Fear and Loathing of the Penis

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“All women are prisoners and hostages to men’s world. Men’s world is like a vast prison or concentration camp for women. This isn’t a metaphor, it’s reality. Each man is a threat. We can’t escape men. . . .
“[H]eterosexuality doesn’t exist and our ‘urges’ to bond with [men] emotionally or sexually aren’t natural drives but normal PTSD reactions to years of abuse and mind-programming.”
— Radical Wind, August 2013

When I think back on how this project began, I recall the woman whose screed against intercourse (“PIV is always rape, OK?”) led me deep into this swamp of radical feminism. It was, however, another rant by that same blogger which made me seriously explore the ideological psychosis of which her rant was a symptom.

“No woman is heterosexual.”

That four-word sentence sent me off on an investigation of her sources, especially including Professor Dee Graham, whose 1994 book Loving to Survive theorized female heterosexuality as a response to male-inflicted “sexual terror,” akin to post-traumatic stress syndrome. Understanding this claim in turn required me to examine the sources cited in Graham’s bibliography, including lesbian feminists like Marilyn Frye, Adrienne Rich, Mary Daly, Audre Lorde and Charlotte Bunch. Graham even managed to work in a citation to “Starhawk” (neé Miriam Simos), the lesbian feminist who was the founding high priestess of a California-based pagan witchcraft cult known as Reclaiming. From such dubious sources Graham had propounded her theory of sexuality, based in a view of men as violent oppressors and women as victims suffering under tyrannical male supremacy. After several months of further research, I’ve begun to refer to this feminist worldview as Fear and Loathing of the Penis.

You see this in the counterfactual “rape epidemic” hysteria on college campuses, with activists at Columbia University trying to frighten prospective students — high school kids — with protests about “gender-based violence on campus.” Robert Tracinski at the Federalist examines the possibility that “rape culture” discourse represents “an attempt to create a scapegoat for the emotional dark side of promiscuity.”

It is evident that these women’s dread and contempt of masculinity arises from specific circumstances. Feminism does not cause women to hate and fear men; feminism is the political rationalization of these women’s anti-male feelings, permitting them to believe that their own unhappiness is not merely personal. It is the explanatory power of feminist theory that attracts women who do not wish to consider themselves responsible for their misfortunes, disappointments and failures, offering them a convenient scapegoat for their problems: Patriarchy.

To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, consider this recent post on Tumblr.com by an Australian woman named Kate:

I think that most of the times I feel afraid of the world, it is because there are men in it.
Men who want to hurt women; men who don’t want to hurt women but do not realise that they are doing so anyway; men who don’t want to hurt women, but do not care when they do, because whatever they want from the situation is intrinsically more important to them.
Men who you can tell are bad just by looking at them or listening to what they say; men who you instinctively feel could be bad, but you second-guess yourself because you want to believe and trust that they are good; men who you would never guess are bad in any way — whose badness doesn’t show for years, and when it does it is near-invisible to anybody else.
Men who make you feel threatened when they don’t get their own way; men who lash out and shift the focus when they don’t get their own way; men who spin every word when they don’t get their own way; men who act like children and make you their mother figure when they don’t get their own way; men who control you to get their own way, men who take what they want anyway when they don’t get their own way.
Men who do not listen to women’s words the same way they listen to other men’s; men who turn you invisible unless they want to f–k you; men who only want to be your friend because they want to f–k you; men who call you ‘intellectually dishonest’ for using emotion and context to argue a point; men who back you into corners physically, emotionally, verbally.
Men who call you ‘crazy’; ‘hormonal’; ‘irrational’; ‘emotional’, men who will not allow your anger to be recognised as a valid emotional response, or your sadness, your distrust.
Men who make you feel the most loved, safe, and cared for after they have abused you.
Men who make you question your reality by telling you with conviction that it is wrong.
Men who take away your sense of independence and self by controlling your every move, and by telling you a better way to do every little thing you’ve taught yourself.
Men who dissolve your self esteem by belittling and insulting you, and calling you names.
Men who tell you that your reasonable emotional reactions are abusive, and infringe on their rights to do whatever they want to do.
Men who do not stop whatever they are doing to you when you ask.
Men who look you in the eyes and lie to you every day to protect their double lives.
I am so tired of absorbing all of this.

Who are these men who do these things to Kate? We don’t know.

She doesn’t name them, but she is apparently surrounded by them, and we are thus unable to offer any advice or assistance to her. She is a helpless victim of men — men! men! men! — and it would seem she offers this catalog of masculine “badness” in the expectation that other women will recognize the pattern. Yet we might notice how Kate lists men’s reactions when they “don’t get their own way,” as if she can’t see that the entirety of her complaint involves her own dissatisfaction because she can’t get her own way with them. Men don’t behave the way Kate wants them to behave, men don’t say and do things the way Kate wants things to be said and done, and their failure to live up to her expectations — their unwillingness to comply with the imperious demands of Queen Kate — is proof that she is a victim of male oppression.

She is inviting us to a pity party where she is the guest of honor. If men reject that invitation, this just proves how bad men are, because they “will not allow your anger to be recognised as a valid emotional response, or your sadness, your distrust.”

Why wouldn’t male contempt for her be “a valid emotional response”? Men are the way we are in part because we must be that way in order to be recognized as men, as responsible adults. Nobody wants to hear a man complain about his problems. Women can be especially merciless in their contempt for any man who expresses a sense of emotional suffering, and many women are deliberately sadistic toward men. Some women enjoy nothing better than to insult a man and then mock him as a “whiner” if he takes notice of the insult. Women who take pride in their own cruelty toward men are invariably the same women who complain when men fail to treat them with solicitude and kindness. Such women are never able to admit that they are even partially responsible for their inability either to attract good men or to sustain relationships with the men they do attract.

Fear and Loathing of the Penis — a paranoid resentment of men, characterized by irrational suspicion — is the underlying mental condition that feminism turns into a political ideology. What disturbs me, after months of studying this phenomenon, is that this madness is both contagious and incurable. Feminism is a sort of cultural virus that, once it takes hold in a woman’s mind, makes it impossible for her to relate to men in a normal manner and, because misery loves company, she feels compelled to share her hateful anti-male attitudes with other women. If left untreated, the effects of this dangerous malady are well known.




 

 

“There are no Christian feminists, because feminism is a sort of narcissistic idolatry, wherein women deny God and instead worship themselves as their own divinity.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Dec. 17

 

 

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! As to envy, I have always thought Freudian psychology — “penis envy,” “Oedipus complex,” “castration anxiety,” etc. — to be a lot of mythical pseudo-scientific humbug. However, Freud did say this:

“Women have but little sense of justice, and this is no doubt connected with the preponderance of envy in their mental life.”

Like so much else Freud said about women, this seems insulting if read as a general statement applicable to all women. We should remember, however, that much of Freud’s practice involved treating neurotic women, the unhappy wives and daughters of the upper classes. As a description of a certain type of woman, his statement is certainly true. Envy is a poisonous emotion, and is antithetical to a sense of justice. The characteristic rage of feminists — their angry insistence that every advantage enjoyed by men is an unearned “privilege,” and that all women suffer oppression because of “male supremacy” — is entirely consistent with Freud’s observation of how “the preponderance of envy” manifests itself in the behavior of neurotic women.

UPDATE II: Linked by That Mr. G’s Blog, Brian Cragin and Doug at Daley Gator — thanks! — and our friend Doug apparently felt a need to pour salt in the wound. It should be sufficient to report facts and let people draw their own conclusions.

Of course, some conclusions are more obvious than others.

 

196 comments

  5. Delusionals are either beyond help (in which case, they’ll die that way), or they can come out of it through repeated exposure to reality.
    ISIS is as real as it gets, though I would guess the survival rate would be well below 50%.

  7. Feminism isn’t so much penis envy as it vaginal worship. The emotionalism involved is the constant need by feminists to fill that hole. With whatever is available. And they resent the penis for being the best filling tool. When women go for more than 4 days without sex they become crotchety and mean. A penis makes a great pacifier and stress reliever. The best scene ever filmed about this is found in Gone With The Wind, Scarlett waking up in the morning after Rhett takes her to bed in a violent fit of anger.

  12. I think that for a long time men behaved and were treated as superior beings for the simple fact that we are. We do all the things that have transformed existence from grass huts and foraging into the marvels of science and technology that we now enjoy. We essentially built the modern world with male innovation, experimentation and labor.
    Having reached a point where women can now live in the comfort provided by men they have come to resent out native superiority and have made a bid to upend that status quo. The problem is, where men earned their seat at the table through accomplishments over centuries, women want a seat simply through jealousy without any concurrent accomplishments to their name.
    This accounts for the utterly trivial basis for their claims and grievances, having nothing positive to point to they must claim to be victims

  14. Problem is, in this internet age, there’s no such thing as “amongst themselves” anymore. We’re seeing an impending meltdown of the hard left, and part of it might be because they have no secrets anymore, everybody can see their dirty laundry.

  15. Larry Correia has been leading the countercharge against the SFF SJWs. And GamerGate is the exact same situation, except there’s huge and successful push back on that front. SJWs miscalculated when they tried to bully a bunch of highly intelligent and competitive borderline Asperger nerds on their own turf.

    The fact is that the precarious coalition behind progressive politics is fracturing, as it was ordained to. When your movement is founded upon the sanctity of the victim and authenticity is based upon how much oppression you can claim, coupled with a belief that economics, in fact everything, is a zero sum game eventually everybody starts looking sideways at the other groups. And the knives come out for the Judean Peoples’ Front. Which turns out to be… whoever is still standing.

    this is where Jonathan Chait comes in. His recent complaint against the PC bullying isn’t on principle, it’s because the revolution is beginning to eat its own and as a white male he’s at the top of the new Enemies List. He’s discovered that he’s next to be purged and is in the same situation as the poor schmucks in the Lubyanka basement saying “this is a mistake! If only Comrade Stalin knew!”

  16. I would not say men are superior. We just had the job of chasing the saber tooth tigers out of the cave, killing the mammoths for dinner and preventing Og and those other bastards from over the hill taking our stuff.

    And that included protecting the women so they could bear and raise the next generation. Which was fair because they were the only ones who could do it, Radical Wind’s fantasies notwithstanding.

    Now that the tribe is not threatened with physical danger some women think they don’t need men around at all. No point asking how the next generation will come along because that isn’t a priority for them. In fact they resent such talk because it suggests to them that there are real physical differences between the sexes and that they are there for a reason.

  17. Feminism does not cause women to hate and fear men; feminism is the political rationalization of these women’s anti-male feelings, permitting them to believe that their own unhappiness is not merely personal.

    That is the linchpin. Moreover, it generalizes perfectly to several other forms of group hatred. Bravo!

  21. You have it exactly right. Like many others, Chait thought this was liberalism and found it was a cult with (today), black gay lady-worship at the top of the food chain that has nothing to do with concepts of left vs right.

  22. There was an analogy to that in the late ’60s when underground comix fought back against a conformist world by making the most offensive comix imaginable.

  23. That’s another way to do it: go straight to the source and quote these people and let their madness speak for itself.

  24. See, in another context, Bernard Lewis’ book on the modern crisis of Islam, What Went Wrong?

    He notes that when people find themselves in the situation such as Islam is today vis a vis the West, there are two questions they can ask and the one they select determines how they will respond.

    One is “What went wrong?” and the other is “Who did this to us?” In the case of the Islamic Mideast they chose question number two and their answer is, of course “Crusaders and da Joooooos!”

    These damaged people identifying as feminists likewise chose the second question. And their answer, as we know, is us. You. Me. The rest of the guys with our patriarchy and our rape culture and that loud damn noise they call music and get the hell off my lawn!

  26. I’m so glad you did the research so I didn’t have to. No way I could have wallowed through that mire. Kudos.

  30. RE: Feminism

    It’s just a sub-set of Progressive-Liberalism.

    It should be apparent by now that these social policies [of modern liberalism] and the passions that drive them contradict all that is rational in human relating, and they are therefore irrational in themselves. But the faulty conceptions that lie behind these passions cannot be viewed as mere cognitive slippage.

    The degree of modern liberalism’s irrationality far exceeds any misunderstanding that can be attributed to faulty fact gathering or logical error.

    Indeed, under careful scrutiny, liberalism’s distortions of the normal ability to reason can only be understood as the product of psychopathology.

    So extravagant are the patterns of thinking, emoting, behaving and relating that characterize the liberal mind that its relentless protests and demands become understandable only as disorders of the psyche. The modern liberal mind, its distorted perceptions and its destructive agenda are the product of disturbed personalities. — Lyle H. Rossiter, Jr. MD, The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness.

    [Liberals aren’t. Progressives won’t.]

  31. It sells men very short to suggest our main asset was or is physical prowess. Our real achievement has been intellectual, far and away greater by many orders of magnitude than women have collectively managed. We have proven superior in BOTH the physical and intellectual worlds. Women are good at things, better than men even, but not in the things that advance society. Their talents lay in holding together what already exists, they are conservative and safety conscious, it is men who are the forward thinkers and have driven progress in every sphere of human life.

  32. RE: Feminism

    If it’s genetic in its ‘nature’—tongue firmly in cheek—it will breed itself out of existence within a few stupid generations that refuse to breed.

  33. RE: Why Ask Why

    See my quotation from Dr. Rossiter (above if viewing by Newest).

    It’s a form of psychopathy.

  34. Well, at least when it comes to social justice warriors, there’s little doubt they are missing some crucial aspects of normal human personalities. The fact they most often practice exactly what they preach not to is disturbing. Anything more complex than inflating a tire so it works is beyond a SJW to understand. Anything the least abstract seems to put them on an LSD trip. They rail against harassment, racism and sexism by using those 3 things as weapons. “Insane” seems to be a perfect word to describe people immune to reality. That’s why they so often specialize in what might be termed ‘soft arts” like writing. If you built a table the way SJWs think it would have two legs.

  35. In regard to your update I’d say it isn’t envy or experiencing actual discrimination per se but in hyper-identifying with groups gender feminists describe as second-class. For some reason they never identify with larger human success stories but only those of failure. It’s like a race-track historian who obsessively writes only about last place nags. Normal people celebrate success and heroes. Gender feminists, particularly intersectionalists, celebrate failure, any failure, no matter how trivial. If they built statues it would be to a generic identity, not a person. That identity might be an obese, non-white, lesbian with arthritis who never coulda been a contenda.

  37. RE: Disturbing Behavior

    The fact they most often practice exactly what they preach not to is disturbing. — Fail Burton

    Not really all that ‘disturbing’ once you understand it’s basis.

    Where there is no Godliness, hypocrisy becomes good taste.

  38. It is possible to understand women. I’m sure of this, which is why I’ve never stopped trying. My mother always told me, “Stacy, you can do anything if you put your mind to it,” and the fact that I’ve spent the past year trying to understand and explain radical feminism is a sort of testimony to that. Of course, the question is whether my mind is strong enough to avoid a complete nervous breakdown induced by reading dozens of books full of feminist theory. So far, so good, although at times it feels as if I’m hanging onto my sanity by my fingernails.

  42. RE: Heh

    And they never look at themselves.

    It’s classic. Even Christ mentions it….

    And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? — The Christ, Matthew 7:3

  48. I don’t think I sell men short at all. I was being brief to the point of irrevernce, but the burden of protecting and advancing humanity has fallen upon men. And that’s because we needed to protect the women for the next generations.

    So men have taken the risks, both physical and intellectual, for the species. As a result, cities, capitalism, automobiles, television, and all the paraphernalia of modern life which shelters all of us so that most forget that life in nature is, as Hobbes warned, nasty, brutish and short.

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