GENERAL – MRAs, PUAs, MGTOWs , and How the MRM Is Not a Monolith

TB, do you consider yourself an “anti feminist”–is this an inevitable part of being MRA? One simply can’t be both? Or does feminism have nothing to do with MRM, as someone recently said to me? I would rather hear that, actually.

I need some definitions. When I hear “anti feminism”–I hear, “women, just sit down and shut up”. Meaning, women can’t be anti feminist, since they have just said (by claiming anti-feminism) that their opinion is of no importance. They aren’t allowed to talk. (The New Testament declared that the woman should learn silence in all submission and shall not teach in mixed company, besides.)

My problem is the way MRAs will not acknowledge “what feminism got right”–as Ballgame has put it. If they do, I have no problem with it. However, if they think all feminism is wrong and always has been? They were obviously not alive before there was feminism. “Sit down and shut up”, that is how it was before feminism.

So, they should do that, then.

Kinda like Phyllis Schlafly running around and extolling the virtues of the trad family… and yet *she* was rarely at home with her own kids, during the time she was running around saying all of that. Anita Bryant, Beverly LaHaye, Maribel Morgan, et. al. They all had active, lucrative careers telling women to stay home.

This ideological-disconnect drives me crazy.

And: are you talking about the ‘incidental’ sort of male feminist, like PZ Myers, or someone like Hugo Schwyzer who makes his whole ‘reputation’ on that? (or is neither a good example?)

I always imagined the endgame a bit differently.

First, there are tradcon men who want to turn every man heterosexual [especially themselves] and certain other men who want to turn a few women [sic] bisexual in hopes of getting a threesome together, and some of the richer ones fund research to try to create drugs to achieve this.

Second, there are a few of these womyn who join up with political lesbians and try to recreate this drug. One thing leads to another and it ends up in the water supply, turning everyone lesbian.

After a dystopian Raymondite dictatorship and civil war, we finally get to a society without sex oppression or sex-role oppression, to the equal frustration of many tradcons and certain radfems.

I would however be very upset by the reverse scenario.

@Daisy:

I need some definitions. When I hear “anti feminism”–I hear, “women, just sit down and shut up”.

I’ve noticed that some people have a habit of interpreting much of what they hear in the worst possible way. If someone starts from a position of absolute negativity, it’s not surprising that they end up seeing through that lens.

When I hear a self-proclaimed MRA arguing for more fairness in child custody cases and divorce proceedings, or a self-proclaimed anti-feminist arguing that Rebecca Watson is relying on female privilege and emotional manipulation* rather than evidence to support her claim that she was nearly raped by a guy who asked her up for coffee in an elevator and accepted her “no” without question or further approach, I don’t hear “women, just sit down and shut up.” Neither do I immediately hear in the term “anti-feminism” that everything feminism has ever accomplished is bad or negative, but rather a response to a number of attitudes many feminists seem to hold and the power those feminists seem to have in western society. There are examples in many of the posts here.

I think it’s important to remember that MRA stands for “men’s rights activist” (or maybe advocate), not anti-women’s rights activist. Similarly, when someone says they’re anti-feminist, they’re not necessarily or even likely to be opposed to women’s rights (despite women’s rights being a part of feminism), but perhaps the way in which they see feminists fighting for those rights, how they define them, their lack of regard for men’s rights while trying to attain women’s rights, and/or a number of other things.

Now, to be fair, I do not consider myself to be an MRA or an anti-feminist. I’m uncomfortable with the “MRA” label because, when I first started looking into it, I found that many of the people who call themselves MRAs (though I can’t say a majority) have fairly conservative views or seem to tie their MRA ideology with libertarians, and I do strongly oppose those ideological bases (note here that I don’t care to talk about that; I’m just noting my reasons). As for anti-feminism, I decided not to carry that label because, when I first discovered it, I too could see it saying “anti-women’s rights,” and I didn’t want to be confused as being so**, since I support women’s rights and think women deserve to have the as much of a voice as anyone. But I think most MRAs and anti-feminists do as well (and there are women among them, using their voices, so the idea that they could be advocating that women sit down and shut up seems a bit far fetched).

*The female privilege in this instance being having everyone rush to their defense when they claim to have been scared/hurt/etc. AKA damseling, despite having no evidence that there was any danger. The emotional manipulation comes from the how dare you question my feelings bent, as if having an emotion, as a woman, makes your perception and “truth” inviolable.

**A bit of irony here, as many feminists will take umbrage when people point out that the word “feminism” implies a gender bias, saying that it doesn’t, that it means “gender equality” etc., yet will jump right onto the phrase anti-feminism and assume whatever meaning they want (anti-woman!) about it without regard to what the people who say they’re anti-feminist actually think, as if feminists can only be women or that feminists are the only people who care about women and women’s rights.

TB: The end game will be fought between feminist men and MRA women.

Not sure why TB thinks so, but I will say that feminist men and MRA women are both particularly powerful advocates. Female feminists and male MRAs are assumed to have an agenda. Their proposed policies will benefit themselves, so you have to take their arguments with a grain of salt. But feminist men and MRA women seem to be arguing on principle (though both groups are still often accused of trying to ingratiate themselves with the opposite sex).

@gjdj

“ingratiate themselves with the opposite sex”

Yes, because pointing out men’s victimhood is a sure way of getting cock. Or patriarchy points despite the fact that in the majority of ‘patriarchies’ ‘man-up’ is their response to all men’s issues.

I think the end game will play out that way because, as Esthar Vilnar said, men are more invested in feminism then women are because feminism allows them to continue to believe in their own supremacy. Which is a comforting illusion. (Like I said, in my experience tradcon men are more pragmatic about the power of women.)

So the only ones who have any investment in prosthelytizing feminism will be mostly men in the future.

Female MRAs will be the only ones effective against them.

And then all the cock is ours.

Ooops… I’ve said too much.

@typhonblue:

And then all the cock is ours.

Ooops… I’ve said too much.

I’ll be taking some of that, thank you very much. 😉

@Daisy:

That is what I refer to.

Why are you referring to that? Who here or elsewhere is doing so when they refer to themselves as anti-feminist or MRA?

To say feminism STARTED as a bad thing, is to agree that Susan B Anthony should have been locked up for voting or giving a speech.

Who is saying that? How many people do you know who are claiming that giving women the right to vote or free speech is a bad thing?

I simply can’t forget my own experience.

Who is asking you to? What does that have to do with now, and how people perceive feminism, either in small part, large part or as a whole, as it is today? I don’t understand why you’re taking this as being personally about you. I do not see anything here that carries that context.

But yes, lots of MRAs seem to want to go back to start and lock Susan B Anthony up, and I just can’t get behind that.

I’ve not heard any MRAs say that, but I can’t imagine those who do are suggesting that women not have the vote, free speech, etc (though I never know. Some might, I guess). I’d be more than annoyed with someone who literally suggested that and wouldn’t be behind it, either. However, I’d be willing to say that most who appear to say that are actually wanting to change the other outgrowths they associate with Feminism (which varies from MRA to MRA) and aren’t literally suggesting that all of the achieved positive changes associated with feminism be reversed.

I don’t want to sound like an incurable optimist, but it sounds like you might be giving some of them an unnecessarily uncharitable reading. 🙂

@Daisy

Well based on your final paragraph, I’d consider you more in the MRA camp.

On the other hand, I think that your view of historical circumstances is more in line with feminism. Perhaps you are a hybrid.

As I said before, I think the feminist model is one of oppression of women. Women were told to “sit down and shut up” and society catered to men.

I think the general MRA position is that the relations between the sexes have been negotiated by both men and women through history. The roles of women and men were greatly different, but one was not necessarily worse than the other. Women were treated even more as children than they are now. So in the mid-19th century women could generally not vote, become a professional, own property if they were married. Men were allowed to administer mild physical discipline (eg. a spanking). On the other hand men were regularly conscripted (a form of slavery in my opinion). Only 1 in 7 men could vote (you needed to earn a certain amount of land and have a certain amount of money). Men were held responsible for the actions of their wives. eg. If a women went into debt, her husband could be forced to go to jail. And very few men were able to be professionals anyways. Men had to handle all the dangerous physical work in a world where workplace accidents were far more common. The typical 19th century couple consisted of a man and a woman on a farm. The man worked all day outside, the woman worked inside, looked after the kids and helped outside when possible. When the lights went out both were exhausted.

In my personal view, the prosperity of the 20th century did tilt things somewhat in the favor of men. When urban jobs were rare, physical and extremely dangerous it was not a severe disadvantage for women to stay at home or work as a teacher or servant (while enjoying part of her husband’s paycheque). Do women complain nowadays that most garbage collectors are men? As white collar jobs became more plentiful all of sudden, men were getting paid well in prestigious positions doing something that women could also do. So, yes I feel that a movement toward gender equality was valuable. I think the general MRA view is that the expansion of rights for women was a worthwhile initiative. But for the sake of fairness, more effort should have been spent removing female advantages.

JD: What does that have to do with now, and how people perceive feminism, either in small part, large part or as a whole, as it is today?

I think its important how things were originally intended and how they ended up. I don’t think mistakes can be properly understood otherwise.

“And male, of course. The worst insult.”

Coming from anyone else, Schala, that would be misandrist. Coming form you, it’s just testimony about transphobia.

Where the fuck is SPLC when it comes to denouncing hate groups that hate on trans people?

“And then all the cock is ours.
Ooops… I’ve said too much.”

Indeed you have, TB, indeed you have. You straight women had better up your game, and you had better abandon your Lysistrata fantaisies, beacause we are waiting in the wings for your horny husbands. Better learn how to give an orgasm instead of just cock-shaming and demanding your own orgasms.

Ha! There has to be a name for that use of “you” – the use that excludes the person you’re talking to.

JDCyran:
I think it’s important to remember that MRA stands for “men’s rights activist” (or maybe advocate), not anti-women’s rights activist.
Yes. It seems that (among feminists and the little bit of media that mentions MRAs) the standard procedure is to find the worst of the bunch and prop them up as representative of the whole. Anyone that actually looks through MensRightsReddit can find positive MRAs as well as negative ones. And by “actually look” I mean actually reading and acknowledging the mixture of types of commentary rather than reading it all, ignoring the positive, and then declaring it all negative (for some reason feminists are notorious for this).

Similarly, when someone says they’re anti-feminist, they’re not necessarily or even likely to be opposed to women’s rights (despite women’s rights being a part of feminism), but perhaps the way in which they see feminists fighting for those rights, how they define them, their lack of regard for men’s rights while trying to attain women’s rights, and/or a number of other things.
I think the reason it can be hard to see that is because a lot of feminists themselves try to make anything that is good and holy synonymous with feminism. And whether intended or not this serves the purpose of setting up the situation where when someone says they question or are against something about feminism it is taken as “you’re against equality”. This is how one who says they think women that make false rape accusations should be punished can result in being called a rape apologist or supporting male against female rape or not caring about “real rape victims” (which usually means female rape victims).

While there are some MRAs that do take on the MRM cause as a fight against feminism there are a lot of feminists out there that intentionally paint the MRM cause as a fight against feminism, probably because they don’t like the idea that some has the audacity to want to positive gender change and not be doing it under the umbrella of feminism.

Schala:
If you don’t believe women have it worse in every possible sphere, and men have no real problem that feminism should solve (ie, not feminism’s job they say), you’re considered anti-feminist, regardless of your position towards female autonomy.
Daisy:
Bullshit. I don’t believe that, and nobody says I am ANTI feminist… the most I get is that I am not properly feminist NOW. (rolls eyes) Cut the melodrama.

The reason YOU get called anti-feminist is for the reason I named above–you seem to think there was never any reason for feminism IN THE FIRST PLACE. And if you think that, yes, you ARE anti-feminist. If one believes feminism has gone off the rails and/or had unintended effects, that is entirely different.
I think something is missing here.

I have personally experienced what Schala is talking about here Daisy and you know full well that I am not one that believe that there was never a reason for feminism. Now if you are trying to say that you and your generation of feminists don’t believe that then I can buy that. However that type of name calling does happen and I’ll tell you why.

With (at least a lot of today’s) feminists when it comes to the realm of gender there is a starting presumption that the system in place is tailored to favor men over women. In such a system things are specifically designed to work against women and the damages that men incur are simply side effects of all that privilege they are given. Thus when talking about the problems that the genders face there is a presumption that women inherently have it worse than men.

When there is a measure in which men do get the short end of the stick they are quite adept at twisting it so that it’s made to look like something that was designed to hurt women and men just suffered from collateral damage from the fall out rather than something that the system designed to benefit itself and the damage that both men and women suffer is either planned damage (meaning said damage is the result of a plan to keep men and women in their respective places) or just collateral.

And when all else fails there is the “overall women have it worse” trump card.

I’d be interested to know how many are saying that not because they disagree with women getting the vote, etc., but because of other things they associate with feminism and are just being hyperbolic

But feminism wasn’t responsible for women’s right to vote, the Suffragist movement was. For starters, that movement did know much about feminist theory, more likely it relied on traditional conservative Christian values and to a great extent it was fueled by Prohibition rather than, say, abortion rights or equal pay.

@Dungone:

But feminism wasn’t responsible for women’s right to vote, the Suffragist movement was. For starters, that movement did know much about feminist theory, more likely it relied on traditional conservative Christian values and to a great extent it was fueled by Prohibition rather than, say, abortion rights or equal pay.

Right, and I didn’t mean to imply that it was. Daisy mentioned getting the vote in her “reasons for feminism in the first place” paragraph and later implied that some anti-feminist rants by certain unnamed MRAs included women getting the vote as a result of feminism that shouldn’t have happened.

Given the ridiculously large (almost to the point of useless) and ever-changing definition of feminism, women’s suffrage could easily be taken as be part of it, or at least regarded as a root of what came to be the feminist movement, by both feminists and MRAs. The actual roots of suffrage and the sequence of events are, unfortunately, not going to play much into either side’s use of it as a talking point.

Ginko,

Great article, ya might get a kick outta what I wrote here….

http://stonerwithaboner.wordpress.com/2012/08/04/pill-popperz-and-other-assorted-looney-tunes/

you also might find Clarence’s comments and my reply interesting here….

http://stonerwithaboner.wordpress.com/2012/08/05/great-minds-stink-alike/

Daisy:

When I hear “anti feminism”–I hear, “women, just sit down and shut up”.

Of course you do. Just like Elevator Girl heard “come up for coffee?” and heard something sinister. You’re trained as a feminist, and an awful lot of feminist theory and rhetoric is based on taking what men say and do and putting the worst possible spin on it, for maximum damsel-in-distress effect.

There are prominent MRAs who say feminism was a mistake from the git-go.

Probably. There are feminists who think the existence of men was a mistake of nature that needs to be corrected. Funny how men’s rights are to be judged by the former, but feminism isn’t to be judged by the latter. But again, that’s typical of feminism. The worst of men is taken as typical, and the worst of women is usually the fault of men if it’s even acknowledged to exist – but men and women are completely equal!

In fact, while I wouldn’t go so far as to say feminism was “a mistake from the git-go”, I think it had problematic aspects from the git-go, and because of the traditional gender role attitude of not contradicting a woman or there’ll be drama, these problematic aspects have been indulged and magnified as times has gone on, leading to a contemporary movement whose most visible representatives are spoiled adolescent princesses who think being spoken back to by the help is intolerable oppression, and egotistical white knights who put down other men to earn women’s approval.

Ginkgo:
“But the big name, popular, published and celebrated male feminists, the ones who have articles in the Guardian and psot on Jezebel and simlilr sites, seem to turn out to be time bombs. I wonder about Noah Brand, for instance.”
Isn’t this a kind of Schrödinger’s Rapist-attack on Noah Brand? You say he shares characteristics with people who committed rape and then you insert your gut instinct to accuse him of being potentially a danger. This associates him with rape without you providing any solid evidence to back up your claim. I criticise you, while having had similar thoughts about female supremacist male feminists. For example I thought Hugo Schwyzer’s story about trying to kill his girlfriend, was a good fit to his articles where he claims to have mind reading super powers and the authority to determine for others what is good for them.
Ginkgo:
“That is exactly hwo it will happen, Feminist women are not really the obstacle for two reasons. One is that a lot of them are principled, and they will be allies. The other reason is that the others are frankly all damaged in some way or other and powerless without male backing.”
For one, I think that more and more people in social movements like feminism are opportunistic, see for example many young feminists like the ones on “feministe” or Clarisse Thorn, they use feminist language to their preferences and to gain advantages for themselves.
Secondly, female femists aren’t only backed by male feminists, but also by traditional or just horny men, who jump to the opportunity to rescue a vulnerable woman.

When I hear “feminism” – I do NOT think “men, just sit down and shut up”. But that is mainly because I’m very successful at just rolling my eyes at the legion of feminists who actually DO say just this, in the name of feminism (and equality and social justice and …). If, however, some other man feels that “sit down and shut up and feel guilty about your oppressing women” is the main message he gets from feminism, I can’t really blame him for it.

Which means that I can understand someone who’s had some run-ins with anti-feminists who told women to shut up because it’s not a woman’s prerogative to disagree with a man. I would be less inclined to have that much understanding for someone who dismisses anti-feminism because of the perceived moral perfection of feminism which makes any opposition to it vile and despicable – that would be turning a blind eye or, even worse, endorsing the truly toxic assumptions about men (and women) in current (!) mainstream feminism.

Daisy mentioned getting the vote in her “reasons for feminism in the first place”

It is very typical of feminists to appropriate issues such as the vote. They often are of the point of view that anything a woman does, it’s a feminist triumph, even if it’s Sarah Palin or Marrisa Mayer or the hundreds of other successful women who opposed to feminism. It is at once misogynistic as well as misandric, considering the vision of life without feminism that feminists portray. But even more interestingly, feminists have also appropriated historical figures, such as Emma Goldman, who was both well aware of the existence of feminism and against it, yet was retroactively inducted into the fold because of her leftist activism. Feminism is full of this sort of revisionism, and quite frankly, it is absolutely necessary for them to do so in their attempt to conflate the advancement of women with feminism. But this is clearly not true, in reality.

Okay, turnabout is fair play…how about looking at different levels of feminism?

radical feminists — men are bad, they are evil, their numbers need to be reduced in the population to less than 10%

less radical feminists —  patriarchy is bad, men are the patriarchy, men need to be changed for the good of our culture

axis II feminist — men are not like women, men are cold, analytical and self serving, men need to be more like women, then the world would be a better place. Why can’t they just be open to their feewings like me? me me me me me

moderate feminists — women have been oppressed.  We deserve more stuff.  Men had it all.  It’s our turn. Yes, my brother, son and father are all good people but they are the exception, the bad men are all of those others.

% feminists ? — men are neither bad or at fault for our troubles, we are different but need to align with each other and use both our uniqueness to forge a new path.  But I can’t disagree with all of those other feminists, they wouldn’t like me.

I don’t think Noah would rape anyone. His thing is bullying other men for female approval.

JDC
“Certainly to say it without any qualification is a communication mistake, and believing it literally… ugh…, but I’d be interested to know how many are saying that not because they disagree with women getting the vote, etc., but because of other things they associate with feminism and are just being hyperbolic..”

What I see is people who say feminism is all bad are going off what they see in the present day, and that is a shallow if valid observation. On the other side the defenders of feminism seem to say one of two things – either they insist on some theoretical feminism , “feminism is about gender equality” and adduce all kinds of citations for that, or else they insist that people consider the full historical range of feminism’s effects.

I see a lot of validity in the second position.

Bibo, I love that joke so much I am going to steal it for a post!

And even here we get two misogynistic posts. I won’t name/shame the authors, but I think this illustrates why I, and some other feminists, may feel like we’re being pushed away from trying to help with men’s rights the same as we try to work for womyn’s rights.

Sex and gender-based systems of control, marginalization, and violence have been so pervasive, I don’t think anyone can see the whole system. I used to think almost everyone else got bashed too. Because people can only see their part of the system, you would have, in earlier stages, comfortable white hetero cis womyn assuming their experiences were universal female experiences. Since then, feminism has grown more inclusive and more open to the recognition that there are no universal female, or universal male, experiences. Feminism has challenged the shaming and silencing that still surrounds sexual assault. Feminism has challenged the idea that because some issues are personal, they aren’t also political. Certainly the institutional structures surrounding personal relationships are political. Who would want to throw these ideas in the trash?

Also, the second wave called themselves the second wave because they saw their movements as heirs to earlier movements. How could one not call d’Hericourt, de Cleyre, Goldman, or Kollontai feminists? Or the Mujeres Libres?

@Marja Erwin, who says that feminists such as yourself, who use words such as “womyn,” have ever helped in the first place? Actually, if you want to help with the men’s movement, then it will be on their terms, not on yours. That’s what the “end game” scenario that has been brought up is really about.

Marja: “Since then, feminism has grown more inclusive and more open to the recognition that there are no universal female, or universal male, experiences.”

Not really, Marja.

There are still strands of feminism stuck in the mindset that women have it worse and that men cannot be harmed due to the power structures benefiting them in society.

If feminism were so inclusive, why was I told “You still benefit from privilege as a white male”, “You’re an anomaly, women and girls suffer more.”, “Check your privilege” indirectly when talking about my experiences being hurt by women and girls?

Why are terms like “Patriarchy hurts men too” still used? It doesn’t even come close to explaining the struggles men like me face in life. In fact, it can still sound like “Men run the world”

And why the hell do you still spell women “Womyn”? Do you really know that the word women has no sexist connotations behind it, or are you still looking at the last part “Men” and running with that idea?

Here’s what I think of feminism: It had it’s noble intentions. But somewhere along the way (maybe sometime in the 70s and 80s) it screwed up…royally!

Some of the more extreme elements that practically demonized men as the culprit of women’s suffering were allowed their soapboxes and reverence. That certainly didn’t help at all.

Now society has adopted these mean-spirited tenants and we still have strands of feminism still supporting these. We’ve got boys struggling in the education system, male survivors of female abuse isolated and ridiculed, good fathers being cheated out of a relationship with their kids in family court, men automatically assumed pedophiles when attempting to support kids, etc. While partially a product of sexist assumptions, even you have to admit that those strands of feminism allowed the shift to happen without nary a word of protest. They didn’t create these notions, yes, but they certainly aided and abetted them where it benefited their own political self-interest. My play, Speak To Me, takes aim at this.

Meanwhile, egalitarian feminists are pushed out of the movement and drowned out in favor of said loud-mouthed gynocentrics. Those strands were the ones that minimized my experiences.

That’s what I think of feminism now: A once noble idea now twisted and perverted into the very thing it claimed to be against. You have a long way to go before even declaring feminism to be all inclusive.

I don’t hate feminism. I hate what it had become. Yet I’m still deemed anti-feminist or misogynist to the more ardent followers. At worse, my own struggles are swept under the rug.

Comments. Specifically two comments that I felt were hostile towards anyone who doesn’t fit into the normative masculine man/normative feminine woman binary. I oppose gender policing [and body-type policing], and I try to support the rights of non-normative men and non-binary people for the same reasons I support the rights of other non-normative womyn. I tend to read gender policing, and slurs like ‘mangina,’ as misogyny though I suppose they can also be considered misandry. I am saddened that many feminists, even feminists who accept womyn like me, mock loveshy men, autistic men, and so on, and I am looking for a movement which sticks up for them too.

@Dungone:

@JDCyran, that’s quite the claim. I claim the opposite (see my last comment as well). It is not the fault of anti-feminists that the definition of feminism is subject to endless revisionism.

I’m confused. When did I say the definition of feminism and its revision was the fault of anti-feminists?

@Dungone:

@JDCyran, I didn’t mean it like that. What I meant is that the constant revisionism is not a valid argument against anti-feminism.

What made you think I thought it was? As far as I know, I was responding to claims that Daisy made: “But yes, lots of MRAs seem to want to go back to start and lock Susan B Anthony up,” and the associated: “There are prominent MRAs who say feminism was a mistake from the git-go,” and to which Gingko responded: “This is undeniable and it is a mistake, both on the factual level and on the strategic level.”

So when I said: “I’d be interested to know how many are saying that not because they disagree with women getting the vote, etc., but because of other things they associate with feminism and are just being hyperbolic,” I was saying a less certain version of what you said here: “So AFAIK, even the MRA’s who view feminism as singularly responsible for all that is wrong with the world are very clear that they are referring to feminism in the past 40 years, i.e. “2nd Wave” feminism.”

I don’t know how that turned into you thinking I was saying that revisionism was an argument against anti-feminism. If you’re talking about the following paragraph:

Given the ridiculously large (almost to the point of useless) and ever-changing definition of feminism, women’s suffrage could easily be taken as be part of it, or at least regarded as a root of what came to be the feminist movement, by both feminists and MRAs. The actual roots of suffrage and the sequence of events are, unfortunately, not going to play much into either side’s use of it as a talking point.

That was certainly not an attack against anti-feminism or a reason not to criticize feminism, but rather a suggestion for why Daisy’s unnamed, hypothetical (to me) MRAs might include women getting the vote, as she says they did, in their definition of “feminism from the git-go.” I wasn’t making a particular claim. I’m sorry if it appeared that way.

@Marja Erwin, are you serious? The slur, “mangina,” has nothing to do with being trans and it is NOT used to enforce rigid gender roles. To the contrary, it is used to describe chivalrous males who want to define what “real men” are in order to enforce traditional male gender roles and hoist all of those self-destructive expectations upon men. It’s those men who typically mock shy, autistic men, and so on, and put the entire female gender up on a pedestal. I agree with you that it’s a slur, but hell, every time you use the word “womyn” that’s a slap in the face to all men, every time feminists use “mansplainer” it’s a slur, too. I don’t have a problem with the word any more than I do with any other foul language.

@Dungone: @JDCyran, I don’t think we’re in disagreement on any point. I only meant to piggyback off your comment in order to add further disagreement with the arguments that you were talking about, not what you were saying. Somehow I got the wires crossed in my wording.

Oh, good. I thought I was going insane and could not figure out what I had said wrong or how to fix it. 🙂

but feminists still posthumously label them as feminists.

I agree! I absolutely loathe it when people try to conscript historical figures, famous, insightful or otherwise into their “cause,” especially when it’s obviously erroneous to do so (because of, you know, blatantly saying they didn’t support it). It’s the ultimate attempt at an argument from authority, as if the number of cool dead people who might have followed (or seem like they would have if only we had been there with our modern knowledge to convince them) a cause makes it somehow more valid, or as if the fact that a famous person whose philosophy seems to have been at odds with a cause but wasn’t would somehow make the cause more valid.

Bleh.

I’d like to see “Mangina” replaced with something like ” Predatory Enabler”, which more accurately describes their behavior,and why it’s problematic. And also can’t be as easily dismissed as a simple misogynistic slur. Because guys like Futtrelle, Schwyzer and Brand have oinly adopted feminism out of co-dependency and a desire to control through fostering dependence, and it’s time we started pointing that out.

@Marja Erwin, you must have some very selective hearing, then, because we all know that you’ve just heard it in a third context.

hehe, well at a clothing optional beach you see allot of weirdo behavior…

there’s a certain type of guy who’ll walk up and down the beach waiting for a single girl to get undressed then approach, and say something to the effect of “All these guys here are perverts, why don’t you sit with me-I’m a good guy.”

More times than not the lady will leave and never come back…

anyways, to me that’s Schwyzer, Fatrelle and the rest…

at the end, they really have no respect for anyone but themselves if that…

JDC: Right, and I didn’t mean to imply that it was. Daisy mentioned getting the vote in her “reasons for feminism in the first place” paragraph .

Again, suffragists were regarded as the First Wave. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-wave_feminism

Dungone: But even more interestingly, feminists have also appropriated historical figures, such as Emma Goldman, who was both well aware of the existence of feminism and against it,

Oh boy.

Emma Goldman wrote lots of pro-feminist essays, such as her landmark THE TRAFFIC IN WOMEN, and classified herself as a first wave, radical suffragist. The word “feminist” was not yet in wide usage (except I think in the UK? maybe not even there), but suffragist and “radical woman’s advocate”, were, and these are the terms she used.

And she said she was, I am holding a copy of “Anarchism and other essays” in my hand (its never too far from me, since I type next to my bookshelf), and it says so right here, in THE TRAFFIC IN WOMEN.

A piece of work, as I said. And I think the word is AHISTORICAL.

@Daisy:

JDC: Right, and I didn’t mean to imply that it was. Daisy mentioned getting the vote in her “reasons for feminism in the first place” paragraph .

Again, suffragists were regarded as the First Wave. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-wave_feminism

I said:

Anyway, to be clear, since most feminists regard the first modern wave of feminism to have included Anthony and the fight for women’s suffrage in the late 1800s and early 1900s . . .

But Dungone is right. “First wave feminism,” as mentioned in the article you linked, was a term coined in the 1970s and was retroactively applied to the suffragists. I can’t say how many of them would have agreed to being labeled as part of the “feminist movement” by modern standards, so I don’t find it a particularly valuable label for that reason. It’s a fine label for identifying a particular struggle at a particular time, however.

@Skidd: And of course, the Temperance-focused groups hated actual liberal women like flappers. The flappers weren’t exactly good Christian girls. Honestly, I think flappers did just as much for women socially as the first wave feminists did (Perhaps more).

And that’s the primary issue I have with the label of “first wave,” or at least the appropriation of many “first wavers” by modern feminists as part of their cause. Some of the women who participated as suffragists may very well be rolling over in their graves every time someone associates them with modern feminism.

But, then again, back labeling often ends up being problematic for that reason when the label is as large as “feminism.” That’s why I tend to refer to them as suffragettes, “second wavers” and “third wavers;” those are the labels each group tended/tends to actually use (although “third wave” doesn’t seem to be as popular among some people who consider themselves feminists, I’ve noticed.)

First of all, I would like to remind everyone here that endgames do not take place between the pieces on the board, but between the hands and minds that move them.

Marja Erwin:
In regard to your first comment, my experiences with women and with feminists have lead me to feel a visceral negative reaction to such stories, even in jest (I feel a similar revulsion to their gender-flipped counterparts, but less strongly because the past association is lacking). I suppose this is what is often called ‘triggering’. In any case, reading such things puts me in a very bad place, emotionally and can seriously impair my ability to function normally.

You may well argue that I should be able to move past these feelings and this reaction, at least in some contexts, but the social framework around me, a social framework which exists in its current form in part due to the actions of the women you so vociferously defend, prevents me from safely communicating my psychological scars and thus renders any healing a practical impossibility.

In response to one of your later comments, I believe that you, and the other members of the movement (if you will insist on terming it such) to which you belong, do a great disservice by so appropriating the lives and actions of so many women without there consent and often in the face of their explicit denial. You have stated that it is only obvious and natural to term such personages ‘feminist’, but you have supplied no compelling justification in support of this assertion. It would certainly be reasonable to mark the influence their actions and ideas had on certain feminists who lived later and to mention their names in a history of feminism in that context, but that does not make them feminist themselves. Fundamentally, I believe that your assertions objectify these women in a very real way, stripping them of any input or agency in their own identities. That they are now dead makes this flagrant disregard no less abhorrent to me.

I consider that the extension of ‘feminism’ to cover all the actions and accomplishments of women and all actions which would benefit them, as well as an assertion of its natural monopoly on any belief in gender equality or the rights and capabilities of women (both you and Daisy make arguments in this thread which imply as much), to be nothing but a shell game of definitions which serves to stifle and objectify many in the service of the immediate political needs of a few.

I will not attempt to define feminism or any other movement. I hold to my previously stated belief that the term represents, for all purposes of discussion, an empty set. I will not treat with any definition of feminism nor with any person attempting to produce such a definition, save to advise them to cease doing so, unless that definition be supported by compelling and well documented evidence, such that I may expect it to be accepted by any rational and discerning individual.

I like how you just said Emma Goldman knew about feminism and rejected it,

To be clear, she rejected what would later be known as first wave feminism by people who were actually calling themselves feminists.

Dungone, straining at gnats: Goldman was anything but a feminist for many reasons that are brushed under the rug today

The person who wrote the first essay advocating abortion rights, is a feminist. Period. We might even say she INVENTED the CONCEPT of abortion rights, a crucial feminist position. Her essay determined the direction the movement went in and influenced it.

Cook the books all you want, but you might as well say Booker T Washington was not in favor of “civil rights” since that term and movement had also not yet coalesced/been invented either. Of course he was. Being ahead of your time and INVENTING something, is not tantamount to disowning… that is utterly and totally ridiculous.

You can not disown something that you have yourself invented.

Next up, Trotsky not a “progressive” sincehe didn’t use the word, and probably would not have liked Van Jones. (rolls eyes)

Dungone, straining at gnats continued: How could she be in support of the Suffragists when she herself was an immigrant, and they sympathized with the KKK

Um, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a member of the Anti-Slavery society. Where are you getting this stuff?

The WCTU was but one faction backing the vote for women, for obvious reasons. I think its interesting how you say ALL suffragists were not feminists… then you say… all suffragists were the WCTU and they WERE feminists! Make up your mind.

The women who organized the Seneca Falls convention (women’s rights convention) were very inclusive, which is proven by the fact that they even named it after a Native American women’s convention; they were implying (with the name) were more civilized that white people in the matter of women’s rights. Frederick Douglas and Sojourner Truth made famous speeches and abolitionism was front and center.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seneca_Falls_Convention

What would a “radical women’s right advocate” be, if not a feminist? As you said, the word had not been invented yet.

If I start calling myself a “radical women’s right advocate” will you start being nicer to me, as you are to Emma Goldman? (I suspect this is really only because she was an atheist, though.)

Okay, from now on, I am a “radical women’s rights advocate”–I trust all of you will now embrace me and treat me with some fuckin respect! Alright!

Skidd: Daisy: You can’t really deny that there WERE plenty of hyper-religious church-lady types of “first wavers”/suffragettes.

As Dungone keeps saying, ALL people who endorsed the vote were not feminists. Just as libertarians often endorse abortion rights, does not make them progressives.

I am talking about, those who specifically endorsed the ENTIRE PLATFORM of women’s rights, especially those who CALLED THEMSELVES “radical women’s rights advocates”–Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Emma Goldman, et al. They used this label TO DIFFERENTIATE THEMSELVES from the WCTU, racists, et al.

The first person who used the word “feminist” was likely de Beauvoir, who by the way, liked men and lot, slept with a famous one and typed and translated his texts for free, and agitated for all manner of progressive and anti-colonialist causes.

I can’t believe I am now teaching history on this forum, it is amazing what World Net Daily and Fox News hath wrought.

Dungone quotes Emma: “We are in need of unhampered growth out of old traditions and habits. The movement for women’s emancipation has so far made but the first step in that direction.”

Sounds like she wanted to go further, not backward. Points for my argument, not for yours.

More chapter and verse is needed; where did she ever DENOUNCE the women’s rights movement? MRA my ass.

Hackberry: Well, ladies, guess what? What goes around comes around.

So, Dungone and others, is this the official reason I am attacked every time I post? I see.

Thanks.

At least someone is capable of delivering a straight and honest answer.

Gingko: Also, I agree with the others on the menaing of “mangina”> I hev never heard it used to describe a man who was acting out of gender role,

Here in the south, a mangina is just a witty word for “pussy”… I only discovered the other meaning when I started posting here.

Schala, ably aiding the psywar op: If it split like the USSR, then the core part, the biggest part, didn’t change.

Oh Jesus Christ, then change analogies. I meant, A FRACTION. The professionals, to be specific, the ones who saw a career opportunity in feminism: lawyers, professors, sociologists, politicians, etc etc etc.

Feminists like my mother, went into occupational and union-feminism, cultural feminists went into goddess worship and woo, sex-oriented feminists started making their own porn and became Susie Bright, etc.

You were on those threads Schala, and you even participated when I talked about the “cultural feminist” faction… now you are helping pile-on like you don’t remember anything I wrote?

Thanks, I appreciate that.

Daisy, I don’t see any personal attacks on you.
And you do know your feminist history so if you ever get dungone to respond this might be interesting.
I’d stick around if I was you.
But then again I’m the guy you like to attack in a personal manner because you don’t like something I said that has nothing to do with you.
So…whatever.

Dungone: Hah! That’s exactly the kind of appropriating nonsense that I’ve come to expect from feminists. FWIW I’m an advocate of abortion rights, yet I am not a feminist. You seem to know very little about who Emma Goldman actually was.

Dungone, and I just covered that phenom (abortion) in a comment, above, that you obviously skipped. (of course)

I think I was reading Goldman when you were still swimming around in your mama’s ovaries.

Chapter and verse, still waiting.

Clarence, in the “double standards” thread, Dungone says he can’t say what he wants to say about me “in polite company”… such a gentleman! 😀

And thank you for the compliments!

Ascribing opinions to me when I have in fact said THE TOTAL OPPOSITE (see “double standards” thread) …. and targeting someone repeatedly and yet giving other people a pass who say the exact same things, might be construed as bullying. Just sayin. 😉

Not that Dungone would ever do anything like that, of course. Marines have always behaved perfectly, just check out history if you don’t believe me. (I have just been reading about the Philippines–damn, it did get ugly!)

And BTW, saying “feminists always do this!” and “feminist always do that!” and not considering that a personal insult, is disingenuous… therefore, every time he does it, I have decided to talk about Marines. In glowing terms, of course! 🙂

Oh, and all – the “payback is a motherfucker” approach isn’t helpful; here. It clarifies the issue around some aspects of history, and there has been a lot of revisionism all around, but it is not helpful directed at individuals, especially the ones who are making a real effort to participate – a real, honest effort – and I think it’s pretty clear that Daisy is making that effort..

Heterophobic? I ask because I have seen some breath-takingly homophobic things directed at gay men by lesbians, not just misandrist but specifically homphobic, so homophobic is also possibel.

(sigh) Dungone, you have spent this entire thread blasting the usage of the words “First Wave”–then you quote me Wikipedia entries, peppered with the word.

Well, which is it? Was there a first wave or wasn’t there?

I asked for chapter and verse… I should have known an atheist doesn’t understand what that means… that means GOSPEL: from the horse’s mouth. Quotes from Emma herself. I am still waiting. I can quote you just as many people writing ABOUT Goldman as you have. So? Horse’s mouth, please.

Chapter and verse: straight from Jesus Christ himself, none of that Paul Tillich bullshit, thanks.

My own quotes of Wikipedia have always been ignored by you, why are you now finding them useful? How about all the wikipedia pages (such as about First Wave abolitionists) you have ignored here, from me?

You have ignored every single one, am I now expected to bow before yours? Why?

And you are quoting VIVIAN GORNICK to me? (giggle) A communist feminist with her own anti-anarchist agenda? (I can imagine how well that would go over, if I tried that one. Although I can, do you want me to?) Gornick is very good, love her books, but she does have an anti-anarchist agenda in general, besides several others. (She also has been caught inventing things, but I won’t go there.)

She was distressed by abortion:

Is this why she had one of her own, her pregnancy by Alexander Berkman? (And maybe she found it a pretty unpleasant experience? Especially an illegal one?) She still wrote the first essay in favor of abortion rights. Like Sanger, you can argue the motives were not great, but facts are facts. And she influenced the direction the movement went, making abortion rights a cornerstone. Like it or not, facts are facts.

Nobody dared to even say the word before she did. It was a dirty, private thing and the word was not used in polite company, let alone in PRINT. She did an amazing and brave thing.

Goldman was an advocate of free love between men and women and criticized contemporary women for being cold hard bitches who were incapable of it

So did Louise Bryant, Germaine Greer, Simone de Beauvoir and countless others… this is not an anti-feminist view, unless you think feminism is the cartoon you believe it is. As I have said MANY times, early feminism was vociferous in telling women to stop being babies and grow up and take responsibility. It only became victim chic rather recently, with the whole concept that women are never to blame for anything. It certainly didn’t start that way… have you ever read “The Second Sex” or even Mary Wollstonecraft? They were very rough on the class of women they thought were little more than spoiled children. Goldman went further and said if working class women could work in factories alongside men, it meant these bourgeois women were ALSO capable of not acting like dainty bitches and can grow the hell up. Unless you have read First Wave socialist feminist theory (the context Gornick is writing from… Rosa Luxembourg, Clara Zetkin, etc) –you probably are not aware that upper class, bourgeois, and proletarian women were not even regarded as the same species. Goldman was writing for radical readers (such as the readers of THE MASSES) who took such knowledge and context for granted. You are lifting these words out of context to prove some point about “strawfeminists”–she also intended to expose upper class women as a parasitic class. (and they were)

You set up “strawfeminist” and then Goldman can be shown not to be that. Well, duh!

For the record, I agree with what she wrote. What you quoted from her: Amen. Totally true. EVERY. WORD.

And I have said that here, many times, but I don’t think you have been reading, have you?

PS: I covered lesbian feminist history in the “double standards” thread. Don’t worry, Dungone, you are exempt from the reading assignment, as usual.

Well, which is it? Was there a first wave or wasn’t there?

You and your generation of feminists labeled them first wavers when you were trying to find historical precedence for your Patriarchal theories. It’s not my damn fault that it’s become the commonly accepted term for the Suffragist movement.

Yes, I am old, sonny boy, and I have a damned good memory too.

Dungone: And it’s not up to you to dictate the terms of this debate

Ah, the Marine is pissed when I use his own tactics on him. (It has been ever thus)

You supply your evidence supporting your conclusions and STFU about mine.

Sure will. Since Wikipedia is now held in high regard, I shall continue.

Emma Goldman’s publication: MOTHER EARTH, where the first essays about abortion and birth control in the USA, were published: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Earth_(magazine)

If she was against women’s rights, seems odd she would deliberately publish them wild and woolly, crazy riot grrls like Sanger, Louise Bryant, Mabel Dodge, Lola Ridge and Margaret Anderson (publisher of Ulysses in the USA)… but hey, I guess it makes sense that she hated feminism but nonetheless decided to PUBLISH feminist writers nobody else would even talk to!

Everyone else here can already decide for themselves, no matter how much you doth protest about it.

Yes, they certainly can. I think readers here know strawfeminists when they see them.

Straining at gnats. And still no gospel!

But you know what it says, “By their fruits shall ye know them”–and Emma had some decidedly feminist fruits. Her legacy speaks for itself.

Looking for some cool quotes, so hold on. Its hard to pick just one, there were so many good FEMINIST quotes. 😉

Here is the entire context of the quote that Dungone uses in his above post, to say Emma Goldman is not a feminist. And of course, the same quote means (to me) that she IS a feminist. Keep in mind that this was written in the dark ages, estimated to be written around 1915.

From the essay “The Tragedy of Woman’s Emacipation”–by which she means what we would now call “the suffragist movement”… which she thought only dealt with material stuff and not women’s personalities, deepest desires, skills, intellect or souls. (She does employ the word SOUL many times, which is interesting, and I would ask atheist Dungone if he also believes in souls? Can I use this to prove she was an existentialist, her use of the word SOUL? Tee hee, never mind.)

…

Pettiness separates; breadth unites. Let us be broad and big. Let us not overlook vital things because of the trifles confronting us. A true conception of the relation of the sexes will not admit of conqueror and conquered; it knows of but one great thing: to give of one’s self boundlessly, in order to find one’s self richer, deeper, better. That alone can fill the emptiness, and transform the tragedy of woman’s emancipation into joy, limitless joy.

…

I agree with every word. Emma Goldman ROCKED THE HOUSE. (I remember how cool she was, at that separatist tea party of mine she attended.)

I now leave my case with the jury.

Was Emma Goldman a pioneering feminist the early 20th century or not?

And Dungone, do you agree with that last paragraph of hers? Do you believe we find ourselves in giving? Its a Jewish concept, at base, called “tikkun”. Not atheist, but rather transcendent. Surprised you like her so much.

If you do agree with that passage, I’m ready to call you a feminist too.

Marja, and I, use the y because it’s, to us, a celebration of anti-heterosexism and cissexism.

You use it because you’re ignorant of how bigoted it is. Notice that I’m not calling you a bigot. I’m only saying that you’re ignorant.

Ah, the Marine is pissed when I use his own tactics on him.

Calling you out when you bs is not the same as telling you how to debate.

Was Emma Goldman a pioneering feminist the early 20th century or not?

Fuck no. I’ve laid out the facts. You’re making your argument in the typical fashion of feminists, that if a woman agreed that 2+2=4 and a feminist did too, then it made that woman a feminist. You’re not proving anything here.

Her views were that women were already equal to men and only needed to take responsibility for themselves. That’s the polar opposite of what feminism claimed. It comes through even in the passage that you’re quoting, if you would care to actually try to understand what it means. Goldman considered contemporary women to be overly moralistic and prude; she thought nothing good could ever come of them getting the right to vote; she feared the push towards Puritanical Christianity that would ensue, and she was quite justified, almost prophetic, in that fear. She thought that the bigger problem were the women themselves, not their lack of equal rights. She found the victim mentality of contemporary women to be just as appalling as enlightened men and women find it today.

Dungone if he also believes in souls? Can I use this to prove she was an existentialist, her use of the word SOUL? Tee hee, never mind.

Is there a point to this?

Hopefully our next interaction won’t be as antagonistic, Daisy. You’ve really crawled up the wrong tree on this one.

@Daisy, I guess if you’re not a Republican then you don’t love America, and if you’re a Democrat then you’re a Filthy Commie, and if you support humane treatment of women then you must be a feminist. Same logic. Gives me the same migraine (that’s why I get terse with you Daisy – you do give me headaches – congratulations).

Skidd,

I believe “wer” and “werman” are related to “worth” and to roots meaning “being” (n.) and “becoming” (v.). I think “guma” and its equivalents were the early Germanic words meaning “man” or “adult male human being.”

So the man-as-default issues are a bit deeper. I actually used to use “werman” and “woman,” but found it impractical, before discovering it was even more problematic than “man” and “woman.”

Dungone: Her views were that women were already equal to men and only needed to take responsibility for themselves. That’s the polar opposite of what feminism claimed

Dungone, if that passage had not been written in 1915, you might have a point, but the fact is that nobody had yet said any of that. There was no “polar opposite” in the first place.

She set the agenda. She used the word “oppressed class” for women, for the VERY FIRST TIME. Feminism hardly existed, as you said upthread, so nobody was “claiming” much of anything yet. (who, for instance, was claiming otherwise?) The agenda was still being decided upon.

Goldman calls women “an oppressed class” for the first time. Can you name a single feminist who used that term before women, before she did?

My god, you are resoundingly ignorant. How dare you accuse anyone else of such a thing.

Dungone: she thought nothing good could ever come of them getting the right to vote;

From the passage I just laboriously typed, that Dungone has not read, Goldman writes:
The demand for equal rights in every vocation of life is just and fair;

So you are wrong.

Dungone: She thought that the bigger problem were the women themselves, not their lack of equal rights.

Goldman writes: The movement for woman’s emancipation has so far made but the first step in that direction. It is to be hoped to gather strength to make another. The right to vote, or equal civil rights, may be good demands, but true emancipation begins neither at the polls nor in courts. It begins in woman’s soul. History tells us that every oppressed class gained true liberation from its masters through its own efforts.

These are her own words. Try that Orwellian shit all you want, but MASTERS is a heavy word to use, in a time when lots of people still remembered the Civil War, you know.

Actually, you don’t know. That is clear. You have no sense of American history at all.

Dungone: She thought that the bigger problem were the women themselves, not their lack of equal rights.

Goldman wrote: Indeed, if a partial emancipation of woman is to become a complete and true emancipation of woman, it will have to do away with the ridiculous notion that to be loved, to be sweetheart or mother, is synonymous with being slave or subordinate.

Sure doesn’t sound like it, Dungone.

But this is the part that upset Dungone most: It will have to do away with the absurd notion of the dualism of the sexes, or that man and woman represent two antagonistic worlds.

… since this is the world that Dungone inhabits and makes his home in.

As you said, upthread: Everyone else here can already decide for themselves, no matter how much you doth protest about it.

Daisy, from where I’m standing, having been written in 1915 should only make 1970’s feminists ashamed of themselves, as nothing had changed.

Don’t you get it that when she talks about the ridiculous notion of love and motherhood as slavery, she’s talking about the fact that it was ridiculous for women of her time to have felt that way?

Dungone: Don’t you get it that when she talks about the ridiculous notion of love and motherhood as slavery, she’s talking about the fact that it was ridiculous for women of her time to have felt that way?

Well, of course it was. As I said, I agree with her. It is not motherhood itself, but the conditions around it (as she says, “slave or subordinate”) that have made it oppressive. Many new feminists of the First Wave could not see the difference. They could not separate the conditions of motherhood from the act of actually birthing babies. They seemed inseparable. The birth of feminist theory is when we learned to separate biology from the conditions around it. As de Beauvoir said, Goldman was among the first (maybe THE first?) to make this distinction.

This became a cornerstone of standard Second Wave theory, of course, and Goldman helped us see the way to it.

As de Beauvoir said also (got her down from the shelf too, now reading her comments about Goldman’s many feminist contributions), before this time in history, before birth control separated the sex act from pregnancy, it was hard for women not to see love AS slavery, since it often seemed (in the form of pregnancy) to lead to that. Only when these two could be separated, as Goldman said, could there be “free love”… and this challenged virtually everything women had understood about sex and love, before this time.

Very radical feminist ideas, indeed. Wasn’t she just so great?

“Um, Skidd, when have I been snarky about science? You mean my comment about PZ Myers and the microbes? I don’t have any problem with his microbes. (?) I was answering Stoner with a boner, who mentioned him.”

I got the impression that you thought that all scientists tended to agree on everything, where that’s almost the opposite of reality. Perhaps it’s because I’ve met so many anti-sci feminists and activists, who shout anyone down with differing theories – I mean, sociology itself has at least three main theories for just about every situation. Echo-chamber activism is anti-science inherently, IMO.

(Though I gotta admit I find it a little funny that we have the reversal of things in here that you’re telling us all off for not having the same historical education that you do. I guess I honestly lack interest in the subject. Other than Jazz Age. Which is great, and full of progressive ladies. The “fun fems” that came after the first wave, perhaps. I don’t think their socially transgressive behavior gets enough credit.)

Daisy:
I have a great respect for you and your contributions to discussions both here and elsewhere, particularly with regard to the history of your movement. However, neither you nor any of the other women you have mentioned in relation to such positions really fit what I am looking for. I do not consider this a personal fault with any of you, merely an unfortunate matter of background and temperament. Oddly enough, it is probably the “loving men” part of the feminists I believe to have put in the most serious work and effort on this subject which drives me away from their work. Such women tend to be quite socially and sexually active, in addition to being very emotionally open, and while I consider none of these things to be by any means negative qualities, they place these writers in another world from myself as surely as if they stood upon the iron sands of Mars. Whatever I am, I seem to have fallen through the cracks of understanding and can subsequently find nothing in such work that is truly relevant to the life I lead.

I do not know why you believe I would be seeking allies interested in the MRM, as I have never myself expressed any such interest, nor have I ever identified with that loose affiliation of groups.

My current policy towards feminism, after much consideration, is one of passivity. I refuse to pursue or to combat, but I likewise do not proselytize or seek approval. I do not believe that I have ever done wrong either by your movement or by women in general or specific (indeed, I am very careful never even to state generalizations of women as a group), so I do not believe that I have any responsibility to seek out your spaces or participation therein. I do, however, consider that elements of your movement have done quite a lot of wrong by me. I am, therefore, entirely open to engaging with interested feminists, but only on the condition that they do the work of courting my interest and providing a space in which I safely join them in reasonable discussion.

You appear to be inviting me to take a side in your altercation with Dungone. I will not do so for the same reason that I have referred to no comment made by either of you thus far: The entirety of the feud taking place in this thread is an idiotic circle from which no advancement could possibly arise, whatever the intentions and abilities of the participants. I will, however, say that your core position hinges on the idea that certain beliefs not only are feminist but must necessarily be so. I do not agree with this position and I do not feel that you have even attempted to support it.

As for the hostility expressed towards the link between the “first wave” and subsequent feminists, I believe that the lion’s share of the enmity there stems from the unfortunate reality that many contemporary feminists will, when backed into a corner, fall back on the achievements of those women and their culturally sacrosanct status in order to justify their own, often quite separate, positions.

Regarding the terminology of the first wave, I would pose some questions to both you and your opponent:
1.) Is the term “first wave” genuinely useful as a historical designation, or does it create more problems than it solves by lumping together too many disparate factions and creating an illusion of unity where none existed?
2.) Two what extent does continuity exist between these “first wave” women and later feminist groups? Can these groups meaningfully or reasonably claim to be the heirs of these earlier thinkers and do the achievements and works of these earlier thinkers reflect positively on their supposed successors?
3.) If we can ascribe the term “feminist” to women who lived before its invention and did not identify as such, then there must exist a definitional standard by which to make such a judgment. Who sets this standard, and by what authority do they do so? Is this the same standard we apply in saying whether or not a person living today is a feminist? If not, why is that the case?

@Dungone
You use it because you’re ignorant of how bigoted it is. Notice that I’m not calling you a bigot. I’m only saying that you’re ignorant.

Yeah… I guess I must have blacked out in the middle of three years of stridently criticizing everything about the second wave that made what could have been a positive celebration of human diversity into an insular, Stalinist, backbiting, genital-essentialist, woman-killing, disaster… surely I didn’t see the BBC series Lefties and hear radfems in their own words mention how they wanted to shackle womanhood to wombhood with derivations of the word… surely I haven’t watched these people problematize their own CAMAB children, and SURELY there’s not an ounce of reclamation in what I do, trying to make spaces safer for the hidden half of the lesbian community.

Do you even hear yourself type?

Valerie: surely I didn’t see the BBC series Lefties

Very interesting, just Googled. Didn’t know about this! Its on YouTube but would rather see if I could get on Netflix.

Thanks for the tip, always looking for such things.

On the other thread, I mentioned “I shot Andy Warhol”-which I think you might enjoy. (One good turn deserves another.) Really captures the era so well.

Daisy:

I do not think you comments on the soul are upsetting, just confusingly phrased with lots of odd capitalization which gives them very unnatural patterns of emphasis.

I assure you, I read the entire thread and all of your comments in it before writing my own comment.

Thank you for answering my questions and for, in doing so, demonstrating exactly the point I intended to make, namely, that your definition of feminism is just that: Your personal definition. The people you are arguing with have there own definitions, which clearly differ from yours. Because neither of you have produced evidence or arguments in favor of your definitions, but instead merely employed them as a priori assumptions from which to draw your other conclusions. As a result, it is impossible that either of you could ever convince the other or get anywhere.

The definition of feminism has been so heavily debated, altered, twisted and politicized (not last or least by feminists themselves) that it has become in and of itself a thorny problem in these discussions, so that we should all be careful to be on the same page as to what precisely we mean by the term before recklessly tossing it about.

As to my statement that your argument rests on assuming certain beliefs, positions and issues to be inherently and exclusively feminist, even your rebuttal rests on that idea. Without such an assumption, it could not be possible to term any person “feminist” based solely on the issues they dealt with and the views they expressed. I will not ask you to stop believing as you do, but the burden of proof in this situation rests with you to demonstrate that holding those positions and dealing with those issues necessarily makes a person a feminist if you wish anyone else’s opinions to be swayed by your claims.

Until such time as you, or another, presents me with that persuasive evidence, I do not consider that there exist such things as “feminist issues” or “feminist questions”, only “issues which are important to feminists” and “questions which feminists often ask”. I consider the fact that it is possible to deal with such issues and to ask such questions without identifying as feminist (I’ve done it in three languages, so I should know), to be fairly damning evidence against them being the exclusive property of one movement.

This brings me to my next point: The way in which you classify women of the first wave as being feminist or not differs significantly from the way later and contemporary persons are so classified. To elaborate: Rather than being judged against a set of criteria, later women and men are considered feminist or not dependent solely on their own decision to identify as such. This is a major point of doctrine for many third wavers, and I do not believe the two uses of the term can be meaningfully conflated. In other words: The “feminism” you ascribe to the first wave is no the “feminism” which might be practiced by a person today. I am not referring to changes in language, key issues, or membership, but to the disjunction in the way membership is determined. Such variation in usage can only confuse any attempt at communication.

As for your last argument, I consider “Group X was influenced by Y, therefore Y is part of group X” to be spurious at best.

To be quite honest, I am fundamentally dissatisfied with the way in which the feminist movement is defined and the way in which those definitions are organized. It is largely due to the mountain of haphazard politicking and deliberate rhetorical traps which comprise that structure that I now steadfastly refuse to assume any position as to the definition of feminism and have generally ceased to regard such arguments and terms as particularly meaningful. Personally, I am not terribly comfortable classing feminism as a single movement in the first place, and certainly not as a single continuous movement. I feel that that view loses to much detail and reality to be a useful representation and exists principally to project an aura of unity and continuity where none exists. I use the term “first wave” in conversation, but I would be more comfortable describing its members in relation to feminism as being “proto-feminists” or “precursors to feminism” (the influence is unmistakably there, but I feel the “wave” terminology does not adequately reflect the distances and differences). Ideally, I would actually wish to place “feminism” as a subset within a larger “women’s rights movement”. I feel that such a system would be better able to describe historical and global realities (applying the terminology of Western feminism to independent movements in other parts of the globe is wrongheaded, imperialist and descriptively inadequate).

But, enough of my rambling: It is the responsibility of feminists to work up their own definitions, as they have claimed this area as that of their singular expertise, and to present those definitions to the rest of us properly systematized, formatted, and proved. Until they have gotten around to doing so, I will continue to regard the whole show as I would someone who showed up to a formal dinner only half dressed.

What, by the way, do you make of my take on where the hostility towards these notions comes from and what is your own opinion of the manner in which the names and legacies of these women are used by contemporary feminists (some comparisons to your second wave experience would be welcome here)? Personally, I believe that the virtual deification of the period, and the suffragettes in particular, does more to discourage an accurate general knowledge of these women and their works than anything “Fox News” has ever said (does Fox News even talk about feminism a lot? I confess I have never seen even a minute of it myself, but I never hear anyone mention it when they make parodies of the station or complain about the stories they run on forums. Why is everyone who says anything negative or has any gaps in their knowledge about feminism assumed to be entirely reliant on this station? It honestly smacks of a cheap silencing tactic to me).

“I believe “wer” and “werman” are related to “worth” and to roots meaning “being” (n.) and “becoming” (v.). I think “guma” and its equivalents were the early Germanic words meaning “man” or “adult male human being.”

Marja, there are a couple three roots here with only superficial phonetic similarities.

“Wer” in English and “virtue”, “virus” , “vir-” etc. in Latin are the same etymon. The basic meaning has to do with power.

“Werden” = ‘become’, “weird”, “wyrd”, “word”; and “ver-” in Latin are the same etymon. This etymon has the root meaning of “twist”.

“guma” is the Germanic reflex of Latin”homin-“. It is not inherently male. “Human” comes off the same etymon. However in Germanic it is pretty much restircted ot males – “brudgimma” in Swedish means “bridegroom”, pretty male, and in fact this is the ame etymon in Englsih “bridegroom” , with “groom” replacing “guma” by folk etymology.

“So the man-as-default issues are a bit deeper”

Yes. Masculine as default, in Indo-European languages at least, goes back to the early stages of the proto-language, when there were two genders, animate and inanimate or active and inactive – crosslinuisitcally animate/inanimate is the minial gender distinction – and this is reflected in the noun case system of some of the daughter languages. The animate gender then split into masculine and feminine as the active/inactive verbal system fell apart.

Thus the feminine gender was much newer, starting with few members of the category and has been growing slowly over the millenia.

That leaves masculine as the generic animate gender, not even specifically human.

Englsih lost all this for purely formal reasons – the distinguishing features of the genders conflicted in Anglo-Saxon and Norse, the two main source languages of English, so people just gave up on it. (Well, AS may or may not be directly ancestral to Middle English; the question is still open.

HidingFromtheDinosaurs said: “Hackberry:
I refuse to entertain such a position. An eye for an eye means surrendering all initiative and agency to ones opponent. I will not do that, especially as I have chosen to refuse the existence of the battle entirely.”

My intent in posting that story was not to encourage an eye for an eye mentality but to simply offer an historical example of how some men were treated by early feminists in the 60’s and 70’s. The “what goes around, comes around” statement was trying to get the point across that we reap what we sow. The story was also meant as a contrast to some of today’s women complaining about being excluded and not realizing that the feminist movement was 100 times worse.

I’m curious about your ” refuse the existence of the battle entirely” idea. Can you explain a bit? Thanks

Dungone said he admired Emma Goldman and knows everything about her, and advised me to BACK OFF discussing her in no uncertain terms. He announced that one of the most famous feminists of the first wave was not a feminist. Did you miss that? The comment about soul was in that context.

This is why I love talking to you, Daisy. You go around writing stuff like “I’m holding a book right now as we speak!!” and telling me you were reading Goldman before I was swimming around my mother’s ovaries and then portray yourself as a poor innocent victim of personal attacks.

I also love talking to you because of how transparent your tactics are. Instead of defending your claim that Goldman was a feminist, you’re trying to change the subject and attack my credibility. This hasn’t escaped me, I’m not dumb. Your goal is to show that because I’m not even right about Goldman’s atheism, how can I be trusted about her anti-feminism? And then you taunt me for not taking the bait, as a further insult to my intelligence.

But, to me, it seems like this is about to backfire on you. Goldman’s atheism is unassailable and if you weren’t so busy putting words into her mouth to suit your own personal biases, you wouldn’t have even tried taking this approach with me.

Anyway, my offhand remark was because Goldman talked about the soul a LOT, and I simply wondered as an atheist, what Dungone thought of that? She seemed to imply (in the last paragraph of the passage I quoted) that in giving of ourselves, we find ourselves. As I said, this is intrinsic to the Jewish idea of Tikkun Olam; which would be Goldman’s upbringing. It is not an atheist idea, per se. And what did he think of that? I was genuinely curious. Dungone does not seem to have any respect for ideas like that. He told me in the “double standards” thread that he had no sympathy for people trapped in fundamentalism, called them idiots, etc. That would not seem to be a very Tikkun Olam (repair of the world) concept, so how does he correlate his atheism with Goldman’s atheism, which seems a Jewish based atheism?

No answer.

Ladies and gentlemen, the real Emma Goldman speaks about atheism:

The decline of theism is a most interesting spectacle, especially as manifested in the anxiety of the theists, what- ever their particular brand. They realize, much to their distress, that the masses are growing daily more atheistic, more anti-religious; that they are quite willing to leave the Great Beyond and its heavenly domain to the angels and sparrows;

The philosophy of Atheism represents a concept of life without any metaphysical Beyond or Divine Regulator. It is the concept of an actual, real world with its liberating, expanding and beautifying possibilities, as against an unreal world, which, with its spirits, oracles, and mean content- ment has kept humanity in helpless degradation.

It may seem a wild paradox, and yet it is pathetically true, that this real, visible world and our life should have been so long under the influence of metaphysical specula- tion, rather than of physical demonstrable forces. Under the lash of the theistic idea, this earth has served no other purpose than as a temporary station to test man’s capacity for immolation to the will of God.

The philosophy of Atheism has its root in the earth, in this life; its aim is the emancipation of the human race from all God-heads, be they Judaic, Christian, Mohammedan, Buddhistic, Brahministic, or what not. Mankind has been punished long and heavily for having created its gods; nothing but pain and persecution have been man’s lot since gods began.

“Your argument that Emma Goldman was not a feminist reads, to me, like an argument that Andrea Dworkin was not a feminist because she disagreed with Elizabeth Gould Davis. (I suspect everyone here would also disagree with Elizabeth Gould Davis.)”

If you look at my views, given I’m pro women’s rights. I would be declared feminist.

Yet, since feminists don’t accept me as feminist due to my being a true egalitarian, unwilling to shelf men’s rights for the 22nd century, I’m not, either. I’m Schrodinger’s feminist, feminist and not at the same time.

Do you really think a President couldn’t have twice as many senior counsellors, that he couldn’t handle a meeting with nine guys instead of five, all of whom would then have got a good night’s sleep in the interim? It is, quite simply, chest pounding bullshit that has reduced governance from long, admittedly stressful, contemplation, discussion, consensus building, to a series of crises-of-the-hour.

This is a very naive view. Any accomplished entrepreneur/leader will tell you the 80-20 rule.. that 80% of work gets done by 20% of the people. In my last engineering job, my boss (and me and other senior members on the team) had a hell of a time finding the right set of people to work on a project that lasted 3-4 years. We would hire someone after intensive screening.. only to find them a misfit for that particular project. Which is why.. we were immensely happy to find good-fits and pay them 1.5 or even 2 times what we would otherwise pay. At the higher levels, its very hard to find replacements which is why they get paid so very well.

Like much of Western society, successful men’s lives are filled with a great deal of unproductive busywork. That women are not as often chumps in this regard is also why you will find their work not regarded as highly… it doesn’t look as hard, ergo it must not have been as important. Does this hurt women? Sure. It also hurts men, because anyone with enough energy or inclination for self-reflection need not apply.

What people do is a consequence of how society gradually evolved, and the choices people make individually. Those who produced the most.. by working hard or by being brilliant as well.. were regarded highly and rewarded the most.. by both men and women. And most humans are motivated by reward. “unproductive” work is a natural outcome of any experimental endeavour.. every engineer and scientist knows that. I also want to remind you of the other side of the coin.. “unproductive” consumption.. the runaway consumption of the modern world.. keeping up with the joneses. And women are the primary culprits by doing 80+% of the household spending in the US.
Bottomline: A lot of good has come from the way work has been structured over millenia, and some bad. This model can not be upended in any meaningful way now, and I doubt any of us will trade all the goodies we have now to go back and live in some primitive way, forgoing any future innovation.

And Re: women not being chumps as often as men.. Are you suggesting that civilization could have taken an easier path and innovated at a slower pace, yet we would have had all the comforts we do nowadays (if not today.. maybe 100 years down the line?). No.. I dont think you are saying that. You offer that as as explanation for “But why are there fewer women as politicians, business leaders, scientists?“. Yes.. I understand that.. men and women are motivated very differently, and thats why they live differently (well explained by Roy Baumeister in his “Is there anything good about men” essay online) and I am ok with that.
But I dont see you answering the main question.. (To be fair to you, its Daisy who made the assertion).. Why SHOULD more women be “empowered” in the public sphere? (presumably by being GIVEN positions, as opposed to earning them if history is to teach us anything). Are they going to solve the problems facing the earth (say global warming, diseases, poverty, etc) better than those at the forefront today (presumably through innovation.. which takes lots of hard work, much of which will be unproductive coz most avenues lead to dead ends).

Marja Erwin:

You are correct that feminism is characterized by many internal divisions, but this is made possible only by the fact that membership is determined solely by an individual’s decision to assume the label, rather than by qualities inherent in their beliefs, actions, or works. In attempting to define Goldman as feminist based on her views runs entirely contrary to this principle and demands that there be a definite standard by which to determine whether or not a person is feminist. If Emma Goldman passes such a standard, I cannot but believe that many self-identified feminists since her time would fail it.

The entire position in favor of labeling Goldman and her contemporaries as feminists, rather than following the designations they applied to themselves, relies on considering “feminism” as an umbrella term for all activism in favor of women (without such a premise, all the arguments thus far made become utterly insupportable). I have already stated that I find this way of thinking to be problematic, not least for its massive cultural insensitivity in setting the name a Western movement as the default label for such activities across all of time and space. Lines may blur with Goldman because so many self-identified feminists later adopted elements of her beliefs (although I have already stated that I do not believe in the ‘influence=inclusion’ school of thought), but would you honestly argue that it is right to include women like Ding Ling in such a grouping? If we admit, as I believe is proper, that feminism is a subset within a larger global pattern of women’s rights activism, would it not also be reasonable to restrict that category to the people who called themselves feminists and acknowledge that they owed much to the influence of earlier movements and thinkers in their culture? I believe that such a system of categorization is much better able to inclusively represent historical and global realities and that we should not be afraid to abandon the fruits of imperialist modern thought merely because they have passed into tradition.

I would also note that you have thus far presented no argument in favor of your own categorization. All you have done is to state that your position is self-evident, without providing any evidence as to why this should be the case.

Hackberry:

Certainly, there is nothing objectionable in pointing out hypocrisy, but I feel it should not be done with a gloating or hostile tone.

@John D:

Agreed. It’s an odd correlation, considering most of the disasters he’d implemented were right-wing projects that had been about a decade in the making.

Also, many of Bush’s vacations were working vacations designed to demonstrate that he was able to participate in non presidential work, like clearing brush.

Wilson was pretty vigorous, so was Nixon, so was Carter (though I like his politics, his exercise of power was… less competent than I would typically like to admit)

FDR was big on leisure, so was Eisenhour… Coolidge ran the country for three months without a telephone, since he was vacationing in the middle of nowhere. To be sure, Coolidge ignored worrisome macroeconomic trends, but those are multi-year things that you can see working a two-hour-day or a twenty-hour-day… in fact, probably easier to see stuff like that working a two-hour-day.

Also, despite the economic disaster (because he couldn’t get an appropriately large simulus through congress), here’s a pretty good lazy president: http://www.mediaite.com/tv/cue-outrage-president-obama-admits-that-deep-down-theres-a-laziness-in-me/

@Astrokid Nj

What people do is a consequence of how society gradually evolved, and the choices people make individually.

‘Round here, economists like me refer to that as market failure: When systems that evolve begin to act suboptimally on their own. Happens pretty much any time you let the kids play unsupervised.

Just because something happened endogenously does not make it good.

This is a very naive view. Any accomplished entrepreneur/leader will tell you the 80-20 rule.. that 80% of work gets done by 20% of the people.

Aww, my teeny-weenie-widdle, naive public-policy-saturated girlbrain with an IQ of 146 couldn’t pick up on the simple truth that people born on third base will talk like they hit a triple? Rich people suffer from selection bias. Hell, everybody suffers from selection bias, which is why no matter where you work, a goodly slice of the office can tell you why everyone but them is incompetent, never mind indistinguishable output. But hey, why not ‘prove’ your point with anecdotal ‘evidence’, the best kind of evidence:

We would hire someone after intensive screening.. only to find them a misfit for that particular project. Which is why.. we were immensely happy to find good-fits and pay them 1.5 or even 2 times what we would otherwise pay. At the higher levels, its very hard to find replacements which is why they get paid so very well.

Never mind data showing falling structural mismatch: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/02/mishmash-not/ your hypothesis is much better because, despite intensive screening (i.e. throw out the unemployed, the person with the rumpled shirt at an interview, the fat one, the one without a credential but with education…), the people you found couldn’t do the job… perhaps, just perhaps, screening doesn’t work very well, despite being the gateway to employment and advancement? Nah, let’s move on to another hum-dinger, the idea that money disappears down a hole:

I also want to remind you of the other side of the coin.. “unproductive” consumption.. the runaway consumption of the modern world.. keeping up with the joneses. And women are the primary culprits by doing 80+% of the household spending in the US.

First of all, consumption is productive, on the basic Keynesian and neo-classical level that long-term consumption must equal long-term spending, and in the shorter term, that most economic crises, especially the most destructive ones, are crises of insufficient demand. And yes, women control the purse strings in heterosexual households. Does that assume that men have no input? That they would not register satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the basket of goods purchased and give input on future purchases?

That is a hypothesis with roughly as much validity as the idea that the Unidirectionalist-Feminist view that because women aren’t serving as legislators as frequently as men, that legislatures would fail to consider issues of greater important to women. Politics is about satisfying enough people to continue the amicable function of the organization. The same applies in a household.

Are you suggesting that civilization could have taken an easier path and innovated at a slower pace, yet we would have had all the comforts we do nowadays (if not today.. maybe 100 years down the line?).

As to growth in productivity, it is a function of investment, in total spending on hard and intellectual capital, not on the number of hours worked. Asian rice farmers had to work many more hours than European wheat farmers in the pre-industrial era, as Malcolm Gladwell notes. That did not have a very great effect on per-capita economic growth during the last two centuries. The West enjoyed growth rates of 1.9% per year, while Asia enjoyed growth rates of 1.7%. It is not hard work, but the targeting of that work that is important to productivity growth.

Further, we enjoyed better productivity growth when wages represented a greater share of hourly productivity than they do today. The explanation being that high wages both motivated more involvement by employees in a firm’s decision-making process, bringing numerous people with first-hand knowledge forward as, essentially, free consultants. This is why countries with a higher wage-productivity ratio generally enjoy higher productivity growth, if not higher productivity.

So yes, it matters how many people can work in undirected research. It matters how much money is spent on infrastructure. It DOES NOT in the same way, positively influence productivity growth to have a CEO working 15-hour-days.

But I dont see you answering the main question.. (To be fair to you, its Daisy who made the assertion).. Why SHOULD more women be “empowered” in the public sphere? (presumably by being GIVEN positions, as opposed to earning them if history is to teach us anything). Are they going to solve the problems facing the earth (say global warming, diseases, poverty, etc) better than those at the forefront today (presumably through innovation.. which takes lots of hard work, much of which will be unproductive coz most avenues lead to dead ends).

Actually, it’s not that women should be ’empowered’, just that women shouldn’t be arbitrarily gatekept. Jobs should be made as neuter without significantly harming productivity (and they can be as a good deal of research has shown) as possible. That means making research work, that, as you admitted, progresses at its own unknowable pace, more flexible. That means increasing specialization, so that legislators legislate, instead of fundraising and ombudsmanning. That means recognizing that CEOs are not research, so most of the people you are conflating with scientists are actually Jamie Diamond, or Gordon Gecko, and those jobs can be easily split, as they used to be, into President and Chairperson teams (or for that matter further sub-divided), which are again, more popular in Europe than the CEO who serves both functions. It means allowing more people to do important work part-time, casually, and at a pace that suits them, which is good for everyone, a nice side-effect of which is that yes, there will be more women in these positions.

It means recognizing that breaking down a task into smaller functions, each of which can be a job, isn’t something that only works in manufacturing, as showrunners can tell you.

Ultimately, it means a more atomistic, fairer, more leisure-and-fulfillment-focused economy. Something that wouldn’t have produced the same benefits in 1220 that it produces in 2012, so perhaps all those traits we used to learn that used to be of core societal importance have become a little toxic?

When I hear toxic femininity or toxic masculinity, I tend to think the terms are about problematizing perfectly valid feminine and masculine behaviors that are palpably so, but if I were going to name anything toxic masculinity, an emotional attachment to attaching power and prestige to working onesself to death would definitely count as such, just as I would characterize emotional attachment to naming structural biases against women something unique to our sex as toxic femininity. Just because someone called me a c**t doesn’t mean somebody didn’t call you a p***k too.

I find in the battle between being stupid or pretending to not know, I cannot decide which is more risible.

@Valerie Keefe
1) I will stick to my guns with respect to the 80-20 rule. I know that the selection process is nowhere near perfect and selection bias exists, but thats the best one we have and people have to operate under local conditions. You seem to want to put a different economy in place, and are judging everything against that. I have to operate under what I got. Also, note that I didnt claim that the failed-workers were incompetent in general.. but that they were misfits for the project.. which can be for a variety of reasons.. your “structural mismatch” (misalignment in where the workers are and where the jobs are) being just one. Other reasons (orthogonal to the structural mismatch) I found for the misfit are: “Hey man..the tension on the trading floor is too much for me” OR “I have difficulty with a project of this complexity” etc. You just cant figure some things out without trying them. Kinda like the NFL quarterbacks and running backs. No matter who you pick from college in the draft, you never know how most of them are going to turn up in the real world of professional football.

2)

Actually, it’s not that women should be ‘empowered’, just that women shouldn’t be arbitrarily gatekept

Based on what you wrote, I dont see how women are arbitrarily gatekept in the current economy. I suspect you are more interested in changing the system at a large scale, and I personally have no desire or knowledge to respond to that. If it wins out in the marketplace of ideas, I am cool with that. As an MRA, I am only fighting against resources forcibly taken away from men in the current system.

Dungone:
First, I disagree that you need only prove those two points. There are a lot of assumptions underlying them (some of which are indeed definitional) and you need to begin arguing from those.

Second, if you believe that you need only argue those two points, you are doing a terrible job of it. Especially number two. I just reread your posts to make sure, and when it comes to the “feminists” you say you need to show Goldman disagreed with, you are hopelessly vague. Who they were, what they were doing and if they even existed are all questions which you have left without satisfactory answers.

Daisy:
I am not “ganging up on you”. I am expressing different criticisms and concerns in this matter from anyone else in this thread and have tried my best to phrase my position so as to invite the comments and criticisms of others, rather than asserting my own beliefs as immutable truths. I would suggest that you may be so used to political argument, particularly upon these subjects, that you have failed to observe that my position in this matter is an academic one. When it comes to questions of history, its organization and analysis, I firmly believe that scholarship should take precedence over ideology.

Both of you:
This argument is still very, very silly and I remain unconvinced that you will ever get anywhere with such incompatible, unexpressed assumptions and hot-headed personal attacks on both sides.

I would, however, be extremely gratified if someone would see fit to comment on my own suggestion in this matter. I believe it to be perfectly reasonable and see no reason why it should arouse ire in anyone, but I may of course be mistaken and am entirely willing to reconsider my position if any person is willing to put forward a strong case against it or a stronger case in favor of some alternative principle of organization.

@Valerie, Astroidkid’s perspective is a pretty common takeaway of workers in failed organizations. It really is true that some companies are as he describes them, even though I agree with you on the whole. This is only tangentially related to gender norms, however.

Neither you, nor Astroidkid, has mentioned something. Companies often struggle to attract talent because they themselves have nothing to offer. Nobody wants to work in the type of environment that Asteroidkid describes. If they have talent and skills, they will find better work elsewhere for just as much pay. A quick look at the unemployment rate for software engineers will make that self evident. Bad companies working on marginal/lame products are forced to pick from a sea of under qualified candidates. A lot of what the software industry is about comes down to helping rich business owners save an extra buck without sharing it with their employees – really exciting stuff that talented people literally run from. That’s where these companies start turning to ritualistic screening processes and possibly even psychic readings – and none of it will ever help.

1 – yes, I am sure of it. I can probably find links later (on iPad now)
2 – she was a harsh critic of contemporary American women, whether part of a movement or not. She used very broad terms to describe women’s shortcomings, so it is highly unlikely that she was only against a specific group. Her focus was inward, on women, whereas the women’s movement, both then and now, was outwards, towards men.
3 – Irrelevant. Fundamental disagreements among feminists don’t matter if Goldman didnt even call herself a feminist or participate in any sort of women’s movement whatsoever. Goldman was a labor activist and peace activist and readily saw men’s issues taking priority over women’s suffrage. She was a harsh life-long opponent of Marxism and socialism, which certainly puts her at odds with the core of feminist theory that is based on Marxist analysis. Her disagreements with the women’s movement were on an entirely different level, closer to the type we have today between MRA and feminism.
4 – The feminists who appropriated her, of course. Radical anarcha-feminists were first to see her work as usefull, yet they interpreted their movement as a double class struggle of women against the state and against men. Goldman did not see things this way; she advocated reconciliation between men and women and criticized contemporary women of being incapable of loving men, as well as having opposed Marxist points of view.

“But why are there fewer women as politicians, business leaders, scientists? Because of the way the job is currently, and unnecessarily, structured. A clear sign of male disposability is that jobs that men dominate, quite simply, work their participants to death.”

This captures something crucial.

First there is one thing to make clear. When Valerie says “is structured” this can eithr be simply participial i.e “has X structure” or it can be passvive “someone has structured Y as X”. Given her background as an economist, the first is likelier. This is important, because it menas she is not positing some intentional workings of an old-boy cabal fashioning some kind of glass ceiling.

Valerie, you go on to say that the nature of this structure is that the work requirements are skewed to produce inept management by fault of emphasizing busywork over productive work. This is probably true even in the corporate world, but it is definitely true in government. Lowly GS-14s’ and 15s, and even some ambitious up-and-coming 13s are forever checking email, forever prodicing – and demanding from lower!- useless superficial reports.

This can either be due to some kind of cultural tropism, some kind of residual Puritainism, or it just may be the nature of the competition these people face within their agencies that they have to accommodate to in order to advance. If that’s the case, it’s not the fault of competiton in general, it’s the fault of the standards they are being judged against.

Dungone on Goldman: Her focus was inward, on women, whereas the women’s movement, both then and now, was outwards, towards men.

Goldman wrote: The right to vote, or equal civil rights, may be good demands, but true emancipation begins neither at the polls nor in courts. It begins in woman’s soul. History tells us that every oppressed class gained true liberation from its masters through its own efforts.

The first feminist who ever called women “an oppressed class”–well, was a feminist.

Who are “the masters” in the above phrase?

Goldman wrote: Indeed, if a partial emancipation of woman is to become a complete and true emancipation of woman, it will have to do away with the ridiculous notion that to be loved, to be sweetheart or mother, is synonymous with being slave or subordinate.

Slave to whom? Subordinate to whom?

As I said, can’t read.

Wait, maybe I can play. (I have read Derrida! I know that part!)

Dungone: She was against the Puritanical anti-male, anti-sex bent of the women’s movement that is a characteristic trait of feminism.

and then he writes (to Hiding): You know what you need to do? Demonstrate how my comments were actually vague. Which ones?

The first one I quoted, which provides no examples of “the Puritanical anti-male, anti-sex bent of the women’s movement”.

What is “anti sex”? This from someone who announced lesbian separatists were automatically “anti sex” because they didn’t have sex with men and preferred sex with women (a homophobic argument at base)?

I would suggest your idea of “anti sex” itself is sorely compromised by your ideology.

Dungone: She was a harsh life-long opponent of Marxism and socialism, which certainly puts her at odds with the core of feminist theory that is based on Marxist analysis.

And yet she referred to women (quote above) as an “oppressed class” which comes from Marxist language… she wrote for John Reed’s newspaper “The Masses”–which was as red as it got.

Goldman was an anarchist, but what later was known as anarcho-syndicalist. This was a heavily union-based anarchism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-syndicalism It had a class analysis. She was hard on the bourgeois class of women, but championed women of her own class. (As I do, by the way.)

Goldman’s anarchism would be regarded today as socialist… I will leave that to Hiding and the academics to sort this out. But you seem to be using “anti Marxist” in the contemporary sense, not in the union vs Marxism sense that was popular in the day, in opposing Stalinism. She wrote at least one essay backing the Wobblies, who are now regarded as reds. (so much so, that they made it into the movie “Reds”) Many of them were, as Reed and Louise Bryant were.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Workers_of_the_World

Hiding, I do find your questions about these matters interesting, more about the history of the left than about feminists. 50s conservatives liked to de-emphasize how radical the early unions were, partly because their new demigod (Reagan) had been the influential president of a union. Nowadays, Fox News has to re-revise that for their anti-workers, boogeyman-politics, and try to make all unions sound like reds. People who remember their kindly Republican grandfather union-members, haven’t quite bought that one.

The war over history is interesting. I don’t intend to let my side(s) down.

Dungone: Daisy, your selective quote mining is both out of context and unhelpful. Goldman was an anti-Suffragist and this is a well documented fact.

And yet, you have provided no documentation for this assertion, and I have provided direct quotes from Goldman to back up my assertion. You have provided no facts, simply opinions from other people, such as anti-anarchist communists like Vivian Gornick.

I quoted Goldman directly.

Dungone: This is the type of shell game appropriation that is downright appealing. She literally thought the Suffrage movement would result in more Puritanism, and she was right, it did!

Quote please?

Dungone: She was far more pragmatic than you paint her out to be and she was concerned with the cynicism with which the Puritanical women’s movement sought to take away rights from others behind a veil of equality for women.

Quote, proof please?

I think it is interesting that you make declarations with no proof, about what you WANT her to have been… not what she was.

Just as you to do me. I am sensing a pattern.

Speaking of which, here we are, off to the races:

Dungone: You yourself are a Marxist and, apparently, a fan of lesbian separatism.

I am a member of the Green Party, in political practice. My radio show is produced by the SC Green Party. “Marxist” is a lot like “Buddhist” in that it is mostly in one’s head, in the modern-day USA. Nice ideas. But in practice, I am a Green Party activist, Occupy activist, and Green Party radio show host. (BTW, if you dislike Marxism, why did you approvingly quote one, e.g. Gornick?)

And as the forementioned Ronald Reagan famously said, there he goes again. “A fan of lesbian separatism”–lesbian separatism, as I said in my capsule history on the other thread, no longer truly exists. It was a pit stop but nothing sustainable over the long haul. And as Gingko pointed out, this feminist-phase has much in common with MGTOW now. (I think the comparison is quite fascinating.)

In the history that I wrote, I provided both plusses and minuses of les seps; the good, the bad, and the ugly.

I forgot, you can’t read, though.

Dungone: Whatever Goldman was, she stood against what you represent.

I love her and everything she wrote. I have read virtually ALL of her essays, which is how I could immediately spot where your (one sentence) quote from her came from, upthread, (YOU, by the way, started the quote mining, I simply provided the entire context).

I have said this numerous times in this thread. I agreed with Emma Goldman back when I first encountered her work 40 years ago, at age 15, which is why I know so much about her.

So, whatever Goldman was, she stands EXACTLY for what I represent.

But again, this bizarre statement is more proof that you can’t read.

Dungone: yes, I am sure of it. I can probably find links later

I am holding you to this. I won’t hold my breath though.

Hiding: I do not see why the extent of your formal education should enter into this matter and I deny that any special training, education or terminology is required. I referred to the fact that you appear to be viewing this as a personal issue of ideological factions rather than as a question of how best to systematize the history and development of ideologies.

Yes, since everything is a matter of ideology, at base. All history, is political, of course. 🙂 As they say, history is “written by the victors”–well, whoever “the victors” are, is usually the result of politics.

That is simply a fact.

When you say I am “failing to see this as academic”–well, I could come back, “you fail to see it as ideological”–so? We are arguing on different terms, but that does automatically make you right and me wrong. I see where are arguments can compliment each other’s at various junctures.

Hiding: As I know by the analytic ability you have demonstrated in the past that you are entirely capable of entertaining the arguments I have proposed, I must conclude that both you and every other person in this discussion are willfully choosing to ignore them, opting instead to merely reiterate positions to which I have twice already stated my rebuttal.

I am not “ignoring” them, I am saying that academic arguments in and of themselves, are the product of bourgeois values, and therefore I do not trust them. 🙂 I therefore do not defer to them. They are a way of shutting certain people out… we can easily see this by who is participating in said arguments and who is not.

Example: Are we all Western-raised white people in this thread?

Is this an accident? (I think not.)

Hiding: The only “higher level” I seek to take this conversation to is one free of personal attacks, heated reprisals and needless, circular repetition.

I get that… its hard when people can’t read though. Or they persist in defining me in ways that I continually clarify are mistaken, only to be totally ignored.

Example: I like Goldman, and have for 40 years. Yet, Dungone has to keep repeating like an automaton that my ideology is nothing like Goldman’s since he admires me and dislikes me. There can be no other explanation for this continued assertion, unless he simply can not read.

A more logical approach might be to conclude that he has been mistaken in his evaluations of me, and he simply can’t do that. Or to try to find some middle ground? Common ground? Again, not possible… he is too antagonist for that.

Thus, it doesn’t come from MY end. I am willing to have these conversations w/Dungone and have repeatedly tried. I have repeatedly asked the reasons for his hostility, no reply.

I’d rather deal in logic than angry emotion. Seriously, I like your posts much better than his. 🙂

Hiding: As for the Goldman quotes you produce, they actually do a lot to reinforce the very real differences between her ideas and those of the second wavers who later adopted her work. In particular, the last quotation you present reads to me as a condemnation of ideas core to many “radical” second wave doctrines. Note that she attacks a “notion”, not a system or a reality. Who do you believe held or holds this “notion”? To me, it seems very similar to the manner in which many of the best known second wave radicals regarded heterosexual relationships. To be quite honest, what I have read of Goldman and what you have posted in this thread would lead me to believe that she has just as much in common with some factions of MRAs as she does with some factions of feminism, although, as you know, I do not regard as being part of either movement. I have repeatedly invited you to demonstrate otherwise if you feel so inclined.

Do I have to go back and dig up my old posts about the diaspora, when many feminists left (or imploded, if you will) The Second Wave?

Germaine Greer was probably the most pro-sex of the Second Wavers, and then she promptly went off the deep end in the 80s. I don’t know if that was something personal or what… but her later books sound nothing like “The Female Eunuch”–which posited that women needed to become sexual “players” rather than simply “acted upon”. (she became nuttily transphobic, like Sheila Jeffreys, who started as a smart feminist talking about history… what HAPPENS to the transphobes? Its seems they cannot talk about anything else after awhile.) Simone de Beauvoir, like Goldman, did not believe in marriage and believed in “free love”… etc. So, as you asked Dungone, which 2nd wave feminists in particular are you talking about?

Mary Daly is not strictly speaking a lesbian separatist, although they all loved her and quoted her all the time… SHE notably never lived like one herself. She worked for a Jesuit college forgodsake, and how patriarchal can you get? When they didn’t give her tenure, she went to the (patriarchal) court system to complain. She was a fucking fake from the word go.

Hiding: By the way, your implication that lesbian separatists were merely interested in having lesbian sex themselves appears ludicrous to me in light of what I have seen of their work, which included a very strong component of actively hating any non-lesbian sex had by anyone. I think it would be fair to say that a group who believed thus was in some degree sex-negative.

Did you read my comment? http://www.genderratic.com/p/2006/double-standards-%E2%80%93-biased-criteria-and-man-hatred/#comment-14175

Karla Jay, Susie Bright, The Furies and other collectives, were very sex-positive for lesbians. This has been downplayed by the mainstream Third Wavers who don’t like lesbian separatism and felt challenged by the self-sufficiency of their politics.

I am asserting that “anti sex” means anti sex PERIOD (all sex) and does not mean anti homosexual sex. That is a homophobic assertion, that if something is critical of heterosexuality, it is “anti sex”–wrong, it is specifically “anti heterosexual sex”.

The measure of “sex” is not heterosexuality, that effectively disappears all other kinds.

Gay men who are pro-sex with men, are not “anti sex” either… being pro-homo sex is not being “anti sex” and that is where I am coming from on that.

For the record, Cell 16 did not prove to be very popular, as the Shakers weren’t either. They didn’t get very far, although they were terribly entertaining.

Many of these separatists were also writing in response to homophobes like the Redstockings, and you have to understanding their writings in this historic context.

“I am asserting that “anti sex” means anti sex PERIOD (all sex) and does not mean anti homosexual sex. That is a homophobic assertion, that if something is critical of heterosexuality, it is “anti sex”–wrong, it is specifically “anti heterosexual sex”.”

If you write books about being pro-celibacy or pro-lesbianism politically because Men Are Shitty Lovers who Oppress Us. You,re being anti-man, and proposing sex with people you’re not attracted (most women are not lesbian, bisexual or pansexual) just because its better than this horribly oppressive sex with a penis… it’s being insane, not anti-sex.

Schala: If you write books about being pro-celibacy or pro-lesbianism politically because Men Are Shitty Lovers who Oppress Us. You,re being anti-man, and proposing sex with people you’re not attracted (most women are not lesbian, bisexual or pansexual) just because its better than this horribly oppressive sex with a penis… it’s being insane, not anti-sex

Yes, anti man is not necessarily anti sex. My point exactly.

What you describe is not what all lesbian separatism was… did you read my post in the other thread that I linked for Hiding? Which ones are you talking about?

As I said, Cell 16 died out pretty early. Nobody missed them, as I recall.

Schala: most women are not lesbian, bisexual or pansexual

I disagree. I believe most PEOPLE (everyone) could be bisexual if they were open to it. (Me and Freud.) I do agree w/Adrienne Rich that in our culture, heterosexuality is practically compulsory. At any rate, the rate of bisexuality could be much, much higher than it currently is measured to be.

Yes, you may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.

TAPS, the paranormal guys, black van, film themselves talking to the air in the dark, fix some plumbing in places. Try to provoke spirits. Sometimes they hear voices. And they HAVE to gender those voices. For no fucking reason.

The fact that they were blond, had blue eyes and were 6’1″ would be more useful information than their fucking sex. A ghost is a ghost is a ghost. Why would they care about the sex of that ghost?

Same way we shouldn’t care about the sex of people at the very top. It’s incidental. It’s due to gender roles more than unearned anything. You give high risk high reward to very few men. And women can have that by just marrying them. Much less incentive to take that high risk themselves, get the reward anyways.

A digression:

Do any of the people here on this thread who have experience with taking antiandrogens think that some regimen of antiandrogens or similar drugs could be successfully used to turn a heterosexual male asexual?

I know that men who have undergone surgical castration report a marked decrease in libido, but unfortunately it is illegal in my home country except as a part of sex reassignment surgery (and neither sexless nor eunuch are recognized as a sex to be legally reassigned to).

@Rocketfrog

There’s a decent possibility that anti-androgens can reduce libido (though long-term, they dramatically increase the risk of osteoporosis if not supplemented with other hormones, such as estrogen or progesterone). In my case, I would say that even during the months I was solely on anti-androgens, I may have had a reduction in quantity, there was definitely no cessation, and there was a substantial improvement in quality. Mind you though, the degree to which all of that was a function of the cessation of crisis-level dysphoria is difficult to determine. Further, while it may not be a great concern for you, a lack of erections over time can severely damage the capacity of erectile tissue to function in the future.

And one last note I want to keep separate: I don’t see anti-androgens having an effect on romantic orientation. You’ve already been born so it’s a bit too late for that to change. If you want a woman to love you and be with you and hold you, not just have sex with you, that probably will not go away.

Finally, which country do you live in, Rocketfrog? I might be able to get more information for you.

Schala: Try to provoke spirits. Sometimes they hear voices. And they HAVE to gender those voices. For no fucking reason.

Probably a legacy of the concepts of incubus and succubus, which were gendered demons/spirits.

Valerie: I doubt it, just as most people could not be a gender other than their CASAB. Uninfluenced midbrain organization admittedly has a bias towards cissexuality and heterosexuality,

Valerie, I basically agree in theory, I just love the idea, and cling to it with a certain religious-type fondness. I know it isn’t logical; my three decidedly heterosexual husbands all talked me out it…. all using different arguments, too. 🙂

I also think there is a “bisexual phase” in nearly everyone’s adolescence, which seems to “pass” in due course. I hate that people are ashamed of that phase and refuse to learn anything from it. Is there some hormonal reason for that? I refer to the period where we all seem to “fall in love” with our best same-gendered friends. (And its serious and passionate, too.) I’ve heard as many boys as girls describe it. In AA meetings, it is often a cataloged as a trigger for alcoholism, an unwelcome and frightening intensity that they do not understand or want, and try to suppress.

That same-sex intensity seems to pass in most people, and that’s where the whole “its just a phase” argument originated.

I think lesbianism has often been taken less seriously because it can be seen to “imitate” this period in girl’s childhoods/teenage years. (It doesn’t in actual fact, but others project their own “girlhood crushes” onto genuine lesbianism, is what I mean.)

Interesting you reminded me about Rich… she seemed really torn apart by the Barnard Conference and the sex wars. She dithered for years, and did a lot of fence-sitting, eventually coming out against the Minneapolis ordinance. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antipornography_Civil_Rights_Ordinance

It was quite a time, indeed. (sigh) I call it the implosion of the Second Wave… now we see by deserting the movement en masse, we left it to the careerists. If knew then what I know now… well, I wouldn’t have.

But it was so unpleasant to be around them. (sigh again)

@Daisy

Valerie, I basically agree in theory, I just love the idea, and cling to it with a certain religious-type fondness. I know it isn’t logical; my three decidedly heterosexual husbands all talked me out it…. all using different arguments, too. 🙂

I feel the same way about a trans-inclusive lesbian utopia. Everyone’s got theirs. To be sure, I admit to a little bit of bicuriosity, but I’m very aware that really, most of that is just being attracted to girls who haven’t had a proper puberty yet, and then there’s part of it that’s just being into degredation (orientation play and such) and also, sorry… but boys smell bad. Even when they smell good, they smell a bad kind of good. That’s just lesbian me talking. Androphiles’ mileage will, of course, vary.

I also think there is a “bisexual phase” in nearly everyone’s adolescence, which seems to “pass” in due course.

I tend to think that because heteronormativity is most strongly impressed during adolescence when people become sexually active, that you have more questioning, more rebelling, but I don’t think orientation is all that fluid during the period, just what people are willing to consider. Later on people explore these feelings less because they’ve had more time to define what they want and have had that reinforced by their respective sexual communities.

In AA meetings, it is often a cataloged as a trigger for alcoholism, an unwelcome and frightening intensity that they do not understand or want, and try to suppress.

When I drink now, it’s usually on the happy side of a six-pack or a bottle of wine… back then… well… drugs were a way to turn off my dysphoria for a while, so yes, I was a problem drinker, not because of the alcohol, but because of the dysphoria. And for many people, dysphoria has a puberty-linked onset.

Daisy,

I used to guilt myself crazy over my inability to feel at home in my untransitioned body, and over my inability to feel attracted to half of humanity. I had internalized the gender-is-only-the-roles theory that’s so common in anthropology, second-wave androgyny and third-wave queer theory, and it was destroying me. I had also internalized the idea that transition is ‘fake/cosmetic’ and doesn’t help with anything.

Eventually I had to go back and confront the idea and reclaim something of it. I was actually more disappointed by Dworkin in *Woman Hating* than by Raymond in *Empire* because although Dworkin was an ally at when she wrote *Woman Hating,* she was arguing from the same narrative that I was finally escaping from.

Daisy and Hiding:
For what it is worth, I am terrified by the “free love” people for exactly the same reasons as HidingFromTheDinosaurs. The ones I have known have been cool people, but presume a level of natural instinctive functioning that I do not have. Also, relating to people is so difficult for me that it represents a fairly massive investment of mental energy.

Marja and Valerie:
I live in Denmark.

I am aware that osteoporosis and depression are possible pitfalls of antiandrogen treatments. I do not really fear depression, because I already am suffering from major depressive disorder. This leaves osteoporosis as the major physical pitfall; it would suck to finally be rid of the things that plague me but be limited in my ability to live life on grounds of frequent bone fractures etc. As for erectile tissue, I have no need of it, given that I have no sex life and am unable to establish one on grounds of not being of sufficient quality as a man to evoke anything in women but pity at best, revulsion at worst.

I also think that getting rid of heterosexuality in a heterosexual person is probably not entirely possible (for the same reason that fundamentalist Christians, much as they like to think they can, cannot “pray the gay away”, only force people into the closet). But I have read some encouraging results from surgically castrated eunuchs.

There is no single greater source of misery in my life than my sexuality (and my romantic drive, which is in fact even more painful, but is at least less distracting, and does not make me think unwelcome and unacceptable sexual thoughts about women who have not consented to being thought sexual thoughts about). I want to be rid of it. I have accepted in my mind that sexuality and love are not for the likes of me, but unfortunately mental acceptance alone is not enough for the body to stop its part in this nonsense.

Hiding:

I apologize for confusing that movement with the subset of second wavers who pushed for lesbianism as an ideal state and decried heterosexual sex as inherently oppressive or abusive.

I think you’re thinking of “political lesbianism”, defined as “all feminists can and should be lesbians. Our definition of a political lesbian is a woman-identified woman who does not fuck men. It does not mean compulsory sexual activity with women.” (source, Julie Bindel in the Guardian). You don’t have to actually be a lesbian to be a political lesbian, you just have to think men are the enemy and shouldn’t be consorted with.

ShoutyBloke:
I regard sexual thoughts about women as unacceptable (for me) because women have not consented to being thought sexual thoughts about by me – in fact, I suspect they would probably find the fact that someone like me had thoughts like that utterly revolting.

When I was younger I was told repeatedly that thinking sexual thoughts about women who had not consented to this was in fact raping them in my mind. I am not sure if I agree with this anymore, but I find that I cannot just remove all my childhood and youth upbringing and conditioning from my head. Which is one of the reasons I would like to be rid of my sexuality; I cannot help but think that in my head I am a rapist monster for thinking sexual thoughts about women.

JE:
I am not sure if I can be said to be “fundamentally good” except in the “bullshit ethical consolation prize” meaning that I generally do not want to hurt my fellow human or animal beings – a trait I think I share with most reasonably well-adjusted human beings. In the sense of “quality”, I am not very good at all; my body and (especially) my mind have several glaring defects and deficiencies, which is why women consistently reject me. They would be unwise not to, given that they can get better men than me – and I fully accept this, even though I admittedly still feel sad about it. I feel guilty for feeling sad about this, because it tells me that I do not fully respect women’s rejection of me (if I did, I would be happy for them that they rejected me, and I do not).

I have sort of given up on getting better in any meaningful way. I spent my youth trying first to turn myself into a higher-quality man, which failed, and then trying to pretend to not be what I actually am, which also failed (and was deceptive as well). What I want now is to be able to live an acceptable life despite being what I am, and I am not sure if that is possible without major physical intervention to get rid of my sexual drive (unfortunately, I do not think my romantic drive can be cured, much as I wish it could – as I said it is more painful, but at least it is not as massively distracting, and at least it does not, as per my reply to ShoutyBloke, make me a mental rapist).

Patrick Brown,

That Julie Bindel piece matches very well with what the people I have known who self-identified as political lesbians said: That they chose lesbianism not for sexual but for political reasons, to liberate themselves from men. Unlike true lesbian separatists, these still (obviously) had contact with men day-to-day.

I had trouble relating, even if I sympathized with the notion, for the simple reason that a corollary of “heterosexuality means women sleep with the enemy” is that I am the enemy, no matter what actions I might take, short of committing suicide or undergoing gender nullification or castration (depending on whether a nullo or a eunuch still “count” as men).

Which is one of the reasons why I drifted out of outspoken and active pro-feminist activism: There was no place for me in the core parts of the movement, and this was the whole point. I felt useless and unwelcome in the feminist movement, and that was because as a man, I was useless and unwelcome.

Some of the political lesbians I knew later redefined as heterosexual; I know that one later got married to a man and had several children.

“I was told repeatedly that thinking sexual thoughts about women who had not consented to this was in fact raping them in my mind.”

The people who told you that were not only lying, they were abusing you. Do not give them the power to still hurt you now that you’re free of their control.

“I regard sexual thoughts about women as unacceptable (for me) because women have not consented to being thought sexual thoughts about by me – in fact, I suspect they would probably find the fact that someone like me had thoughts like that utterly revolting.”

They don’t need to consent to it. Your sexuality doesn’t exist to cater to their feelings, it exists for you and you only. How you act on it is of course limited by all the usual rules of ethics, but feelings just are. And if they feel revolted by the idea of you having sexual feelings towards them then that’s also morally neutral, they can’t help feeling that way anymore than you can decide not to have sexual thoughts. But they have no more right to demand that you stop having sexual feelings because of it than you have to demand that a woman has sex with you because you have sexual feelings towards her.

“When I was younger I was told repeatedly that thinking sexual thoughts about women who had not consented to this was in fact raping them in my mind. I am not sure if I agree with this anymore, but I find that I cannot just remove all my childhood and youth upbringing and conditioning from my head. Which is one of the reasons I would like to be rid of my sexuality; I cannot help but think that in my head I am a rapist monster for thinking sexual thoughts about women.”

I think I would view some figures from your childhood, like those friends of your mothers mentioned above, more favorably if they had merely beaten you. I don’t think anyone is expecting you to just decide you don’t want to think like that anymore, but rather that we hope you will be able to. I certainly hope that.

“I am not sure if I can be said to be “fundamentally good” except in the “bullshit ethical consolation prize” meaning that I generally do not want to hurt my fellow human or animal beings – a trait I think I share with most reasonably well-adjusted human beings.”

I’ll keep my belief that most people are good, bullshit or not, thank. You, however, go far beyond most people. You’ve repeatedly demonstrated that there is no amount of pain you won’t subject yourself to to avoid even the chance of hurting someone. If most people were willing to go as far as you do to ensure other people’s comfort there would be a lot less pain in the world.

“In the sense of “quality”, I am not very good at all”

People are not tools for some purpose, the consept of quality cannot meaningfully be applied to one.

“my body and (especially) my mind have several glaring defects and deficiencies, which is why women consistently reject me. They would be unwise not to, given that they can get better men than me”

Whether or not you are sexually attractive to women (or to men) doesn’t mean anything more than whether you are sexually attractive.

“and I fully accept this, even though I admittedly still feel sad about it. I feel guilty for feeling sad about this, because it tells me that I do not fully respect women’s rejection of me (if I did, I would be happy for them that they rejected me, and I do not).”

This is what I’m talking about when I say you go above and beyond to avoid harming people. Accepting someone’s decision means not trying to stop them from making it, it does not mean preventing yourself from even having thoughts about it. They have no more right to decide how you should feel about rejection than you have to decide whether they should be attracted to you.

First of all, I am sorry for derailing and apparently killing the thread. Valerie mentioned an antiandrogen and I decided to ask my question.

Schala, Copyleft, Shoutybloke:
The Orwellian thought police was (in his fictional universe) an actual, concrete institution, which could punish people for thinking criminal thoughts. There is a difference between politically empowering an institution to police thought on one hand, and people taking responsibility for what goes on in their minds on the other.

I do not think that any thought should be punishable by law, but I do feel bad about some of the thoughts that I think. Particularly sexual thoughts about women who have not consented to being thought sexual thoughts about. While thinking such thoughts is only a violation that goes on inside my mind, I do not want to violate anybody, even in my mind. It makes me feel that I am a terrible human being.

Shoutybloke – while I have not consented to being thought of as repugnant or pitiful by women, it is not a mental violation of me, it is just an opinion – and while it is an opinion that hurts me when I am made aware of it, that is entirely my problem; I should learn to appreciate that women know what is best for them and that this is why I am consistently deselected.

JE:

I don’t think anyone is expecting you to just decide you don’t want to think like that anymore, but rather that we hope you will be able to. I certainly hope that.

I have no idea where to begin. When I have brought the subject up with mental health professionals, some have simply refused to believe that I actually think these things. Others have been at a loss as to what to do. My current therapist’s best advice is to try to not think about it and focus 100% on my work. I unfortunately seem to lack the capacity for workaholism unless I work with something that really interests me, though; I am not a very competitive person and have little career ambition.

If it makes any sense, I have no idea which parts of my thought patterns are wrong and sick, and which are right and healthy. The thoughts that make me feel miserable seem just as correct to me as the ones that do not.

I’ll keep my belief that most people are good, bullshit or not, thank. You, however, go far beyond most people. You’ve repeatedly demonstrated that there is no amount of pain you won’t subject yourself to to avoid even the chance of hurting someone. If most people were willing to go as far as you do to ensure other people’s comfort there would be a lot less pain in the world.

Arguably, if everybody lived like me, then everybody would be miserable. I live like me, and I am miserable.

The “bullshit” in my statement binds more tightly to “consolation prize” than to “ethical”. My point is that calling someone “a good person” because at least they are not a sociopath, a violent criminal or a politician is sort of silly – I remain convinced that most people (even if I often have trouble understanding why they do the things they do) are basically well-intentioned.

Whether or not you are sexually attractive to women (or to men) doesn’t mean anything more than whether you are sexually attractive.

It means that I lack the kinds of qualities that women find attractive. In particular, in my case it shows that “nice” is really the only good quality I have going for me – which, as will be pointed out in most Nice Guy discussions, is obviously not good enough. I lack courage, charm, wit, strength, fortitude, and basically most human qualities that are not either synonymous with “nice” or some kind of purely technical proficiency.

I have been told on many occasions , by both men and women, that I am not a real man. I do not even know what a real man is supposed to be. But I do know that women prefer real men to whatever crappy imitation product I can offer.

This is what I’m talking about when I say you go above and beyond to avoid harming people. Accepting someone’s decision means not trying to stop them from making it, it does not mean preventing yourself from even having thoughts about it. They have no more right to decide how you should feel about rejection than you have to decide whether they should be attracted to you.

Whenever I have tried to talk about this with any non-professional person offline, I have been told that it is an absolutely entitled attitude to even be sad about being consistently deselected – that it means I want to control women’s sexuality, despite my protestations that I do not want to do so.

Do you remember when Ozy made an April 1st joke on NSWATM, making fun of straight white men who viewed their inability to find a partner as a gender issue? That is sort of the attitude I tend to meet; that what I face is trivial bullshit, and I am a terrible and somewhat ridiculous character for daring to feel bad about it. And thus I feel bad for feeling bad about it. And this is why I consider castration or nullification. Perhaps it would provide me with an escape hatch from the terrible things my having a sexuality (and a romantic drive) is doing to me. Perhaps this is what people mean when they say that sex and love are primary needs (something I always had trouble comprehending, because food and drink are also called primary needs, and not eating or drinking will kill you); that many people will go crazy if deprived.

It is hard for me to handle. It feels like my sanity, my intellect, my focus, even my personality itself, are slowly deteriorating, I grow more lonely, pathetic, depressed, frustrated and hopeless as the days go by. And my cries for help are laughed at.

When I re-read forum posts I made a year ago, they read like they were written by a completely different person, someone who was much smarter and healthier than I am, and who was even decently good at expressing himself. When I re-read my old master’s thesis (in theoretical computer science) it reads like it was written by someone capable of a level of thought and expression now far, far beyond my current self. Even looking at myself a few months ago, it is obvious to me that I am locked in a downward spiral. It scares me, because whenever I think it cannot possibly get any worse, it always does. And as I grow more and more depressed, crazy and lonely over time, I also gradually lose the ability (and hope) to ever be anything but crazy and lonely.

This is why I seriously consider castration or nullification as options. This life is not for me. I just drag myself through the days, hoping that there will soon not be any more days left. It is a cruel and stupid joke for me to keep on living as a sexual mammal given that I am consistently (and rightly) rejected as not-good-enough. Having sexual and romantic drives then just becomes sources of pain and misery. I have demonstrated that I am incapable of being a man to anybody’s satisfaction; perhaps I could be a good eunuch.

You misunderstand. In order to form an opinion about having sex with you, they need to think about having sex with you. Which is, in your worldview, an unaceptable violation since you have not consented to them thinking about having sex with you.

Oh, the irony! Only through the eyes of a sex-negative ideologue can revulsion be considered a virtue while attraction is considered a crime. And to add further irony (hypocrisy), these same groups of women demand to be romanced by men who make the first move. They view a man failing to make the first move as a form of rejection itself; some even go so far as to talk about it as a type of bigotry against unattractive women.

dungone,

If you are talking about me, I am not a “sex-negative ideologue”; I just try to accept that since I am heterosexual and repugnant to women, it is not for me.

Other people can have all the sex they want with whomever they want, as long as everybody involved is consenting to it.

Now I’m feeling triggered.

Because much of mainstream porn is rape. Linda Boreman was coerced into performing, and raped on screen, and these films are mostly still available and still widely-viewed. Many other porn performers have faced varying degrees of coercion. At the very least, I think viewers have an obligation to find out where their porn’s coming from, to support performers, and not to support abusive producers.

Shoutybloke,

I try not to fantasize at all, and when I do so anyway, it is entirely involuntary, as if caused by a part of my brain I cannot fully control. I try to get rid of fantasies as quickly as I can, by thinking of something else. As I have explained it makes me feel terrible to even have sexual fantasies, whether they involve strangers or women I know personally.

I do not usually watch porn. I did when I was younger, but I found that watching porn makes me feel terribly depressed, and sometimes a bit scared (I have trouble interpreting whether the facial expressions and noises involved signify pain and suffering or pleasure and ecstasy), rather than aroused. I think whatever part of the neural wiring that is responsible for making people feel aroused when watching other people have sex is not working correctly in my brain.

RF

If it’s involuntary, you have no more business feeling bad about it than you do feeling bad about not being able to fly to the moon.

@RocketFrog, indeed, I had been referring to the bullies who tried to make you believe that your innermost private thoughts were vile and hurtful to women. The fact that you ended up internalizing this self-hatred just means that you were vulnerable and became victimized by a bunch of bigots. More fortunate men are lucky enough to have good male role models and friends as they grow up, as well as experiencing the complexities of sex and relationships from numerous angles, eventually being able to weed out the noxious a priori assumptions about their sexuality that was socialized into them by a man-hating culture.

@Marja Erwin, can you enlighten us as to the bizarre thought process that made you connect men’s sexual fantasies with rape porn? Is it simply impossible for you to imagine a man having a blissful fantasy that doesn’t in some way involve him raping someone? You’re suggesting a truly noxious standard – the idea that even if a film depicts absolutely no discernible coercion, a man who incorporates that into his fantasy might still be guilty by association. Unlike Gingko’s example, which featured a clearly visible artifact, you’re telling men that they are not to trust their own eyes and abstain from all thoughts and activities until they can prove that no woman has ever been harmed in the process. What an onerous requirement! I suggest to you that you refrain from getting into a vehicle fueled by gasoline until you make absolutely certain that no man has ever been killed in a war over that oil, or that you not buy a single piece of clothing from a manufacturer who might be exploiting workers or selling jewelry that might possibly incorporate blood diamonds.

Dungone,

I have two concerns here.

My first concern is with encouraging people to watch porn. I think in this case, it’s important to point out the history of coercion and encourage those who do watch porn to seek out more ethical porn. And not everyone does watch porn. I don’t respond to it. Maybe I’m not visually oriented.

My second concern is with the idea that it’s acceptable to do things to sex workers that it’s not acceptable to do to everyone else. e.g. the idea that if someone rapes a sex worker, or any poor womon, or any womon of color, or any trans womon, it’s not really legitimate rape, the way it would be if they had raped a rich white cis womon who’s never been in sex work.

In this case it would be perfectly acceptable for Rocketfrog to fantasize about anyone’s body, including mine, or aspects of anyone’s personality.

” I don’t think anybody suggested that it’s okay to do things to sex workers that are not otherwise ok, but that a consensual porn actress has by definition concented to having people fantasize about her”

That was what I was going for, but I can’t stop Marja twisting my words to fit her paranoid fantasies.

And not everyone does watch porn. I don’t respond to it. Maybe I’m not visually oriented.

Exactly. You’re making up rules for others that you’d never have to follow yourself. You’re bringing it up as a completely unrelated issue that has absolutely no bearing on this discussion. Given the context, of a man who has been shamed by feminists to the point where he becomes guilt-ridden for even thinking about sex, your moralizing interjection is the exact opposite of what an appropriate comment should be. Totally not cool. Someone like RocketFrog should be encouraged to check it out and the reality is that the vast, vast majority of porn, with the tens of thousands of consenting actors who appear in it, is perfectly “safe” to watch without any prospect of accidentally witnessing an actual rape. Leave the poor guy alone, for crying out loud.

Dungone, since you have plenty of time to lecture Valerie and Marja, let me remind you, I am still waiting for those links you promised Hiding, upthread. To remind you, you said:

Dungone: yes, I am sure of it. I can probably find links later.

Since you’re so sure, where are they? Waiting. I have waited for days now. Did you finally holler uncle? No links to prove your bullshit?

As I suspected. Thanks for proving exactly what your WORD is worth. (I already knew that, of course, but its good to underscore your lack of accountability for everyone else here.)

Dungone: your moralizing interjection is the exact opposite of what an appropriate comment should be. Totally not cool.

Your LIES that you will find links and then not doing it, is the exact opposite of what an appropriate comment should be. Totally not cool.

You are hardly the arbiter of decent commenting. You’re trying to be funny, right?

@Dungone

People can face sexual harassment, abuse, exploitation, and objectification in pretty much any employer-employee setting and porn is no different, something we’ve been trying to make clear to unidirectional feminists for some time. You know, the people opposed to survival sex but AOK with survival coal mining.

So yeah, some people are coerced in the sex industry, and I don’t think that should come as a shock to anyone who’s been muscled into unpaid overtime. That we should focus on production and not problematize content is not a novel idea, and that we should re-name content that examines consent so as to not emphasize that that content examines consent to let some breathe easier is, well… far more nonsensical than calling someone by their preferred pronouns will ever be.

Dungone, since you have plenty of time to lecture Valerie and Marja, let me remind you, I am still waiting

When I find myself in need of a personal assistant to prioritize my commenting schedule, I’ll keep you in mind 😉

People can face sexual harassment, abuse, exploitation, and objectification in pretty much any employer-employee setting and porn is no different

@Valerie, I don’t disagree with that at all. That’s exactly why Marja’s concerns are overwrought given the grand scheme of things. Let’s not beat around the bush – the only reason why feminists are so keen on women in porn is because of their long and storied history as Puritanical anti-male-sexuality bigotry. The expensive designer clothes that many women love to wear are far more exploitative of the women who manufacture them and you think that feminists might care about that a little more. But any concern for the real women who are exploited by the fashion industry is drowned out by the uproar about clothes that make women feel bad about their bodies and what feminists can do about that.

“So yeah, some people are coerced in the sex industry, and I don’t think that should come as a shock to anyone who’s been muscled into unpaid overtime. That we should focus on production and not problematize content is not a novel idea, and that we should re-name content that examines consent so as to not emphasize that that content examines consent to let some breathe easier is, well… far more nonsensical than calling someone by their preferred pronouns will ever be.”

Economic necessity will coerce most everyone into work. The sex industry just happens to usually pay liveable wages, so it might be more attractive to someone without a formal education, tons of experience, or who is part of an unloved minority (after all, trans women in Brazil go in that because that’s about the only opening, for many of them). More attractive than drug selling, petty thievery or grand theft anyway.

Patrick Brown,

A “real man” is an adult male human being who actually exists. Don’t listen to anyone who tells you different.

That is the biological definition. But “man” is also a social construct, and in that case, “real man” seems to mean something along the lines of “someone who is able and willing to perform the masculine gender role to a satisfactory degree”.

I am not, and this is one of the reasons why many men view men like me with contempt (or pity), and many women view men like me with revulsion (or pity). Men who are “not-real” are not respected by other men, and women are not attracted to them.

As an example (admittedly on the somewhat silly side), NSWATM once had an article about the “hotness of gender-non-conforming guys” – and chose to illustrate it with a well-muscled skinhead (very obviously a “real man”) wearing a tutu. Even “gender-non-conforming” in men is only acceptable if it is done by “real men”.

“That is the biological definition. But “man” is also a social construct, and in that case, “real man” seems to mean something along the lines of “someone who is able and willing to perform the masculine gender role to a satisfactory degree”. ”

Wrong

Real man is an instrument of guilt and shame to make male humans able and willing to sacrifice themselves for the sake of others (ie conscription). To accept their death. Their lower worth as humans.

It’s nothing to support or be happy about.

Same for “real woman” definition that only include women who have long hair, shave everywhere, take 1-2+ hours daily before going out, never go without make-up outside (or even open the door for someone). Who have a ton of make-up, go to hair salons once a month, or more. Love spas and girly things. Love shoes.

I say that a real woman doesn’t have to do this to be one. And a real man doesn’t have to kill himself because others deem him inferior either.

Marja,

It’s generally okay to fantasize about almost anyone, their body, their personality traits, etc. and it’s not something that requires their permission.

I have only your assertion to go on here. I have had other women state the exact opposite; that even the thought that men might be having fantasies about them was intensely triggering. Who am I supposed to believe, and why?

It’s not an issue. It’s not something that harasses or harms or otherwise affects them.

See above. Some women find even the thought that such a thing could be going on oppressive and frightening.

It’s perfectly healthy to imagine someone to share your life with, someone with whom both of you can be more than either of you could be alone.

Not for someone who is not good enough for women to actually want anything to do with. Then it is just a source of misery.

I didn’t see any reason to single out porn performers one way or the other. Sorry if I sidetracked things there.

I think the relevant aspect of porn performers here is that porn performers know that other people will be having sexual fantasies about them, since that is the usual use scenario for porn.

Schala,

At least in my cultural background, women who act outside of that particular norm tend to be celebrated, while men who do so are ridiculed.

“See above. Some women find even the thought that such a thing could be going on oppressive and frightening.”

Then it’s their problem. They need therapy. You don’t need to cater to their every needs.

Do you require that everyone cater to your every need? Why would you cater to everyone else’s? Just be generally respectful, whatever else is something you can’t even know.

Why would anyone bother seeking out professionally produced videos at all when so many people are perfectly willing to film or photograph themselves and post it on the internet for free?

@HidingFromtheDinosaurs – Yup. I had alluded to this when I said that lots has happened since 1972. But your comment is important for another reason, in that it neatly obliterates the anti-porn premise that women are pressured (economically or otherwise) into sex work without legitimate consent. Because plenty of people actually want to do it for it’s own sake. They turn on the camera themselves, working by themselves, for themselves, often performing solo acts, and self-publish it on their own websites, and say it quite literally, in their own words, that they want their audiences to enjoy these materials and take it as a compliment when they do. People even release self-produced materials free of charge, with no economic motive whatsoever. And we’ve gotten to the point where the leaked sex tape is on par for the course for self-serving celebrities who don’t want to be associated with the porn industry, but yet crave the attention that comes with it. Even when they do get paid for it, they make pretty good money. Sure, it offers better pay than a life of crime in a third world country. But it also offers better pay than a perfectly respectable white collar job in the USA. Yet anti-porn activists sweep all of this under a rug to paint a picture of rampat exploitation of women by an evil for-profit industry.

Digital Monster. Like pokemon, but not quite as popular.

@HidingFromtheDinosaurs, in what way did Marja’s last comment make it sound like women are Digimon? I can’t fault it in any way. It’s exactly the message that I wish she had given to RocketFrog in the first place. She is finally being sensitive to his state of mind. The original comments about porn were not.

RocketFrog makes it pretty clear that he has an irrational fear of harming women on numerous occasions, including here

Of course I also thought about whether the women involved had been coerced into it. This is a sort of thorny subject I think, because on one hand, some sex workers are poor marginalized people who are driven into a line of work that they hate

It’s irrational because he does not have a similar fear of exploiting women through various other consumer choices that he makes. Perhaps he even bought a pair of Nike shoes before, no? The reason he focuses on this is because of the way it relates to his own sexuality and the self-hatred he feels after years of bullying by men and women alike.

This is the problem with a culture that demonizes male sexuality:

But truth to be told, I do not want permission to have my involuntary sexual fantasies. I want to stop having them at all. Me thinking about sex is pointless and painful. I might as well be a quadruple amputee having involuntary dreams of winning an Olympic gold medal for the 100 m dash

RocketFrog has these perfectly normal, healthy emotions, but he wants to amputate them from his conscience because he’s afraid of the way other people feel about him.

Look, I know a tiny little bit about this sort of thing because I may have felt the same way back in middle school. I was heavily bullied as a kid by a bunch of xenophobic rednecks. It wouldn’t be unusual for me to get into 2-3 fights per week; one time I got spit on 5 times when I walked into my elementary school, another time those same kids slit the palm of my little brother’s hand open and he had to get 12 stitches – he was 6 years old and they did that to get to me. My regular mental state was to try to disappear completely and the way these kids treated me easily became the way that I thought all kids felt about me, including the girls that I would have a crush on but would be too afraid to talk to. It took years for me to grow out of that and start dating. That’s one of the reasons why I am so particularly hostile towards feminist shaming tactics, because it is no different in its intended effect than those redneck bullies I fought as a child. It’s just plain old bullying. It’s also why I’m so hostile to the sheer laziness of the female gender role when it does come to dating, because I have come to consider it just a part of the system of oppression that lets society bully men into subservience.

Marja Erwin:

Digimon is a series of Japanese children’s cartoons which I, and a fair number of other people my age, watched on Saturday morning TV growing up (they were dubbed and aired on American TV in the late 90s/early 2000s, when I was in elementary and middle school). It featured sentient monsters which live inside a “digital world” created by the internet and go on adventures with human children. All of them had names ending in “-mon” (e.g. Agumon, Wizardmon, Angewomon, etc.). Your new spelling put me in mind of it, and it’s funny enough (at least to me), that I probably won’t be able to help ribbing you about it in future (I don’t actually mind you spelling it however you please, as studying linguistics has curbed my tendencies towards prescriptive grammar).

dungone,

I am not sure why you find those words bigoted against men, given that they are about women. Can you explain?

I am not sure why you find those words bigoted against men, given that they are about women. Can you explain?

@Rocketfrog, these words are about men. There wasn’t a legitimate reason to change the spelling of women because the “men” part in “women” never, ever referred to the male of our gender in the first place. It just sounded as if it did, so a bunch of separatist feminists started imagining that it was part of the Patriarchal conspiracy designed by men to oppress women even by the very words we all use. These people were so keen on disassociating themselves from anything that reminded them of the existence of human males that they decided to butcher the English language. Mind you, the conspiracy theory behind this word-oppression supposes that we’ve lived under a Patriarchy for far longer than any of the modern languages existed, which begs the question why all of those other languages don’t also suffer from similar maladies. The very idea of the word “womyn” conveys the notion of cutting off your nose to spite your face, the eradication of anything male from women’s lives, whether real or imagined. It’s bigotry.

@Gingko, well you know what would make far more sense? If they just dropped the “wo” and kept the “man.” If it was really true that they didn’t want to think of themselves as a modified version of the gender neutral human, then the obvious choice would have been to push out men and steal the gender-neutral words for themselves. Instead, they chose to drop themselves out of the human species, linguistically speaking. They attacked strawmen and lost in a gender war they themselves had started.

how well I can convince myself that all the things that I am incapable of do not really matter to me… I am rather desperately seeking a more permanent solution.

Then stop convincing yourself that you’re incapable of doing them. Or better yet, stop convincing yourself that it’s your fault that you can’t have something. It’s not your fault that women are socialized into a passive gender role that prevents you from meeting someone who could bridge the gap in your weaknesses through her own strength. You should feel sorry for women who end up with far worse men than you just because they’re lazy. But why should your own inner life suffer for it? That’s just adding insult to injury.

To Rocketfrog-

Delurking to ask- how do you feel about Buddhism? I hope this doesn’t come off as proselytizing, but I have somewhat similar issues as you (I’m not autistic, but I’m a man who has also deeply internalized a certain very… uncompromising strain of feminist sexual ethics which makes me find the pursuit of sex and/or romance fraught, at best, and accordingly I suffer considerably- I have somewhat different personal issues than you with regards to all this, but still many of your words resonate greatly with me)- and, for me, the teachings it offers in many ways seem to me to represent the best solution to the whole quandary that I have found.

One thing from Buddhism you might find of particular interest- there are supposedly specific meditative techniques which can lessen sensual/sexual desire and are used for that purpose, though from all I’ve heard they are best attempted only under the guidance of a qualified teacher. (And I would certainly recommend trying to find one if you were to decide to seriously go this route.) I don’t know if that’s something you might want to look into- I haven’t yet attempted those particular techniques and can’t speak for their effectiveness, but the goal of Buddhism is ultimately the end of suffering, and since (to oversimplify a bit) the basic premise of it is that the cause of suffering is desire, a lot of thought has been put into ways of countering and learning to deal with desire within Buddhism, and it might be worth at least looking into what’s been said about that within Buddhism, whether you go the route of attempting to accept your desires or attempting to eliminate them.

(One other thing, though I don’t have time to elaborate to the degree I’d like to on this right now- one thing I notice in what you say is how much you apply your standards only to yourself- you assume that women would find you, specifically, repulsive, but allow for the possibility that other men can pursue sex without it being oppressive violators. But the sort of sexual ethics you’ve internalized have far more sweeping implications than I think you’re seeing at the moment, and if you take them to their logical conclusion, I think you arrive at a place where you have to either reject the original premises or see yourself as no different than anyone else. And either way, I think it would probably lead to a less miserable state of mind for you. As I say, I don’t have the time to elaborate on this that I’d like to, but in essence, a standard of sexual ethics in which feeling attraction to someone without their consent is a violation is one which condemns sexuality itself as harmful and oppressive, and condemns virtually the entire human race save asexuals and perhaps demisexuals as sexual violators. At that point, most of the other premises of the sort of feminism that advocates sexual ethics of this sort collapse- the argument that sexual attraction to a stranger is on the same spectrum as rape is an argument which goes so far that it ruins the structure to which it belongs. Whether you then reject that argument and its inevitable conclusion or accept it anyway is up to you, but either way there is no reason to see yourself as uniquely wretched.)

I hope this was somewhat helpful in some way- as I say, I sympathize greatly with you, and I hope you can find peace with yourself in the end.

ThereWasAForest,

Being mentally ill has taught me that religious people will frequently try to convince me that their particular religion can heal me of my pains – and no, you are not the first Buddhist to suggest Buddhism to me either. I used to know a Tendai priestess, who would incessantly suggest to me to become a Buddhist monk.

I disagree with core tenets of Buddhism. Even if we separate out all the aspects of ancient Indian mythology in Buddhism (reincarnation, etc.), then I still think that the view that the root of all suffering is desire is simplistic, unless we twist the meaning of “desire” into something that means something completely different from what that word usually means. Starving people are not suffering because they desire food, they are suffering because their bodies are deteriorating from lack of nourishment. Torture victims do not suffer because they desire to be free of torture, they suffer because someone is inflicting damage to their bodies. Rape victims do not suffer because they desire to not be raped, but because their bodies are physically violated.

Second, desire is a fundamental part not only of humanity, but of animality – we share it with chimpanzees, dogs, rats and lizards. The concept of “wanting stuff”, of basic intentionality, is what a brain is for, the basic purpose of a brain is to help the organism it is part of to avoid things that are bad for it and get things that are good for it. Some animals (including humans) can suspend acting on their desires, though.

The closest thing to an “esoteric” philosophy that appeals to me, I think, is Stoicism (although I think I lack the mental fortitude to be a Stoic) – which actually has a number of common traits with both Buddhism and Taoism (probably not an accident – it descended from Greek Cynicism, and several Cynics visited India during Alexander the Great’s time, where they met a number of local religious and spiritual figures). Stoicism teaches that it is impossible to be free from the cruelty of the world, but that it is possible to transcend it using reason – the only thing we humans have that we can truly control. It teaches that it is possible to achieve a serene mind, and to achieve “being of good spirit” by suspending incessant value judgments and viewing things just as facts, rather than as “goods” and “bads” – much like how in Taoism, introducing the concept of “good” automatically also introduces the concept of “bad” (and “beautiful” introduces “ugly”, etc.) – and that this would also ultimately lead to better decisions.

There are also many things I disagree with Stoicism about, but it is closer to a weird old philosophy I could get on board with than Buddhism is. Perhaps that is just because I grew up in a Western culture.

you assume that women would find you, specifically, repulsive, but allow for the possibility that other men can pursue sex without it being oppressive violators.

Of course. Not all men are viewed by women as creepy and revolting. Sexuality is, as it should be, open to those people who other people actually want to engage in it with.

Whether you then reject that argument and its inevitable conclusion or accept it anyway is up to you, but either way there is no reason to see yourself as uniquely wretched.

I do not think I am uniquely wretched; there are probably many others like me. We are seven billion clever monkeys on this planet, after all.

I realize that some of the more extreme aspects of my way of life – like the period in my past where I lived in self-imposed isolation to avoid reminding women of rape, my occasional self-harm and my wish to be castrated – violate the Categorical Imperative. If every human being lived like that, society would come to a halt, and there would soon be nobody left to live at all.

Dungone mentioned upthread that sexual and gender ethics have a sort of special place in my mind, which is correct. I have a glaring blind spot in my critical faculties, and find that I have difficulty critically assessing these things – on a very basic level, I think that I have no right to even investigate these things. Even though that violates every single thing I, being mostly of a skeptical nature, approach most other aspects of existence with. I know this, and I still find myself completely powerless to change it.

Schala,

When I have tried to take any kind of initiative – which I am admittedly not good at, because I have no other tools at my disposal than to simply declare what I feel and think verbally – I have had responses ranging from being politely declined because “something is just not there” to being laughed at and being humiliated in public. And that is entirely understandable – if I am such a revolting creature that I evoke such responses, I have no business doing the things that evoke them.

Schala,

If women pursued more, they would probably still prefer to pursue attractive men. I have known plenty of women who often make the first move (I live in a Scandinavian country) – and they were also not at all interested in me, or in other pathetic mentally disabled nerds like me. Which is my original point: Why would they, when they can get something better? They are not stupid.

“Much as certain reactionaries seem to think that mental disabilities and illnesses can be cured by “just pulling yourself together”, that is unfortunately not the case.”

They are wrong. But we can still hope that in time you can heal.

Dungone:
I think it goes deeper than just anti-porn activists. I think that there’s a very real and very generational gap going on that renders most of the discussions of pornography had by all factions in these gender debates inaccessible to a growing number of people and will soon render them obsolete. When I see people write about “porn” in these discussions, they almost invariably seem to be talking about something which bears little meaningful resemblance to what I or anyone I know (male or female) is actually viewing or interacting with. They might as well be discussing the dangers of CRT televisions for all the relevance it has to someone like me.

Marja Erwin:
I would still be interested to hear in what way you propose people might go about “researching” the pornography they view. Is there a database which maintains a reasonably accurate and well-sourced log of such information? Many videos and image sets are circulated under multiple names and many performers also employ more than one alias, how do you propose people deal with for this obstacle to obtaining complete information? What about images which people produce or procure themselves and post on various anonymous image boards? In that case, there is often not even a whole face to go on (people who want to show off but not have it come back to haunt them often crop out at least part of their faces). As has been pointed out, the antecedents of your own information are questionable and subject to dispute. How does your proposed model account for all of this? I am not making this request by way of an attack or counterargument: I hold a deep and abiding interest in the minutia of methodology and will be quite disappointed if you do not reply.

RocketFrog:
I really wish I could say something to help you, but I don’t think it’s in my power to do so. What you’re describing sounds something like my darker periods of depression, and I’ve never really found a formula for getting out of those except to just live through them (I’m in a fairly bright patch now, but I was nearly suicidal last winter). One thing I might recommend you try, if you don’t do it already, is a regular exercise regimen. It can’t cure psychological issues, but working yourself hard at the gym three times a week can provide a sense of structure that I’ve sometimes found makes it easier to cope. If nothing else, exhaustion is usually a good way to get your mind off things.

Well, I suppose you’d first identify a porn project or company, and see what people say about it. If performers and ex-performers are positive about it, then it’s probably mostly doing things right. If performers and ex-performers are bitter about it, then it’s probably doing something wrong. If one-time performers are complaining about deception and rape, than it’s definitely someplace to avoid. A few months ago, I was reading a pro-sex feminist blog which reblogged a performer’s alert about some porn company where she had been raped, warning other performers to avoid them. I wasn’t trying to research anything and didn’t write down the company name, but there’s probably a lot of complaints online about the nastier companies.

“I know. But those who prefer Leonards can get better Leonards. There are lots of available single nerdy men, and only few women who want them. ”

I disagree there.

That there is a standard of “better Leonard” that others meet and you don’t. That nerdy men are all love-starved, and that few women want them.

Of course its few mainstream women. But I don’t want either mainstream men nor women. They’re boring cardboard cutouts who wear masks 24 hours a day and play mind games because they think that’s what life is about.

You’re better than them to me, by far. And you’re not last on a list of 3 billion potential suitors, like you think you are.

ThereWasAForest:

At the moment, my thought on the matter is that the big difference is that male sexuality is predatory, because my memory drifts to being told over and over again that the male gaze is a violation in itself – but I also know that this is just my teachers and my mother’s friends talking in my head, and me being too weak-willed to free myself of my past.

But I also think that I cannot control what other people do. If they violate each other’s boundaries, then it is limited how much I can do to stop them. But I can make sure that I do not do so.

I always thought, by the way, that the schism between “sex-positive” and “sex-negative” in feminism is artificial and largely nonsensical, because apart from a few religious extremists, there are nearly no truly “sex-negative” people. There are people who object to certain kinds of expressions of human sexuality – but nearly everybody, even people who are considered sex-positive, do that too. It seems to me that the line between “sex-positive” and “sex-negative” gets drawn in a completely arbitrary manner – typically so that the person doing the definition ends up on the sex-positive side. I mean, most people seem to regard Gail Dines and the rest of the anti-porn movement as sex-negative, but they themselves think that porn cheapens, commercializes and debases sexuality, allowing them to view themselves as sex-positive people, trying to save sexuality from commercialization and exploitation (not a sentiment I agree with, particularly in a world where lots of people produce amateur porn apparently just for amusement, but it does at least have some internal consistency). It seems to me to be a largely meaningless distinction leading to largely meaningless categories; it is better to discuss actual points of disagreement.

My wanting to be free of having sexual or romantic urges and drives is only partially rooted in my feelings of guilt over having them. It is because to me, personally, they are solely sources of pain and misery; nothing good comes of them. Having needs (needs that most people characterize as basic needs, right on the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy) that cannot possibly be met is absurd. The guilt is secondary to that.