Do You Want to Be a ‘Male Feminist’?

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“Feminism is organized insanity. Why be merely crazy, when you can turn your mental illness into a political movement?”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Jan. 29

If there is anything feminists hate more than Christianity, heterosexuality, America and capitalism, it’s a “male feminist.”

The quotation marks are required because “male feminist” is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. Feminism is a women’s movement, organized for women and led by women, and there is nothing any man can do that will qualify him for membership in the movement.

However, this self-evident truth does not prevent “progressive” males from trying to leverage feminism to their own advantage. The “male feminist” denounces his fellow men — you know, those hateful misogynists over there in the patriarchy — in an effort to persuade feminists that he is an exception to the rule. He is not a sexist oppressor. He does not view women as sex objects. He just wants equality (and a “liberated” girlfriend who doesn’t demand monogamy or a long-term commitment or any of that other bourgeois “responsibility” stuff).

The prototypical “male feminist” was Hugo Schwyzer, a deranged professor who routinely slept with his community college students, nearly killed a woman and had a psychotic meltdown after he was called out for his gross misconduct.

Feminism is based on the belief that all men (collectively) oppress all women (collectively), so that humanity is divided into two groups, male oppressors and female victims. As members of the oppressor group, males are by definition part of the problem (variously termed “patriarchy,” “male supremacy” or “misogyny”) and only women, as members of the victim group, can be permitted to have any voice or influence in defining the solution to this problem. Karen Ingala Smith has explained that anything a man says about feminism contributes to the “silencing of women in the public sphere,” which means that “women’s subordination is reinforced.” Men only seek to be recognized as “feminists” so they can play a role of “leadership and power”:

Those who have power and benefit from it in varying degrees generally do not cede it and share it — they protect and reinforce it. . . .
[Women] are entitled to demand our rights without apology, without reference to how this affects men, without sorting out all the men’s problems too. . . .
That is not to say there is no role for men, just not the role they are used to of leadership and power. Men are very welcome to say that they support us and to consult with us to see in what way they can be most useful to the cause and we will tell them.

In other words, guys: “The First Rule of Feminism Is Shut Up.”

Nevertheless, “progressive” males continue begging for scraps from the feminist table and feminists sometimes give them answers:

Question: Do you believe that there is anything men can do to aid feminism despite not being able to be feminists themselves?
Answer:  Oh, there’s plenty men can do! Unfortunately (for men), none of that gets you the hero status and women fawning over you that most men seem to be after when they decide to engage in feminist causes. Some things that men can do to help are:
– Confront other men in male-dominated spaces when they display sexist behavior (even if there’s no woman looking).
– Do not watch porn or participate in the sex industry in any way. Tell your male friends to do the same.
– Donate money to institutions dedicated to helping women.
– Listen to women and believe them without questioning or playing devil’s advocate when they talk about their experiences.
– Use your privileged voice to create opportunities for women. For example, you can recommend a female coworker for a promotion to your boss, or make sure he pays attention to her work. Women are often invisible or ignored.
– Understand the importance of female-only spaces and protect those spaces. Do not try to invade them and do not let other men do the same.
– Do not let the women in your life do more than their share of housework. Clean your stuff, wash your dishes, change your kid’s diapers, cook your food, and do all of that without being asked to or expecting special praise.
– Respect women’s boundaries and spaces. Do not take more than your share of a seat on a bus or a train, for example, and do not push women around verbally. Women are socialized to be accomodating and will often not enforce their own boundaries for fear of male violence, even if they’re terribly uncomfortable, so you have to recognize this discomfort and back off.
– Do not judge a woman for her appearance. Avoid commenting on it, and never compare her to another woman. If you want to praise a woman, prefer to focus on her intelligence or skills.
– Work to dismantle male supremacy from the inside. Combat your own male socialization, your own entitlement and your own tendency to violence and aggression. Question everything that’s gendered. And do not become defensive or try to justify yourself when a woman calls you out on your male-dominant behavior. Do not use tired cliches like “not all men are like that!” or “but I’m a nice guy!”. Instead, examine your behavior and try to understand why you’re being called out.
– And more important of all, do all of the above without expecting any special reward! Your reward is to be participating in creating a better world that’s fair for everybody. You don’t get to be a “special” man, you don’t get free passes for anything, you don’t get to stand out for being decent. If you feel you deserve anything extra for being a decent human being, that’s your male entitlement at work. Afterall, if you’re helping women to make yourself look good, you are not helping at all.
Hope the info’s useful!

Quite useful, indeed! This was written by a young blogger who describes herself as “The Angry Hairy Lesbian Feminist they’ve warned you about,” and her point is exactly correct: No man can ever expect praise from a feminist, because nothing any man does can ever qualify him for the admiration, trust or respect of a feminist. Because he is male (and therefore, by feminist definition, an oppressor) he is undeserving of love from any female (who is, by definition, his victim).

Someone should write a book to explain this to you guys . . .




 

106 comments

  1. Besides the fact that feminists are decidedly for females being oversexed and watching lesbian porn for and by women.

  3. Or, as (older, pre-feminism) women used to refer to such “men”, they are pussy-whipped.
    I mean, the ones who are serious, not the Hugo Schwyzer sort.

  5. In the 1970’s and into the 80’s, Humanist and Deconstructivist philosophers all seemed to jump on the feminism bandwagon. This included more than a few men who were already mining that postmodernist vein. Derrida, for example, had a group of like-minded philosophers that embraced feminism, and for a while, it was the new hotness among writers in philosophy. (I assume that was because it could get you published.)

    So yeah, there have been male feminists for quite a while. They were not hated at all by the women in the movement. There wasn’t even much in the way of mistrust. But you have to remember, this was before the marxist/homosexual activist wing of the movement caused a sea change, leaving well-respected, “mainstream” feminist women like Camille Paglia, Phyllis Chesler, and Tammy Bruce on the outside of the movement, looking in.

    Once that happened, the mistrust of men in the movement became more of a regular thing, causing many of them to do as my wife and I did in the early eighties and jettison our association with it entirely.

    This sea change *actually* happened: feminism–in the main–was not about homosexual activism and marxism, it was about equal pay for equal work, getting doctors to stop treating women as if they were just men with different parts, spurring research into better pre-natal care, providing support for women who became “first wives” of successful businessmen, and preventing discrimination against married women seeking work (which was done on the presumption that they could become pregnant).

    How ironic is that last line? Or the point before it about pre-natal care? How many feminists today will shout you down for uttering the phrase “pre-natal care” because it’s considered dog whistle speak for “pro life movement?” Answer: all of them.

    But yes, It really happened. My wife experienced that particular form of discrimination against married women several times. Many married women in the 80’s resorted to removing their wedding rings and never mentioning the fact of their marriage to co-workers. It was effing ridiculous. And the good news was that the problem finally disappeared once more and more women earned their way into upper management, instead of merely inheriting the role (like everyone’s favorite example–for decades–of a glass-ceiling-breaker who never had to do any such thing: former WaPo Owner/Manager Katherine Graham).

    Again, the irony. Earning your way into management is now considered selling out to the patriarchy by the modern feminists.

    So yes, men were associated with the movement; at least peripherally, like I was, and more centrally, like certain philosophers of that time. Back then I was never treated poorly by any of the women who declared themselves to be feminists, even though I still liked having someone do my laundry once in a while, and have ALWAYS been a redneck.

    The entire movement, just like the entire Democrat party, is not what it was in 1973.

    Sure, there were marxists and homosexual activists in the fringes of the movement. Some of the writers Stacy profiles were pretty vocal about supporting their sisters on that fringe. But they weren’t front and center in the seventies, they just elbowed their way to the center and shoved everyone else who was part of the movement out of the way (wait K-Bob, who do you mean by everyone else? That would be the women trying to break the glass ceiling in corporations; the hippy chicks running produce stands; the porn stars who wanted testing for STD’s to be enforced; the religious women who were hoping to reform the church’s stand on divorcees; the women who ran voter-registration drives; the league of women voters; the women who work in the medical professions; the women who became trades(wo)men; the moms who wanted safer schools; the moms who wanted to end bullying by “mean girl” gangs; the small business owners who were women; and the women who wanted to raise their daughters to be more independent, to name a few off the top of the noggin).

    Now it’s all about smashing the patriarchy and ending a rape epidemic that doesn’t really exist, all so people will allow women the right to be lesbians instead of all that other junk about glass ceilings and safe schools.

    But then, that’s what marxists do: they co-opt everything.

  6. Actually, women are better suited for some physical tasks. The Air Force and Navy has found that women, generally, are better suited physically to be aircraft pilots than men.

  7. I’m pretty sure she’s not *impersonating* a skank. Now, whether there are any takers is a different matter.

  10. I go to the zoo often because it’s fascinating to watch the lion and his two lionesses interact and live their lives. I’ve learned much that’s applicable to men and women.

  17. This is why I actually feel sorry for male feminists. It’s a collectivized bad relationship. Everything on that list would fit comfortably in the mouth of a controlling, abusive partner — in my unprofessional opinion, it always comes down to “you’re responsible for my happiness, and also your own” — and I doubt that it came out of nowhere. I worry for her girlfriend’s safety, if she has one.

  19. Why would any university even offer a major in Feminism or Black Studies? There is nothing to do with these majors except struggle to pay off the debt.

  20. Probably occurs due to a mineral imbalance… too high a concentration of feldspar in the forebrain.

  27. “… Camille Paglia, Phyllis Chesler, and Tammy Bruce ..”

    I’ve interviewed both Chesler and Bruce, and greatly admire Paglia. The reason all three of them are outside the Official Feminist Movement is simply because they are honest people who value intellectual integrity.

    Chesler is a committed feminist who knows firsthand — from her youthful marriage to an Afghan Muslim — what barbarism is inflicted on women in Islamic culture. Bruce is also a committed feminist who saw the official leaders of the women’s movement sell out their principles for political convenience during the O.J. Simpson trial. Paglia is simply too much of a maverick (much like the late Christopher Hitchens) to be a slavish follower of someone else’s Party Line.

    All of these women illustrate, in different ways, how the feminist movement is incompatible with intellectual freedom and, ultimately, incompatible with democracy. The fact that feminist theory is also incompatible with human nature . . . Well, that’s my own personal contribution the discourse, and I don’t expect everyone to agree with it.

  31. I’m trying to imagine what man could have fallen to such a low estate as to want to make a sandwich for that one. It’s easier to imagine a guy saying “I rebuke you in the name of Satan” and then drinking lava.

  32. Nothing wrong with cats, per se. They’re just useless, except that they catch mice. But these women don’t get cats to catch mice, they get them because they’re useless — in contrast to a dog, which can at least bark to warn of an intruder and, if large enough, actually protect its owner.

    For feminists, pets are objects onto which to displace the maternal instinct that is thwarted by their abnormal psychological development. Feminists hate babies and love cats. Think about why that is.

  37. Please keep that land whale AWAY from my sandwiches. I make them myself. I don’t need the help of a womyn.

  38. i ‘ve heard of a slang term that defines what feminists want in a man. i believe the term is “whipped.”

  41. Monkeys. Always ready to take ‘disgusting’ to new levels.

    Nine-year-old boys’ lives would be so empty without monkeys to gross out over.

  42. I think many who give your work a fair read will eventually agree with it.

    I guess the thing that’s missing is that gender feminists (pro-diversity, pro-family women) have been removed from the theory, like party members and astronauts from official, Soviet era photographs. But they were there in the beginning, and still quite strong as recently as forty years ago.

    Now it’s predominantly an anti-gender feminism. That’s not only incompatible with human nature, it’s anti-human; from the fringe to the core.

  43. It’s not the poor “girl’s” fault she couldn’t quit eating. You are denounced anyway. You don’t get to choose not to be denounced in these environs.

  46. One of the funny things about feminists, as our host has oft pointed out, is that their wrong is independent from their crazy. IIRC, it was a long time ago that some top feminist pointed out that with the inevitability of technological progress, men eventually wouldn’t need women for that, and it would reduce their leverage.

    She wasn’t wrong; she was just crazy to think that men hated women in the first place, leading to the bizarre conclusion that artificial wombs could be as much of a hindrance as a help to women. (I think it would hinder feminism, but that is a separate question.)

  47. You can’t denounce me! You can’t denounce me! What are you? The Quartermaster of denouncers?!?

  49. Especially if she rolled over on top of her during the night. They’d be able to slide the girlfriend under the door like in the cartoons

  50. I think that that show, M.A.S.H. did more to elevate smug, cynical liberal eunuchs to a place of prominence in society. Major Burns might have been a d*ck but at least he was trying to get next to “Hot Lips”

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