What is the effect of feminism on males? How does a constant barrage of anti-male/anti-heterosexual discourse influence men?
Newton’s Third Law of Motion — for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction — can be applied to group psychology. Confronted with hostile criticism, some people will comply (the equal reaction), attempting to conform to the views of critics, so that we see some men trying to placate feminists by refraining from whatever male behaviors or attitudes feminists say they find offensive.
However, some men will not merely reject feminist criticism as incorrect or unfair, they will exhibit the opposite reaction, deliberately saying or doing things that offend feminists.
This kind of Newtonian opposite reaction to feminism takes many forms, both conscious and unconscious. I’ve always considered the “macho man” trend that emerged in the late 1970s and ’80s — e.g., the body-builder culture, action hero blockbusters like Rambo and Terminator — as a psychological reaction to feminism. Sure, those movies were mostly just escapist fun. Sure, tough-guy heroes have always been a staple product of Hollywood. But the ultra-muscled physiques of Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger were cartoonish in their exaggerated masculinity, and the stories were cartoonish, too.
We also see the Newtonian opposite reaction to feminism in the whole “dudebro” male-bonding culture, where chilling with your buddies in your “man cave” playing videogames or watching sports on TV is venerated as the ultimate in leisure. And I would argue that a lot of what feminists now label as misogyny (a word that means woman-hating) could best be understood as a secondary effect of feminism.
Quite often, you see young men doing or saying things they certainly must know will drive feminists into a furious rage. This is the politically incorrect thumb-in-the-eye response to feminist rhetoric that routinely insults heterosexual males. It is evident that feminists, despite their constant disclaimers of desiring nothing more than an innocuous “equality,” are in fact advancing a totalitarian worldview, a zero-sum game in which women’s “equality” requires expropriation.
According to this logic, everything any man possesses — education, employment, family, property, a good reputation — can only have been obtained through his oppression of females. If your son graduated summa cum laude, was hired by a Fortune 500 company, married a beautiful woman, and bought a nice house in the suburbs, this just proves that your son has benefitted from male privilege. His success is a result of cultural misogyny and anti-female discrimination.
Male success is social injustice, according to feminism’s totalitarian worldview. The feminist demand for “equality” is actually a demand that society punish successful men, a demand for new policies in schools and workplaces, a demand for a system that can guarantee more success for women by systematically depriving males of opportunities for success.
The enactment of such punitive anti-male policies is what feminists consider “progress” toward “equality.” We can view the entire campus “rape epidemic” discourse — false statistics and false journalism intended to force the imposition of policies aimed at depriving males of due-process rights — as emblematic of feminism’s totalitarian tendency.
Young men sense this intuitively. They perceive feminism as a hostile force. However, more than four decades into the feminist revolution, with feminism now deeply entrenched in our culture, exercising hegemonic influence within academia, today’s 20-year-old has no access to a rhetoric by which he can effectively challenge feminism. There are no anti-feminist professors on campus and no anti-feminist books in the library, and so young men generally lack the intellectual resources necessary to countering feminist arguments. Very few opponents of feminism bother to study the subject at a theoretical level, and opposition to feminism is therefore often badly argued — or not “argued” at all, instead taking the form of crude jokes and insults.
Viewing all this in terms of psychology, rather than politics, is really the only way to understand it. Here’s an example: Some dude posts a genuinely offensive joke about tricking women into believing he’s wearing a condom during sex. This joke is so wrong in so many ways that you have to suspect it was deliberately wrong, intended as some sort of ironic spoof of Bad Male Behavior. But the reaction? Oh. My. God.
. . . and . . .
I’ve had a dude do that before. that sh–t is terrifying. . . . I didn’t know that he [wasn’t wearing a condom] until he pulled out.
I FLIPPED. Cried all the way home. Cried for days. Got tested. Bought the morning after pill. Seriously, f–k dudes that do this.
. . . and . . .
This is how men talk to each other about us.
Ever since the “safe sex” gospel took hold in reaction to the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, young women have been learning painful lessons about human nature that their sex-education teachers never taught them. Anybody who actually buys into the In Latex We Trust mentality promoted by the “pro sex” evangelists is a fool, but these fools refuse to accept responsibility for the harms they suffer as a result of their own folly. “Safe sex” is a myth. There is no such thing as risk-free promiscuity. If you don’t know a guy well enough to know whether he can be trusted, sweetheart, why are you having sex with him?
The most ironic reaction, however, was this:
Uh . . . “sex work”?
The person who posted that describes herself as an “overeducated whore,” and provides this information about herself:
I have about 3 years’ experience as a stripper.
I have been escorting a bit over two years.
I have been sugaring for almost one year.
In case you didn’t know, “sugaring” is about so-called “Sugar Daddy” arrangements, which is prostitution by any other name. For an “escort” to admit that she’s lucky she’s not dead is a recognition of the brutal realities of that sordid business, and johns not wearing condoms is scarcely the worst of it. But, hey, feminists will condemn us for “slut-shaming” if we disapprove of prostitution, so once again we see how feminism’s totalitarian tendency to silence dissent serves to suppress basic common sense.
Easy money for easy sex ain’t so easy, is it, honey?
Moving on in our Bad Ideas Have Bad Consequences tour — try to imagine if Richard Weaver had a blog — let’s ask ourselves what kind of guy actually buys into feminist ideology?
Assuming that you are an honest, decent, law-abiding person, you realize that you are not to blame for creeps who slip Rohypnol into girls’ drinks at frat parties. You don’t engage in abusive catcalling. You are not producing “revenge porn.” You are not “oppressing” women. You genuinely like women and so you recognize that feminists are engaged in dishonest anti-male propaganda if they accuse you of misogyny merely for disagreeing with their ideology.
A clean conscience is helpful in confronting totalitarians, which is why most males enjoy mocking the feminist rhetoric that portrays us as Patriarchal Oppressors. What about those other guys, the ones who jump on the feminist bandwagon and start pointing the accusatory finger at other males? We naturally suspect they have some ulterior motive, and our suspicions of these “white knight” types are frequently confirmed: Feminist hero Bill Clinton turned out to be a sexual predator, and then there was the case of “male feminist” Professor Hugo Schwyzer.
Nevertheless, not every “male feminist” can be presumed to be a hypocritical worm who has figured out that he can get laid by hanging around liberal women and talking “pro-choice” politics. Some of these guys sincerely believe feminist theory, and one of them posted a diatribe against MRAs (Male Rights Activists) in 2012:
Misandry Isn’t Real Dudez
I’m a guy, and I need feminism. Not “men’s rights.” Feminism. Here is why.
Everything that MRAs talk about that men can’t do or are socially punished for arise directly and immediately from misogyny and transmisogyny. Not “misandry.” Misogyny.
Whether a man is expressing his emotions, playing with children, baking, having sex wherein he is penetrated in any way, wearing the wrong color, talking the wrong way, moving the wrong way, being sexually harassed/assaulted, or paying too little attention to looking like he’s not paying attention to how he looks, when society punishes him or derides him or marginalizes him for these things, it is happening because they are things associated with women, and our society at large f–king hates women.
Has that sunk in yet?
Men, can you even think of a single goddamn way you have ever been mocked that wasn’t somehow related to something that a misogynist society sees as feminizing? Even when large men are mocked for their bodies, they are referred to as having “man-boobs,” for f–ks sake.
How do you expect to improve those things with “men’s rights?” What right are you fighting for? I can tell you what I think you’re fighting for. I think you’re fighting for the right to contain and control misogyny, and direct it back at women, where you think it belongs. You want to maintain your privilege but erase its consequences, and that’s why your movement is farcical; it’s a big f–king feedback loop. How do you expect men to be free from the peripheral effects of misogyny and transmisogyny when you refuse to even f–king believe it’s real?
That 2012 male feminist rant went viral and has been endlessly reposted on Tumblr, where it is typically praised thus:
Here, then, we have a brilliant male feminist. This guy is the progressive beau ideal of a supportive ally for gender equality. Yet when we check out the guy who authored this rant . . .
Sure it doesn’t. Whatever you say.
If they would just stay in the kitchen and keep the house clean, there would be no need for the hate, would there?
Several vernacular definitions have been offered of what feminism his, among them:
1. The habit of looking at social relations with the assumption that women have options, and men have obligations.
2. The habit of looking at social relations with the assumption that only women are important and only their interests and sensibilities matter. (Ellen Goodman used to provide a fine twice-weekly example of this mentality).
3. The habit of looking at social relations with the assumption that men are defective women (and, especially, boys are defective girls). Anna Quindlen was a great purveyor of this view, which is also prevalent in the educational apparat.
4. An open mouth saying ‘I want’; a belief that preferences and appetites articulated by women are their own justification (of which Sandra Fluke is a fine example).
5. The habit of looking at social relations through a prism which might be used by a graduate of a seven-sisters college (see Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem) and reflective of their concerns and frustrations. (Most salient for feminist discussion ca. 1969).
6. The habit of looking at social practice with a juvenile prism – i.e. carrying resentments about what the boys get to do that we do not (see churchwomen).
—
Re the arts and sciences faculty I am most familiar with, the share of diplomas awarded each year which are destributed to those majoring in ‘women’s studies’ is 0.3%. (and, note, most college majors are studying vocational subjects, not arts-and-sciences) The complaint about Yale University’s ‘women’s studies’ program back in the day was that the ratio of its budget to its majors exceeded that of the Economics department by 100 to 1. The students are not influenced directly by academic feminism because almost none of them waste their time on it. The problem with women’s studies is opportunity cost – resources expended which could go to something worthwhile – and corruption – the allocation of resources to privileged political interests. The problem is jobs for jerks, which implicates a mess of things college administrations do, not just hiring bad-attitude dykes. Hardly anyone pays attention to the jerks but other jerks.
—
I tend to doubt men react so much to ‘feminism’ (except when contending with school administrations and the HR department) as contemporary girl culture, which has some points of congruence with ‘feminism’ (and is, in some settings, buttressed by law). Kay Hymowitz is an example of a author with no connection to women’s studies or gauche politics who subscribes quite unself-consciously to item 2 listed above (and also exemplifies some of item 5). Mr. Dalrock is in part in the business of elucidating the ways in which some of the above points manifest themselves in the culture and institutional life of contemporary evangelicalism.
You need to address problems in girl culture: the notion that men are disposable at the whim of the woman, the notion that they have no prerogatives in the care government of their children but are merely instruments of the mother’s program, and the notion that they should fulfill a menu of expectations that are not readily reconcilable One might also address the notion that women are never properly held accountable, especially by men.
Perhaps we’re in a 100-year cycle: Freud, in Narcissism (1914), described “penis envy”, and how some women develop a masculine ideal as “a survival of the boyish nature that they themselves once possessed”. Is that what we’re seeing here? Women denouncing men for outgrowing the asexual stage of childhood?
The amazing amount of intellectual hoops these people jump through to maintain double standards of racial and sexual profiling is a sign of brutal stupidity, not insight. Identity addicts can’t make simple principled comparisons. What happens if I make up clever rhetoric where women or blacks are always wrong? I’m sure Stormfront feels the facts are always on their side too. But feminists don’t see their bizarre phobia like that. They think it’s all clever societal observation. There’s a name for what it is when vast millions of people are said to be always wrong based on skin and sex: supremacist bigot. And yes, when you think 6,000 years of civilization is Jim Crow for women, that’s a phobia. Equal is as equal does, and if you’re not occupying draft offices and Vet’s Hospitals and demanding diversity, you’re not even trying to be equal. I guess if I have a legal obligation to guarantee the survival of my country with my skin then yes, that is privilege and I will take the statues, thank you. If you object to that then sign up.
As I have said many times on these threads, for the Leftist/Feminist, all human action is zero sum. If I have a successful day at my business, then some female business owner somewhere in the U.S. declared bankruptcy.
Actually, its worse. Because I’m a Caucasian male, when I buy KFC for the family on the way home from work with the profits I earned by screwing the female business owner I don’t know into penury, I’m also starving some black people in the Central African Republic.
And because I’ve been married to the same lovely woman for almost thirty years, I’ve deprived a polygamous lesbian of whatever it is they do.
God, I love being a white, heterosexual male!
Thanks for your comments. I would suggest:
1. The influence of Women’s Studies is far greater than the number of students majoring in Women’s Studies would suggest. Each year, approximately 90,000 students nationwide take at least one Women’s Studies class. In many cases, these are students who are pursuing humanities/social science majors — English, history, psychology, etc. — and so the influence is diffused in this manner. Further, Women’s Studies programs are interdisciplinary, taught by faculty from other departments (psychology and sociology, especially), so that the influence of feminist ideology spreads across the curriculum. Virtually all discussion of human sexuality in academia nowadays is influenced by feminism.
2. “Girl culture” is nowadays a reflection of feminist influence, albeit in a diluted form. What you describe is the vulgar form of feminist empowerment ideology I call “Go Girl Feminism”: Anything a female does is AWESOME simply because she is female: “You go, girl!” It is very much a female-supremacist worldview, and is quite commonplace in popular culture.
My assignment within the Heteronormative Patriarchy is to oppress transgenders in Paraguay. And I know what you’re wondering: “They’ve got a lot of transgenders in Paraguay?” No, but they would, if not for my oppression. It’s a part-time gig.
I hate Freud, so I’m not endorsing any of his ideas, but sometimes I wonder …
Men and women are complimentary, so you’re not going to have identical standards in a well-ordered world. There will be different expectations with regard to what counts as honor and what counts as good leadership.
“I didn’t know that he [wasn’t wearing a condom] until he pulled out. […] Bought the morning after pill. Seriously, f–k dudes that do this.”
Fantastic thinker fails to realize that her conclusion can be read as an insane imperative.
“How do you expect men to be free from the peripheral effects of misogyny and transmisogyny”
Transylwhatnow? I really do find it difficult to keep on top of all the evil and exotic-sounding things I, as a white heterosexual Christian man, am to blame for. Could they send me a weekly updated list perhaps?
“I have come out as a transgender woman.”
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! It can cut off its wee-wee, it can put the lotion on its skin, but that’s no woman…
http://www.newsrealblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/austin-powers-man-baby.jpg
If a guy does this, it’s rape. Call the cops. Ruin his life since he has no problem risking yours. Make him f–king learn. Rapists belong in jail. Rape by deception is rape, not a funny “meme.”
And yet, when it comes to women tricking men into raising the offspring of other men as their own, the feminist stance is: DNA tests are an anti-feminist appliance of science and Many men have, of course, ended up raising children who were not genetically their own, but really, does it matter?
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/6391918/whos-the-daddy/
I’d like to add this about the “slut-shaming” rhetoric to show how dishonest feminist discourse is.
Naturally feminists were all over the Charlie Hebdo murders but they one and all cast it in the light of racist cartoons, which was a lie. Those people were killed for blasphemy, but social justice warriors forbid themselves to talk about it in those terms. If they do, they’d have to make an admission about a protected group. The idea Salmon Rushdie went into hiding because he was a racist is ludicrous, and radicals have never spoken about “racist” cartoons. There is no religious element there and it is not fundamentalist rhetoric.
The shaming part is feminists are reversing their shaming argument about the cartoonists in suggesting they brought about their own murders. Apparently drawing cartoons is a reasonable expectation of a death sentence so don’t do it. Walking in an alley at 3 AM in a miniskirt brings no similar expectations of a visit with reality so do it. Cartoonists don’t need chaperones. They weren’t drunk and alone with a stranger where they made themselves vulnerable.
This week, I am mostly strangling paraplegic genderqueer womyn of colour in Nepal. With my Evil White Man Mind-Tentacles.
Yeah. When that guy mentioned “transmisogyny” and men being penetrated , I knew what was coming. Oh…I said “coming”.
Interesting perspective. But I agree this is more diffuse than course titles. For example postcolonial studies is a gender feminist lake.
I think it’s simpler than that.
A large percentage of Western women (and men) under the age of about 30 are childish narcissists. They’ve never faced any real hardship or danger in their lives, so they invent them.
Feminism offers a certain sort of privileged middle class white girl the chance to redefine herself as a victim, which a lot of young women find emotionally compelling.
Sometimes, a kernel of truth pops up in the oddest places.
On that particular faculty, the only inter-disciplinary programs which have a constituency are ‘environmental studies’ (mostly geoscience faculty) and ‘Asian studies’ (mostly art history and comparative religion). None of the rest account for more than 1% of the diplomas. Some are pro forma majors. If you take the right menu of courses, you can be awarded a degree. It’s just that no one ever bothers.
The need to staff these programs (with corresponding faculty from conventional departments) can freeze faculty hiring in an unprofitable mold. The departments are not necessarily pathological. That particular institution has had in the past an English department amply staffed with people who fancy the study of literature, not exercises in garage sale sociology, and their signature is that a certain share of your course work is in literature published prior to 1800. I was congenial with one of the corresponding faculty for the women’s studies program. That woman loves John Donne and Shakespeare; I doubt she wastes any space in her head on ‘bell hooks’.
If you did all that part-time, The Patriarchy needs to give you a raise.
Dude looks like a lady … just saying
“when they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate”
The assumption of victim-hood is the common theme of all the various members of the left coalition. The exception is hetero white men, who must embrace their guilt for oppressing all the others. I find that puzzling as I don’t understand the emotional payoff.
“Men, can you even think of a single goddamn way you have ever been mocked that wasn’t somehow related to something that a misogynist society sees as feminizing?”
Of course they can, you blithering moron, what sort of a stupid question was that? Right now, for example, I am mocking you for being a blithering moron.
And they wonder why we’ve reached peak oppression.
Actually, this morning when I deposited a check in our church’s offering plate, I put a kiplingesque colonialist boot on the neck of some indigenous, bat-worshiping tribe in the depths of the Amazon drainage basin.
So there.
Ditto. I feel ashamed when I feel that I’ve been a victim. I certainly don’t look for ways that I’ve been screwed over.
They do make it so easy by making the target so large.
I’m still tying to figure out how a society which hates women has men spending so much time and effort to
copulate withmeet women/If our esteemed host’s sex troubles series means anything, it means that young men who want to lead successful lives should find a decent woman, and get married earlier rather than later. Having a wife, and being faithful to her, means not worrying about your next drunken “conquest” deciding that you raped her, and means that you aren’t going to be surprised when some sweet young thing shows up with a baby she says is yours.
That advice is exactly how all of Western civilization was supposed to work, something which worked pretty well for our society for as long as we know about human society. It has only been since we decided that we were somehow smarter than everyone who went before us, and we could make society better, that we’ve managed to make society worse, for the individual and for society as a whole.
Hi, there. Longtime lurker, first time commenter. This is an enlightening article from a seemingly unlikely source:(http://www.cracked.com/article_21910_8-ways-legal-system-screws-rape-victims-like-me.html)
The author seems to have something of an agenda-which is given away by inferring from the title and the last paragraph-and Cracked leans left, anyway. But I see no reason to disbelieve anything that is written therein.
Lately, Mr. McCain, I noticed that you’ve been posting more articles about rapists and men who commit sex crimes, which I believe is a good thing. One thing I think that goes along with combatting feminist narratives about rape culture and the like is an open recognition that rape is a very messy affair that leads to lots of ambiguities and makes true justice difficult to achieve. It is a special kind of crime, and sometimes I think rhetoric from the right about this sort of thing would seem tone deaf to a person who has experienced genuine sexual assault. A woman who claims to be raped may not be entitled to full unquestioning faith that she is telling the truth in a court of law, but certainly some sympathy at least is due. Just because a person doesn’t act like a victim (or a perpetrator for that matter) doesn’t mean that they are lying about what happened.
I know it sucks to always have to put disclaimers like, ‘yes, obviously rape is bad, but…’ but it seems so easy for a commentator to trot out stories in which a man is falsely accused of rape only to be met with a dozen other narratives about women who were really raped and no one believed them. Obviously the point of talking about the effects of being falsely accused of rape is not to say that rape is not a problem or that it doesn’t happen, but that’s how it’s often going to get portrayed.
I’m not saying that no one reading this doesn’t get these things, as I think that most of us do. It just seemed like an important point to make after I read that article.
Normal humans should treat feminists the way they’d treat poisonous snakes. Just avoid ’em entirely. Nothing can be gained from interacting with such species.
TO RAPE THEM!
It’s economics. When you subsidize something, you find yourself up to your ears in it.
You broke your link with the parentheses.
How about a return to an understanding the purpose of sex is reproduction, and the pleasure part of it is to make people want to keep it up.
*snerk*
I’ve always believed that the “macho man” era of the 80s was more in response to that period in the 70s when Alan Alda was looked upon as the ideal male by women — that is a guy who never physically fought back, who cried at the drop of a hanky and was generally non-threatening in every way.
Thanks
Isn’t it amazing to know that there’s SO MUCH MORE yet to be revealed about loony sexual practices?
I mean, think about it: Right now you hate – HATE!!! – some portion of the populace that practices a fetish you’ve never even heard of!
No, our society at large does *not* hate women. Our society at large hates *feminists*.
Mothers are women and our society at large definitely hates those, especially if they stay home with their children.
Oh, SAHMs are the worst. The most important thing in the world is for women to earn as much as men, and that will never happen if they keep on taking time off to tend their demonspawn. /sarc
They always managed to make the war seem like just a bunch of crazy generals (on both sides) getting people killed. That part was overdone in the movie, but was turned into a pacifist’s dream in the TV show.
For Amanda Marcotte: This Accidental Experiment Shows The Superiority Of Patriarchy.
To complete my major at UK, I had to take either a junk psychology or junk sociology course, and I picked the junk sociology course. The only thing I remember was a whiny old male professor, who was recently widowed, who told us that the cure for depression was to listen to the Moody Blues, turned up loud; nothing of the actual coursework has remained with me.
When you say that “Each year, approximately 90,000 students nationwide take at least one Women’s Studies class,” remember: most of them are taking it because they have some idiot requirement to fill, and that the guys picked it, hoping that there’d be more cute girls in the class than in junk sociology.
FTFY
RS wrote:
You h8er! You h8ful h8ey h8er! I denounce you!
ISWYDT
The State, quite naturally, has an interest in determining legal paternity, to insure that some male is providing financial support for the child; that the child might not actually be his is irrelevant to the State’s interests.
As for the men who have been so deceived by their wives, well, she picked both the man who would be the better biological father and the man who would be the better child-rearing father; if the man who was the better child-rearing father wasn’t also the better biological father, well, that’s his own fault.