Category Archives: Demonization

SEXUAL TRANSACTIONALISM – Success objects, separating the men from the boys and transactionalism in sexual relationships

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Miguel Bloomfontosis discusses this in a post from last year, where he identifies a double standard when it comes to transactionalism in sexual relationships. And judging from the responses he got, he hit a nerve with this.

In his post Miguel links to a post where a woman describes a dating experience that ends in a decision to stop dating “boys” and to concentrate from now on on “men” – boys with all the paraphernalia of economic success. It’s such a bald display of success object thinking, of instrumentalization of men.

This standard of economic success being the measure of manhood, manhood being something that is achieved, is right out of the traditional gender system handbook. Every man who grew up before 1980 is going to recognize it and every dog whistle associated with it immediately. And a structural feature of it is the trope that “getting the girl’ is another achievement, and it’s the greatest feat of manhood of all (I am convinced that a big part of the contempt in homophobic dismissal of gay men is that we opt out of this fool’s struggle. We don’t even attempt much less succeed at getting the girl. This is why I bristle so much at the facile attempt to portray homophobia as an expression of misogyny. Putting men on a sexual treadmill is misogynist?)

Feminists have railed against this this traditionalist portrayal of sexual relations with the woman as a reward for success correctly as objectifying of women and as toxic for everyone.* Yet when it comes up in this form of man as success object, what kind of pushback do we see from feminists? Jill Filipovic and her coterie of admirers celebrated it – just look at the comment thread. Look at the comment thread carefully – there was a lot of pushback, so those celebrating this really have no excuse for being confused on this point. (Then it trails off into a swamp of privilege narrative about who gets to poke fun at whom…..)

An iconic example of the pay-to-play structure of dating is Big Bopper’s Chantilly Lace from 1958. This isn’t about payment for services rendered or anything so crude and whorish as that, no, this is about the rule that he can date her as long as he is capable and/or willing to pay for everything. And this is only about the rule, not his relationship with this actual woman. She’s actually willing to go on a date when he’s broke but even so the language of transactionalism is he knows to frame the conversation:

Chantilly Lace

Hello baby, yeah, this is the Big Bopper speakin
hahahahahaha
Oh you sweet thing
Do I what
Will I what
Oh baby you know what I like

Chorus

Chantilly lace and a pretty face
And a pony tail hanging down
A wiggle in the walk and giggle in the talk
Makes the world go round
There ain’t nothing in the world like a big eyed girl
That makes me act so funny, make me spend my money
Make me feel real loose like a long necked goose
Like a girl, oh baby that’s what I like

What’s that baby
But, but, but
oh honey
But, oh baby you know what I like

Chorus

What’s that honey
Pick you up at 8 and don’t be late
But baby I ain’t got no money honey
hahahahaha
Oh alright baby you know what I like

Here’s another song from the same era:

“Because I’m a blonde, I don’t have to think.
I talk like a baby, and I never pay for drinks.
Don’t have to worry ’bout getting a man
If I keep this blonde and I keep these tan,
‘Cause I’m a blonde, yeah, yeah, yeah.
‘Cause I’m a blonde, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I see people workin, it just makes me giggle
‘Cause I don’t have to work; I just have to jiggle.
I’m a blonde, B-L-O-N-D.
I’m a blonde; don’t you wish you were me?”

And it goes on like that for several more verses making fun of the way she gets a free ride. Cute song, I saw it in a drag show and the queen had to be over 50 and looked like Fred Flintstone.

There seems to be broad agreement in the culture that a lot of sexual interaction is transactional, enough that it is a particular sneering point for male feminists to try to shame men who point it out. This cultural agreement is broad enough that “whore” or “prostitute” is one of the most damning insults you can hurl at a woman, the stereotype it exploits is apparently that widely held. I wonder to what extent this shapes the discussion around sex work, how much it conditions the drive to demonize men in response to it.

I think there is a thin and not always visible line between the sane and reasonable interest in selecting a co-parent, sexual partner, who is economically viable on the one hand and looking to hook some kind of free ride or at least some free booze and food based on time spent in the presence of your awesomeness and sexual attractiveness on the other. It seems to me dating is the border area where this line lies.

This is the beginning of a series of posts on sexual transactionalism in which I hope to explore various angles of it – prostitution in general, contract prostitution in the form of unequal marriage, even the PUA movement, if it turns out there’s a connection, even inverse.

 

*EDIT: dungone contributed this comment in reference to feminist condemnations of sexual transactionalism, which he points out have been rather, um, narrowly focused:

dungone on said:

I’ve also noticed that when feminists decry “transactionalism,” it’s not actually about getting rid of “transactionalism,” but about reinforcing a hypergamous state to an even greater degree. It boils down to lowering the price women have to pay, raising the price that men have to pay, and sealing the deal by making it taboo for non-feminists to bring up and criticize in any meaningful way. The ultimate result of transactionalism, hypergamy, and prejudice is effectively a female cabal that sets out for itself to control both male and female gender roles for the sole benefit of high status women.

IT’S SHIT LIKE THIS, FEMINISTS – This is how deep the rot goes – #killallmen

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A blogger calling herself stavvers at Another Angry Woman has an interesting post up. It is a real ball of sociopathic self-justification and gendercide fantasy. She starts out:

“Well, well, well. It seems the latest thing feminism is fighting about is the phrase “kill all men”.

Because apparently there is some debate to be had on whether or not this is problematic formulation. And this article just goes on and keeps getting worse, staring out with the usual bogus disclaimers, “This is all just a completely harmless hypothetical that reveals nothing about our entrenched bigotry…” before launching into denialism and self-justification.

“So, before I launch into this defence, let me point out that nobody is actually planning to kill all men. Not even some men. It’s just a phrase, an expression of rage, a rejection of a system which is riddled with violence.”

Well then it’s a completely ignorant expression of rage, since men are overwhelmingly the victims of deadly violence, usually at the hands of men – this is usually the only time these killings are punished and recorded as crimes –and often at the behest of women. If it’s intended as a rejection of violence, one has to wonder why it is directed at the primary victims of that violence.

One has to wonder at this blind spot and what might be causing it. One does not have to wonder for long; it will become very clear.

“Kill all men” is a shorthand war cry, much the same as “ACAB” or “tremble hetero swine” or “die cis scum”. It represents a structural critique, presented in a provocative fashion.

The difference being, and the reason this is dishonest, is that women are hardly the relatively powerless minority that gay or trans people are, so there is no real equivalence between these battle cries. Women are the majority of voters, have complete control over child rearing and enculturation in society and control the majority of disposable income.

Exhibit A: Manipulation (Appeal to pity)

“Patriarchy harms men, it’s true, but it oppresses the fuck out of women, and there are few, if any men who are not complicit in this oppression. Most men are not rapists or abusers, but many are complicit in perpetuating this violence by spreading rape apologist myths, by failing to stand against violence against women and girls, and by simply not nailing their colours to the mast and acting as allies.”

Let’s look at this a piece at a time:

Patriarchy hurts men too. Such a deep insight. Patriarchy oppresses women with food and shelter and protection and modern medical care, but it KILLS men to make that all happen.

Now we get the Pure Vessel thing: “if any men who are not complicit in this oppression.” Apparently no women are complicit in any of this, not even women who kill or rape other women, or who send men off to die in war.

Rape apology? Oh we know about rape apology. How’s this for some rape apology – “B-b-b-but it’s not real rape because patriarchy and rape is a crime of gendered oppression, and besides it’s not systemic, just him individually and it’s always really, really rare and anyway it’s not as bad when it happens to a boy as it is when it happens to a girl and he’s the real rapist here anyway, he forced her to do all this – the fact that he was an infant doesn’t mean he doesn’t have male privilege. Oh, and he got lucky so he should be grateful.” You can every one of those points in feminsts spaces when male rape victims are mentioned (with some shining exceptions).

And the appeal to White Knights – “by failing to stand against violence against women and girls,” – apparently stavvers is unaware of the degree and scope of violence that men will visit on other men in the defense of women and girls. There are plenty of examples of this from recent news articles in her own country, but we have our share of this mentality here too– this is how these people have acted in the past when a man offended the sacred person of a white woman – or even was simply accused.

And finally, “and by simply not nailing their colours to the mast and acting as allies.” Apparently for stavvers the alliance is all one way, women owe men nothing in return in loyalty as allies, men exist for and their value depends protecting women and nailing their colors to women’s flagpole. This the form of objectification Martha Nussbaum calls “Instrumentality”.

She goes deeper into this:

Exhibit B: Denialism (Lying)

“And this is because misogynists completely fail to understand how power works. They miss the fact that in this society, violence against women and girls is rife,…”

Well for one thing, all misogynists grow up under the control, nurture and guidance of mothers, so they almost certainly know exactly power, absolute power over food and shelter and punishment, the power of life and death, works.

And for another, the scale of violence in stavvers’ society is probably the same as in mine – several times greater than against men and boys. That probably is not apparent to stavvers because those deaths are invisible to her, probably because they are of no importance to her. They simply don’t count. This the form of objectification Martha Nussbaum calls “Violability”. This lack of empathy is sociopathic.

Exhibit C: Gaslighting

“I suppose it is hardly surprising that utterances of killing all men draw such ire, even from feminists. Under patriarchy, violence is the domain of men.”

So apparently India is not patriarchal at all, and not just India. Apparently neither is China.

“Even from feminists”? The mind vomits. Is this how a feminist refers to feminists who happen to have some human decency?

“There is no serious threat of the women rising up and actually killing all men, all the while the hum of background noise of another women raped, murdered or beaten by a man. That this culture of violence is gendered, and the system is set up in favour of keeping things that way.”

Then she really doubles down on the sociopathy:

“Part of the power of SCUM is the effect it has on men. At my reading group, the men present were allies, and I remember vividly one saying “I don’t think she went far enough at the end, letting some of the men live and act as the Men’s Auxilliary”. All of the other men nodded along. They got that this idea is just fantasy, just a satire.

On the other hand, it’s pretty difficult to mention SCUM (or indeed just cry “kill all men”) without the misogynists crawling in, crying misandry.”

So she sees value in a gendercide fantasy because its sociopathic bigotry offends men, and then she passive-aggressively ties it up with a swipe about “crying misandry”. There’s probably a clinical name for this kind of behavior.

“So no, we’re not actually advocating killing all men, but what we need is for men to understand why we might. A secondary function of this powerful little phrase is to seek out allies. Some men simply cannot fathom that we might be this furious.”

Oh the irony, this coming from someone who cannot fathom why men might be furious, and who thinks she can dismiss it with her ….

“And of course, all men are not deserving of death. In fact, most of them aren’t. I can think of a fair few I do wish painful, violent death on, although this remains but a fantasy. Patriarchy would destroy me were I to ever touch a hair on their head. Patriarchy already tries to punish me for merely expressing these thoughts, because they are unbecoming of a woman.

And of course, all men are not deserving of death. In fact, most of them aren’t.”

Oh how very generously lenient of her.

Patriarchy would destroy her…? This is denialism taken to the point of delusion. Patriarchy protects women like her and finds all kinds of excuses to dismiss her violence. The Battered Woman syndrome scam comes to mind, but more systemically the female sentencing discount is well-documented for almost any crime of violence a woman can commit, if it even gets labeled a crime of violence at all.

And when any of us finds any of this troubling, ha ha, it’s all a joke, are we really so stupid as to take any of this seriously? Are we really so crass as call it what it is and try to rip the gaslighting veil away? Besides, where do we get off privileging our own preceptions, so tainted by male privilege, over her reassurances? This is the form of objectification Martha Nussbaum calls “Denial of subjectivity”.

The Sociopathic Subtext

This is the sociopathic subtext to this attempt to explain all this away – that this is no big deal, that men are supposed to be men and just shrug this off. And “men being men” means men being tough and just sucking it up – an appeal to machismo. And men are just so big and strong, so all powerful, that a woman could never, ever harm a man, and he’s just a pussy if he has the temerity to complain. I thought feminism called machismo “toxic masculinity”, I thought feminism opposed all that.

The sociopathic subtext to just trying to pass this off as some kind of harmless joke and not the reflection of deeply entrenched attitudes with real-word consequences is that men just don’t matter enough for any of this to matter. It’s perfectly alright to treat men as violable and as instruments of women’s welfare and to dismiss men’s own perceptions of thier situation, because hey, they’re just men. Objectification is the center of sociopathy and the lack of empathy we see in stavvers’ post.

 Solidarity with sociopathy

So this is the quality of the thinking and the depth of the pathology at work in this article. I have seen a lot of pushback in feminist spaces on this article, but tellingly not one person goes the distance and just says “She’s not a feminist”. Simple as that.That’s all it would take to prove that feminists really don’t tolerate this kind of bigotry in their movement. They just have to denounce it as anti-feminist. That’s all. Then again maybe that silence is consent.

And they wonder why we distrust them and their motives and their explanations.

Ann Coulter says 2% Rape Statistic is Bogus

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by anonymous reader

According to the FBI, a higher percentage of rape claims are false than any other criminal complaint, 8 percent compared to 2 percent for other crimes.[1]

 

A study of all rape allegations in a Midwestern city over nine years found 41 percent were false and a study of more than a thousand rape allegations on air force bases over the course of four years concluded that 46 percent were false. In 27 percent of the cases, the accuser recanted.[2]

 

The quotes are from Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama by Ann Coulter, published in 2012. Sources given for this info are at the bottom.

According to Coulter, “feminists” repeat a statistic from the book Against Our Will from 1975, which sourced an unprovable remark by a state court judge from a transcript. It says in the notes: “All claims of a 2 percent rate of false rape allegations can be traced back to Brownmiller’s book.”

If we take Ann Coulter at face value, false rape charges are 8%, could be higher, and anything that says 2% repeats something unprovable.

A Slate piece from 2009 suggests the Midwestern city study is unreliable because it was based on a sample of 109 reports and included iffy language. It calls a review from the Cambridge Law Journal, “the best we’ve found” and places “false rape charges” at a rate of 8% to 10%.

Earlier this year, there was an infographic from The Enliven Project. The graphic uses a 2% false accusation rate. (It also factored in a 10% reporting rate, meaning 90% of rapes are unreported, which is why it looks the way it does.)

That 2% was sourced to a 2009 PDF from NDAA.org, which says “estimates for the percentage of false reports begin to converge around 2-8%.” It also says “very few” of the estimates from the Cambridge Law Journal study “could be considered credible.” It gives another study from the Making A Difference Project, which puts the rate at 7%. About false rape reporting, the PDF concludes:

“To date, the MAD study is the only research conducted in the U.S. to evaluate the percentage of false reports made to law enforcement. The remaining evidence is therefore based on research conducted outside the U.S., but it all converges within the same range of 2-8%.”

The PDF talks about a case where a study in Britain gave an initial result of 8%, but was then revised to 2.5%. A study of rapes in Victoria, Australia showed a 2.1% rate of false reporting. Presumably these support the 2% lower bound. (Against Our Will isn’t cited in the PDF.)

A Slate XX piece in January criticized The Enliven Project graphic as overestimating the number of false accusations. Referencing the same NDAA data, it points out the difference between a false report and a false accusation: “victims who fabricate a sexual assault report may not want anyone to actually be arrested for the fictional crime. Therefore, they may say that they were sexually assaulted by a stranger or an acquaintance who is only vaguely described and not identified by name.”
The entry on Wikipedia for “false accusation of rape” questions the 1996 FBI data cited by Ann Coulter.

The NDAA PDF concedes, “Of course, in reality, no one knows—and in fact no one can possibly know—exactly how many sexual assault reports are false.”

- – - – -

Sources from the Notes Section of Mugged:

[1]Crime Index Offenses reported, Section II, Department of Justice Uniform Crime Reporting, 1996 at 22. (It says in the book, “Data on “unfounded’ rape complaints after 1996 does not seem to be available.”)

[2]Eugene J. Kanin, “False Rape Allegations,” Archives of Sexual Behavior, February 1994. Available at http://falserapearchives.blogspot.com/2009/06/archives-of-sexual-behavior-feb-1994.html (link works)

Charles P. McDowell, “False Allegations,” Forensic Science Digest 11, no. 4, December, 1985 (a publication of the U.S. Air Force of Special Investigation); Bruce Gross, “False Rape Allegations: An Assault on Justice,” Annals of the American Psychotherapy Association, December 22, 2008.

 

 

MALE DISPOSABILITY – How an abuser portrays herself as the abused and how her enabler goes down in flames –the Ballad of Jodi Arias and Alyce La Violette

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Daisy Deadhead asked a few weeks ago if anyone here was paying any attention to the Jodi Arias trial. She considered this particular murder trial, with the now customary accusations of spousal abuse by the murder victim, to be a huge men’s rights issue. She was right.

Background – Jodi Arias shot her husband, Travis, and stabbed him 29 times. She can’t keep her story straight enough for anyone to figure out where she did it or quite how it all happened. Nevertheless there is an even chance she’ll be acquitted – because Patriarchy or something and the Duluth Model. Murder victim or not, he’s the only man in the situation, so he must be the abuser, right? That seems to be the way La Violette’s, expert witness for the defense, sees it.

But this is the real news. The star defense witness, a domestic violence expert named Alyce La Violette has stirred up a hurricane with her biased testimony portraying Jodi as a DV victim. Look at the reaction in the comments about her book at Amazon. DV victims and DV professionals are lining up – over 500 comments so far – to say how she disgusts them as DV victims, how she shames them as DV professionals, what a fraud she is. It is really quite the firestorm. And in comment after comment her man-hatred is excoriated. That’s a new development too.

And when someone ventures a positive comment it immediately attracts five and ten comments calling them frauds, maybe even Alyce herself, or else duped idiots. One such comment has 55 comments in response – that’s five pages of comments.

In fact the reaction has become so violent that saner voices, Janice Harper for instance, have had to speak up – not to defend Alyce La Violettee so much as to insist on some kind of civilized moderation.

This is news indeed. What’s news is that the enablers of these abusers are paying the price, for a change. There will always be Jodi Ariases and Ted Bundys – sociopaths who feel free to treat others as objects and simply do not see how the most basic rules apply to them. That’s not the issue. The issue is how society deals with that. In the case of a Ted Bundy no one saw it for years, but when they finally did, the hammer came down. No one testified at his trial trying to excuse his behavior on the grounds of some kind of mistreatment he allegedly suffered. Yet when it‘s a woman – this time it’s Jodi Arias, but it happened with Mary Winkler, with Andrea Yates and with many others – there is a heroic attempt to portray the perpetrator as a victim, and a willing audience, because that narrative fits their narratives.

And the enablers like La Violette are crucial to this. And always even in those rare instances where the woman does get held accountable, the enablers skitter out scott free to wreak havoc another day.

Well, maybe not for much longer.

BRANDING – Feminist elitism and why it’s not a fatal deficiency, and how feminists can regain credibility as caring about the rest of us

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Ally Fogg is having a good conversation on why so many young women and people in general have generally “feminist” beliefs and attitudes – gender equality, self-determination in matters of gender – or beliefs and attitudes that feminists say are feminist, or that they claim as feminist, are uncomfortable with calling themselves feminist.

In the course of the conversation Quiet Riot Girl remarked that feminism has been elitist from the beginning, which by itself imposes enough shortcomings, but then goes on to compound the problem by claiming to be all broad-based and democratic and open to diversity of opinion and then to go on and claim to be the broad solution to gender issues.

There’s really no question or discussion to be had about the elitism of early feminism. Just look at the way the suffragettes are dressed in all those photographs. It is impossible to any manual labor at all dressed that way, and this was in an age when anyone who couldn’t afford servants – the 99% – took all day to the laundry for a week, first firing the stove to heat the water, then facing the back-breaking labor of hand washing, wringing and hanging…. And then there was the work of cooking – more firing the stove, plucking the bird if you could afford one……

I answered that it’s the whole vanguard party model. And it doesn’t have to be a bad thing. If the elites don’t do this work, who else has the time or resources to do it?

Have you ever heard this story about Zhou Enlai? You remember Zhou Enlai, the one people shed actual tears for?

Once Khruschev was visiting Beijing. At the reception he got loud and boastful – “This is the difference between our country and yours: I was born poor and now I am running the country, while you were born rich and you are still running the country”. And indeed, Zhou Enlai was from a very privileged background.

Zhou Enlai considered for a moment. “That’s very true, but there is this difference: We are both traitors to our classes.”

So elitism doesn’t have to doom a movement, but those elites have to transcend their elitism and their focus on their own issues. (See also Womanism and critiques of white feminism). It’s hard, because selfishness is how their class managed to climb over everyone else and become elites.

Elitism doesn’t have to doom a movement – all the elites have to do is turn on their class, in this case privileged Western white women, to convince us they care about us. They have to help the MRM in the process of disassembling thier female privilege, in other words, building real gender equality. Since they routinely claim that equality between the genders is where their hearts are already, what “real feminism” is, it should be no big deal.

Quiet Riot Girl doubted it would happen because it would require feminists to actually give a shit about men. Nevva hoppen, as they say.

I answered that I agreed, it won’t happen, and here it is another failure to transcend. It is a failure to transcend their traditional enculturation. Male disposability is a pillar of traditional, “patriarchal society”. You simply cannot get the model to work without it.

The answer is for feminists to go deeper into their feminist rejection of traditionalism, even the traditionalism that has crept into feminism. So good-bye to the demonization of male sexuality, which is so Victorian – so good-bye to “rape culture” and “testosterone poisoning” and the penis as weapon imagery; good-bye to male hyperagency – good-bye “patriarchy” and “male privilege” and “male dominance” and female victimhood.

In other words the answer for feminists is to perfect and complete their feminism.

It will be a hard purge and I for one can hardly wait for the show trials.

GENERAL – This is why we need rape shield laws, or something to deal with this

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Two teenaged female relatives of the convicted Steubenville rapists have been brought up on charges for going up on Twitter and threatening the life of the rape victim. One blamed the victim for ruining her cousin’s life.

You can ask a number of questions about the mentality this comes out of. Is this a culture of resistance to the authority of the courts because that authority has so often and so reliably been illegitimate and oppressive? Is this just a family culture of plain old human amoral familism? Is this just teenagers with a pack mentality?

Those are questions for later. Right now the issue is protecting victims who report rapes. A rape shield law cannot reasonably conceal the name of the accuser and victim after the trial begins – some very dark places lie down that road and we have been in all of them over the centuries – but in this case this ugly persecution almost certainly started earlier.

And it’s not just member so the families of the accused who are jumping in on this:

“In addition to the threatening tweets, other Twitter users posted messages harshly criticizing the rape victim’s character, according to screen shots captured by a website dedicated to fighting online bullying.”

I’m not sure a rape shield law would have prevented this; maybe just a rally public treatment of the thugs making the threat will send enough of a message.

Read the whole article.

 

Here’s another take on this, from Amanda Marcotte. I didn’t initially buy her reversion to rape culture in this case, but on second look I can see what’s she’s saying. She says that people just don’t want to acknowledge they someone they know is a rapist. I  think there’s more to it and it is worse – I thnk these girls don’t just wnat to deny these guys did it, I think they want to downgrade it – yeah, well maybe they did do it, but it doesn’t really matter, look who they did it too. That explains a little better the vile treatment of the victim, explains a litle more fully why they are piling on. People just protect their own and sometimes this is what it looks like. I think that works with all serious crime, and so calling it “rape culture” is not really accurate.

But I really agree with this her analysis when it is applied to the way male rape victims are treated, espceially by other men. There we see a real rape culture – denialism, anomalization, minimization.

HYPOAGENCY – Hypoagency and Blaming Everything on Men

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I’m going to be doing a series on hypoagency and hyperagency. Typhonblue identified these as the core of the gender system we find so problematic and the more I look at them the more that analysis is confirmed.

Because this is series, I am soliciting examples of both.

Female hypoagency is what we call the cultural tendency to deny that women have agency. We are talking about imputed rather than real lack of agency. This means that when a woman does something, her agency in that act is denied, so that if that act is something bad, she will be immune from blame.

A necessary corollary of female hypoagency is male hyperagency. Under male hyperagency men are held responsible for all the things women are not.
I hope the sexism is obvious enough not to need further explanation and that the misogyny and misandry of this system is obvious too. One common form this takes is projecting women’s inaction, failures or the negative consequences of their actions onto men, as a culturral norm.

So in this first look at female hypoagency we are going to look at female immunity and how it works both in the general culture and in feminism, which claims to criticize and analyze that general culture. This is basically a list of things as they come to mind, nothing comprehensive or exhaustive, and I encourage readers to nominate other material.

Here we go:

WAR – This is the claim that “men start wars” and that war is a male problem that men foist off onto innocent civilian bystanders. This relies on a completely uninformed and naïve understanding of war as some kind of sport that all those rough boys go off and do and the stray rounds fall on peace-loving innocent bystanders – in other words a complete denial of the benefits that women and others on the winning side derive from war, and a denial of women’s role in sending men to war.

POLITICS – This is the claim that men have all the power because they hold the majority of political office, despite the fact that women outnumber men as voters, so are responsible for all these male politicians being voted in. This ignores the troublesome fact that women make up the majority of voters. The engrained belief in hypoagency is what makes this denialism possible.

BENEVOLENT SEXISM – Every time women enjoy any kind of advantage due to gender – “privilege” – that has to be spun as being due to male action, or else it has to be spun as some kind of disadvantage. Labeling an advantage “benevolent sexism” accomplishes that.

This is not to deny that benevolent sexism is a fair way to describe what’s going on. For one thing, it damned sure is sexism – sexist against men, and we don’t experience it as particularly benevolent, not in the least. But on the other hand the Golden Cage is also harmful to women. Well, that’s just one more reason to identify and destroy all forms of female privilege.

These are the big, umbrella categories. Help with specific examples.

MISANDRY – Male Resistance to the MRM

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A Redditor named doch_doch has a new blog she has just started and it is definitely worth a look. (This is one of the cleverer screen names I have seen. It means “though, though” or “Oh but yes it is!” in German.)

She starts with:

“Imagine you’re a man in the US in the time prior to women’s right activism.”

And winds up with this, which I have never seen anywhere else:

“So where we the men’s rights activist in all this upheaval? Well, with a few exceptions, there just weren’t any. While things were changing for women, things were not changing as quickly for men. In fact, men deviating from the norm of being the sole financial provider were dismissed, mocked, and ostracized.”

As they still are. See Hanna Rosin and the End of Men, for starters.

She summarizes:

“In the world I live in right now, I know that the gender binary is still screwing everyone. But for women’s issues there is a dialogue, there is movement and change. There is support from churches, government agencies, and individuals for “women’s” issues. Not only doesn’t this exist for men, it isn’t allowed to exist. Men’s rights is a dirty word for most feminists, with people throwing around accusations of misogyny, sexism, racism.
I’m not going to allow feminists to define this movement for me. There are some very, very angry men involved, it’s true. Anger can be destructive, but it can also breed change. Many men have just had enough of being told they don’t matter unless they’re rich and white.
I get it. “

Indeed she does. You need to read the whole post to see how thoroughly she gets it. She called herself an MRA for a while until she got tired of the venom of so many in the movement – she understands where it comes from; she just doesn’t feel like subjecting herself to it.

Something that just occurred to me when the question came up of where the MRAs were in the 1800s, is that it would be interesting to compare the resistance from women that the women’s rights movement got, starting with the suffrage movement but not restricted to that, to the resistance the MRM is getting from men. People resist change because it threatens vested positions of power or security.

So let’s compare the two.

Male resistance to the MRM seems to fall into a few main categories:

MACHO THUMBHEADS: There are the macho thumbheads who dismiss any discussion of men’s issues as un-masculine whining. These are the idiots who shout down male victims of rape(1), and who dismiss women raping boys by saying the boys got lucky.

You do find women in feminist spaces talking like this too about male victims, but less and less, I think. I think the community is taking corrective action. Good for them. It’s patriarchal shit (to the extent Patriarchy is even a thing.)

WHITE KNIGHTS: Then there are the white knights They downplay men’s issues because women and only women are the deserving targets of concern. These people believe in empathy apartheid. Basically it’s more macho posturing. A subset of these white knights are the guys who fancy themselves the protectors of sacred womanhood against all those other men, brutes all of them, with nothing between these fragile women and the horrors……

Demonization: one very common form white knighting takes is demonization of other men. (When feminists do this, they are just feeding into the patriarchal damsel/white knight dynamic – the Ladies’ Auxiliary of the Patriarchy). Commenter John Markley outlines this mechanism or dynamic in a discussion about Hugo Schwyzer, his misandry and his ex-communication from all the cool kid feminist spaces:

“elementary_watson,
I’ve long thought that Schwyzer’s misandry was in part his way of absolving himself of responsibility for his behavior- If ALL men are inherently rotten, his behavior 1. isn’t his fault, and 2.doesn’t make men who DON’T act that way any better than him. He’s like a more sexist version of Saint Augustine. (I believe Patrick Brown has made the same comparison, actually.)

 

About the Sarkozy molestation story:

Schwyzer didn’t just say the crime was less serious because of “male privilege”- he called the 11-year old predatory and painted his abuser as his helpless, pitiable victim. It was a step beyond victim blaming or rape apologism into… Hell, I don’t even know.”

Demonization serves as a mechanism to alienate the evil you see in yourself, to other it into an external entity that you can reject it.

COMPLACENCY: Then there are the complacent ones, who think things are fine the way they are. These are the guys who have yet to be sundered from their children by an ex-wife who the criminal and family court system privilege with every possible advantage. These are the guys who insist there can’t be anything wrong with circumcision because they were circumcised and they don’t know any better.
APEXUALITY: And then there are the guys who just benefit by keeping other men down. The word for that is kyriarchy.

Now let’s look at female resistance to the suffrage and larger women’s rights movements:
LADYLIKE THUMBHEADS: There were those who thought that all this agitation was unladylike. Real ladies didn’t want anything to do with politics, not even voting.
COMPLACENCY: Then there were the complacent ones, the ones who knew a good deal when they saw it. The country had gone through a devastating Civil War in which the war dead and maimed were overwhelmingly men and not women – women had almost completely been spared that. Further down the social scale men labored and died in mines and factories in unspeakable conditions – if you haven’t read the Jungle, this is the time to remedy that gap in your education – and their women knew that however hard their lot at home was, it was a damned sight safer and more comfortable than what their men went out to face. And that included politics. The politics of 19th century America make dogfighting look refined and genteel.
APEXUALITY: And then there were those women at the top, hiding behind their front men running the world, keeping the women down. This is where Sojourner Truth’s question “Ain’t I a woman?” fits in. Recall that she and her question got shot down.
And lookee here – there’s no female equivalent of WHITE KNIGHTS in the sense women doing down other women to aid men. The female equivalent of a white knight is a damsel, and no one damsels to help out men. I can’t think of even one instance of a woman opposing women’s suffrage or later on any feminist proposal on the grounds that it might harm men.

So there’s the comparison, and it yields some interesting parallels. Women’s opposition to women’s right movements were retrograde and reactionary, just as men’s opposition to men’s rights movements are.

1. It is worth your while to go read that whole sordid comment thread. A clear pattern emerges – most of the women support the male rape victim. Telling. And remember this was four years ago. Compare that with the state of the discussion on comment threads these days.

MISANDRY – The gays will take your girlfriends away!

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There’s a fun video running around where a bunch of gay guys tell straight men they should be pushing for gay maraiuge to get gay men all settled down, or they’ll take all the girlfriends away because women prefer gay men generally anyway.

I laughed too when my partner showed me this, but he agreed the funnier video would have warned women about us taking their boyfriends away, or at least teaching them to expect a whole lot more in bed and in a relationship.

The video is not only aimed at straight men but is also aimed against straight men, so it’s misandist. A gay man who reallty thinks this way is sleeping with the enemy. And that would be just eeeewwwww….. /s

I posted this on the reddit thread where the video was posted. This is the video i would like to see:

“Be nice to him girlfriend; what are you going to do after he gets that first competent blowjob?”

“Hey girlfriend, get ready for when he finds out he’s as attractive, scratch that, more attractive than you, and that there are people who think he’s hot.”

“Hey girlfriend, what are you going to do when he starts expecting you to do half the work in bed? Will you even know what he’s talking about?”

“Hey girlfriend, what are you going to do when he asks why you never send flowers?”

“Hey girlfriend, what are you going to do when he finds out the vagina cartel can’t “cut him off”?

“Hey girlfriend, what’s you plan when you find out that you can’t manipulate him any more by insinuating he may be gay or not man enough?”

Queer Eye For the Straight Guy was just the beginning. You know why gay men are made welcome in the men’s movement in a way they have never really been in feminism? It’s called MGTOW – Men Going Their Own Way. And there is nothing more MGTOW than a gay man. It’s the power of the limp dick, and it can re-order the world.

DEMONIZATION – Blaming men because women won’t approach

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I don’t spend a lot of thought on straight dating but it’s a pretty live subject in some parts of the gendersphere, so the issue comes up a lot. Commenter Daisy had this insightful bit to say:

My opinion–lots of women get upset when men approach them for the same reason I do, they would rather do the approaching themselves. But they don’t have the guts to do this or greatly fear social disapproval, so they direct this anger about this situation (their anger at themselves, and anger at the typical gender-defined social-situation wherein the men do approaching) towards men. As a young woman, I did this too. I would get furious when men approached me, all out of proportion to the situation. It was only when I moved to San Francisco and met the Samois ladies (including the infamous Pat Califia, wooo!… and hir then-paramour, Gayle Rubin) that I had this carefully explained to me.
(I was part of the Plexus newspaper staff and lived in a collective household, and one of the women was Samois, so they had MEETINGS in my HOUSE… if you think this didn’t blow my little Ohio-hayseed mind back in 1981, think again, LOL.) This was when I got to see the whole “feminist sex war” debacle up close and personal, since the first volley was when Samois was expelled from the San Francisco Women’s Building… FOR NOTHING! But I digress…
These Samois women would take the man’s side and told me, the reason you are mad is that you are angry AT YOURSELF. I knew in my heart that they were right.

This says a lot about a lot. I think a lot of the resistance you are finally seeing in men to a lot of what feminist analysis is the sense that a lot of it blames men for women’s actions, or inactions. There is a male supremacist bias that has crept into feminists analysis since the 70s. I know why this is, it is always hard to identify let alone reject the comfortable poisonous indoctrination we grow up with, but it just has to be done.

Demonization is the process of blaming someone else for your own evil, or just even your mistakes. In order to be able to say “the devil made me do it” the Devil has to exist, so you invent him. It is all about avoiding accountability and responsibility – a false freedom, an ultimately destructive bid for power.

I cured this by taking charge of the situation. A man who approached me was instantly off any list (and always has been), but I tried to be very nice about it. Not his fault. But never never never as a single woman did I sit around and “wish someone would talk to me”… I learned to be very direct. It helped that I considered it a feminist imperative. (I would like that to BECOME a feminist imperative.)
But a few years ago, I was on a feminist email list and I was pretty harshly attacked for blithely announcing “if you don’t like waiting around for a phone call, then get off your butt and approach him”–because most women are (for lack of a better word, okay) “bottoms” in a relationship and they felt that approaching a man sent the wrong message, that they were dom when they were not. I wondered if they were right, too.

Making the approach – by way of comparison here’s an observation from when it’s all men. Back when I was spending time in gay bars I almost never saw the usual approach-chat up-preen-reject pattern that I had seen earlier in straight bars. The reason was simple – lack of designated approachers. Without that designation, no one took it upon themselves to approach because by approaching you declared an interest when the other guy hadn’t yet. You were taking a risk he didn’t have to, and everyone naturally wanted to be the guy getting approached. Besides, it was flattering. The guy approaching got none of that.

So can a woman approach a man without being considered, you know, a top? If you are a top, no problem, but most women are not.

Most women are not – that is almost certainly an accurate statement of the situation as it stands. But stop and ask how many of those women had their top-ness beaten out of them by society during their gender socialization years. Gender policing is a thing.

Discuss.

Please