The Other McCain

“Radical feminism, by definition, seeks to dis-cover and examine the root of women’s global oppression by men, and the sources of male power.”
— “Radfem 101: A Radical Feminist Primer”

What is seldom noted in discussions of feminism is the extent to which the movement’s ideology represents a calculated appeal to the resentments of psychological misfits. Feminism attracts maladjusted personalities who, to employ Freudian terms, displace the rage of their hypercritical superego onto a male scapegoat. The damaged ego, unable to cope with a profound sense of personal shame, must escape the superego’s condemnation and does so by an externalization of blame, projecting onto males an all-encompassing malice that in fact represents the wrongful desires which the woman’s own conscience condemns in herself. Such women are attracted to the feminist movement because it promises to “empower” them, enabling them to indulge their pathological appetite for punitive cruelty against the hated male scapegoat.

“All women are prisoners and hostages to men’s world. . . .
Each man is a threat. We can’t escape men.”

This function of feminism as a vehicle for rage-displacement explains why its adherents so often exhibit a generalized anti-male fear — a paranoid identification of men as a collective enemy — so that the feminist lashes out with frightful vehemence toward men she doesn’t even know, presuming them to be guilty of heinous crimes and bad motives, simply because they are males. The damaged ego (“broken people,” to employ Professor Glenn Reynolds’ phrase) simply cannot deal appropriately with feelings of failure and disappointment. We indulge such deformed personalities at our peril, because they crave power in order to inflict a sadistic revenge on their chosen scapegoats.

“Feminist consciousness is consciousness of victimization . . . to come to see oneself as a victim.”
— Sandra Lee Bartky, Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression (1990)

Believing themselves to be victims of oppression, feminists thereby absolve themselves of any moral obligation to treat males fairly. The male oppressor can expect no mercy from women who, having organized themselves to seize political power, employ that power to impose vindictive punishment on males without the need to prove that any individual target of this feminist revenge is personally guilty of wrongdoing. Anything that harms men is “social justice” according to the zero-sum logic of feminism. Studying radical feminist texts by Andrea Dworkin, Mary Daly, Kathleen Barry and others, I notice their tendency to present an indictment of “male supremacy” based upon a historical collection of atrocities compiled from all over the world, and this tendency can be observed whenever feminists try to delegitimize their contemporary critics by accusing them of tacit complicity in criminal wrongdoing. You can never rationally discuss a simple policy question with feminists; Christina Hoff Sommers was accused of “rape denial” for attempting to discuss facts and logic with Oberlin College students.

Feminists employ a cumulative, collective approach to male guilt, reciting a catalog of global wrongdoing — Chinese footbinding, Islamic female genital mutilation, medieval witch-hunts, child prostitution in Thailand, the violent abuse of women in BDSM pornography — as proof that all men are evil monsters. This is a method of anti-male hate propaganda, and it does no good to point out that you, as an individual, are not Chinese or Muslim, that you were not alive during the Middle Ages, have never been to Thailand and are not “into” BDSM. Nor, for that matter, does it do any good to point out that the feminist who recites these atrocities is a privileged member of the academic elite, whose affluent parents paid for her to attend the finest schools in the world. She has not been victimized by these atrocities, but rather wields the victimhood of other women as a weapon with which to intimidate you into silence, threatening to destroy your reputation by branding you an apologist for these crimes unless you SHUT UP and grant her whatever else she may demand in addition to your silence. (Male silence is mandatory, under the First Rule of Feminism.)

Feminists routinely resort to totalitarian tactics because feminism’s ideology is totalitarian in nature. Although the movement’s professional “mainstream” spokeswomen are usually careful to pretend to care about democracy and freedom, occasionally the mask slips and we find Julie Bindel arguing that men should “have their power taken from them” so that feminists can “put them all in some kind of camp.” Anyone tempted to dismiss such hateful rhetoric as an expression of “fringe” beliefs outside the feminist “mainstream” simply has not paid close attention to what feminists have been saying and writing for the past four decades. Inside the Feminist-Industrial Complex of academic Women’s Studies programs, blatantly anti-male attitudes are not only tolerated, they are encouraged and justified by an ideology that makes “male power” the root of all evil. We may find this belief system expressed whenever feminists gather anywhere they believe themselves beyond external scrutiny. This is from a 2012 post at a radical feminist blog:

By facing the enemy’s power I mean the big rape industries, the big male military, economic, religious and state institutions, but also male criminals, abusers, rapists. Men and their institutions are so hard to attack, socially, physically, psychologically, linguistically or institutionally, and because of this, it’s easy to feel completely powerless and hopeless. How many times, as feminists, do we punish, shame or even lock up male criminals every year, with our own hands, as a group? I have never had the opportunity to do it myself yet, although I am looking forward to when it will happen. Regularly measuring the effectiveness of our actions according to how much male power over women has been removed is a good way not to lose focus of the enemy.

Notice not only the description of males as “the enemy,” but also the feminist’s gleeful anticipation of personally inflicting punishment on “male criminals.” Is she planning a career as a police officer or prosecuting attorney? And notice also how she insists that feminists must measure “the effectiveness of our actions according to how much male power over women has been removed.”

The feminist’s obsession with power — an inability to accept the voluntary mutual cooperation that is the basis of free a society — is typical of totalitarian thought, and also of paranoia. This is why dictators like Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot so often display paranoid tendencies, because the desire to obtain vast power over others is rooted in the totalitarian’s pathological fear of being harmed by power exercised by others. Legitimate authority (as wielded by parents, teachers, police, etc.) does not bother honest, decent, moral people, but it is terrifying to those who secretly harbor wicked and selfish desires. The totalitarian is not honest, decent or moral. A warped character, permanently twisted by a sense of personal humiliation rooted in an unhappy childhood or unfortunate adolescence, the totalitarian craves power to inflict revenge on a society whose law, morality and culture are rejected as unjust.

Revenge is what feminists want, and the fact that men targeted as victims of this revenge may have done nothing to deserve punishment is irrelevant to the totalitarian worldview of deranged women who speak of men as “the enemy.” Like the Ukrainian peasants who starved to death in Stalin’s terror famine, the victims of feminist policy can never be innocent, because feminism’s ideology defines them as a part of a collective enemy. A feminist conception of “social justice” requires that males must suffer, and the movement thus attracts sadistic women who derive a sick pleasure from the idea of inflicting that suffering on men.

All men deserve to suffer, because they are men — this is the psychological basis of feminism, and everything else about the feminist movement is merely a means to accomplishing its punitive goal.