about consciously, that they typically just avoid the subject completely, with themselves and with anyone who might bring the subject up.

A man who masturbates uses porn of some kind to get himself excited enough to do it and to make himself excited enough to come. Only rarely, in the heat of youth, when hormones flow like flooding rivers, do men ever get excited for no reason and come with little stimulus. Even young men, excited by their ability to come over and over again, will use porn to arouse themselves to higher and higher levels of orgasmic achievement, so that they achieve a state of hypersexual arousal from sheer habit.

Why shouldn’t this all be just fine, the way men like to see it? Why be ashamed? Where’s the negative? The negative is the porn. The negative is the idea that arousal as men know it depends on some kind of imagery or imagined actions in order to take place at all. Men would like to think they are just so incredibly virile that they can have all this sex, and all their masturbation is some kind of practice or some kind of proof that they could do this with a girl, too. But the reality, they suspect, and which I think is horribly true, is that it is the porn that takes them to this level, and that if you take away the porn, you take away much of the ability that porn promises.

Men also feel unloved and unappreciated when they masturbate, of course. They feel like they are going to waste. What a great feeling, what a big hard cock, it feels so good, why isn’t there anyone here to share it with me? They feel reduced to a lower, unlovable and undesirable level. Men who masturbate feel debased by having to resort to masturbation. If they were as great as they wanted to be, they would never have to jack off again. No man can honestly deny this feeling, no matter how hard he tries to hide it from himself.

Next post I will try to explain further how using porn to masturbate debases men, and how this feeling can be turned outward to create a need to debase women, too. Or maybe some of you can help me by leaving comments.

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.

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.