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.

Do men dominate women because they lack empathy?

Over at I Blame the Patriarchy, the feminists are exchanging comments with some of the rare feminist friendly humans (with male parts) over the reasons why we are aroused by porn. Feminists with female parts tend to think that men have a simple desire to dominate women, and lack the empathy to put themselves in the place of a woman, who, they like to think, dislikes domination and wishes to avoid it.

The question is raised because one blamer with male parts claimed that a man who empathizes with women’s suffering can use empathy to drive pornographic thoughts from his head. 

Yet, his idea is pretty directly contradicted by women who fantasize about rape or coercion even though they have been raped themselves. How can they lack empathy when they have suffered directly from the brutalization of women? Obviously there’s more going on here than simply saying “I hate being dominated, therefore it can’t arouse me; and because I have been dominated, and I hated it, I am immune from arousal that is created by it.”

I may be quite wrong about everything I say on this blog. But one thing that I go back to again and again is the idea that arousal can be forced on us all by the conditioning of our culture and the self-hypnosis that masturbation creates. I’m not anti-masturbation, but I am highly suspicious of the hypnotic nature of porn and fantasy that we use to create the arousal and get off.

I’m an old human, past fifty now. My level of arousal has declined from the feverish heights of my teenaged years. Yet, before I changed my life due to feminist enlightenment, I was still trying to push the orgasm button almost as frequently as I did as a child. The addiction we develop over a lifetime of stimulation is pretty profound. 

Getting to orgasm becomes more and more difficult, though, and here is where I think we tend to use the sickness of forcible arousal to force ourselves to get off. It’s all one big clusterfuck of dominance and submission when you see it this way, and it transcends completely any male or female roles in the person getting themselves off. 

My thought is that because arousal is something we crave, and we don’t really feel strongly enough to complete a sexual act with ourselves, we seek out ideas of sex as an irresistible force that overcomes our lack of desire and fills it with the submission to this feeling that leads to orgasm. 

This is worded in such a poor way because I’m trying to put into the words the universality of my conception of arousal as something we all force on ourselves in order to feel that orgasm. Men force themselves to feel arousal by forcing women to feel arousal, either by love and attraction and flowery kittens-and-rainbows sex when young and attractive and possessed of actual magnetism, or through the fantasy of pretending that women become overcome by desire by being dominated, from the coercion of seduction to the rape-like horrors of BDSM.

My take on sexuality is based on m belief that all sexual roles are culturally-based. There is no natural or inherent bias. Everything we think of as gendered is ingrained in us from birth by our culture. Men buy into all this more easily than women because they can fool themselves into thinking that it’s essentially female to be overcome with lust and give into a degrading sexual experience. Yet, at the same time, men force themselves to come all the time when they jack off, essentially raping themselves without ever realizing it. 

I think there is a strong undercurrent of male sexuality that accepts the idea that since you enjoy forcing yourself to become aroused and to get off, that women should like it when you do them the same favor. 

So mere empathy for women is just a part of the methods by which we can detach ourselves from degrading sexual fantasies and porn. The other part is also realizing on some level that we are all trying to force ourselves to arousal and orgasm more often than we really need to be. And here is where the deepest resistance will always lie for those, like me, who willfully addicted themselves to the orgasm button decades ago.

A man chases women until he finds one who allows him to fuck her, impregnate her, and thereby own her life. This is the essential meaning of marriage, if you strip away all the details about God and legalities and shades of moral do’s and don’ts. The chasing of women, the relentless pursuit, is what reveals marriage as the brutish and domineering thing it really is.

The fear of gay marriage must be closely related to the fear of dominant gays. Men, or dominant sex partners, no matter what sex, will be allowed to chase women, or whichever sex they target, that they see as submissive or open to being seduced. The idea of sex itself is drenched in coercion and male supremacy, and marriage is the codification of the essential underlying meaning of sex being about pursuing and winning. Putting this power into the hands of gays means allowing them the same privilege to openly pursue those who haven’t chosen to be gay but who can be had by the same mixture of cunning and force that men use on women.

It has taken me a really long time to even come this close to understanding the fear and outrage straight people feel about gay marriage, since I have a nature that has never really been comfortable with my given role as a predator. Once you see that the echos of rape resound throughout the entire construction of arousal and sexuality in a patriarchy, you stop being befuddled by the moral window dressing that they all use to disguise their unexplored fears and desires.

So the sum of my understanding of the fear of gay sex and marriage is this: If we let those gays openly marry each other, they can openly pursue anyone they want, and that means that gay people will start raping, owning and marrying straight people. The idea that anyone can rape and enslave someone is a subtle threat to male privilege.

I can’t help but feel awe about the unbelievably fine and delicate sensitivity of male privilege to the slightest threat from any side. For something that most people would swear does not exist, it certainly has a robust self-preservation instinct, even in the face of total emotional chaos, which is how I used to characterize the fear of gay marriage.

ISLAMABAD, Aug 29: Balochistan Senator Sardar Israrullah Zehri stunned the upper house on Friday when he defended the recent incident of burying alive three teenage girls and two women in his province, saying it was part of “our tribal custom.”

Senator Bibi Yasmin Shah of the PML-Q raised the issue citing a newspaper report that the girls, three of them aged between 16 and 18 years, had been buried alive a month ago for wishing to marry of their own will.

I realize that male supremacy, from the standpoint of an American male, fearful of losing his precious privileges or even being mistaken for someone less than masculine at all times, is a somewhat abstract thing, because the less time spent thinking about it the better. But actually it’s all part of a global, age-old set of customs that are no different in essence from this atrocity.

When you think of liberating women from this kind of custom, or any custom that degrades, patronizes or even exaggerates the distinctions between the sexes in the name of masculine or feminine behavior, you are also thinking of liberating yourself from the cultural mandate to be an unthinking monster who oppresses half the people on earth by your very existence.