The Growing Distrust of Feminist Men

I'm Seeing a Lot of This Lately

When I hear of an outspoken male feminist being outed for harassment, assault or some other kind of shitty behavior against women, I am never surprised.  I've even read some suggestions that they are our era's version of the televangelist who was outed for infidelity or latent homosexual tendencies, or the sex abuse scandals in the Catholic Church.  I largely agree with these assessments, and the underlying psychological dynamics with all of them are quite similar.

One cannot first respect women if one does not first respect human beings as individuals.  Respect is a personal sentiment that one feels towards others deemed worthy of respect.  I may genuinely respect individuals who are women, just as I may respect individuals who are men. 

Feminism as an ideology does not see people in human terms, which is to say in individual terms.  It sees people as demographic categories: male, female, white, person of color, straight, LGBT, cis, trans.  Human beings fade into mere abstractions.  One cannot love, honor or respect arbitrary ideological demographics as one can love an individual human being.  The best that can be done is to exalt the categories deemed marginalized and denigrate the categories deemed privileged.

As a result, feminism attracts men who struggle to interact with women in a human way.  He uses the talking points of feminism to construct an idealistic view of women.  For the feminist male, this precludes the natural and normal human feelings of romantic and sexual attraction towards women, as his ideological convictions cause him to routinely conflate attraction with objectification.  Thus he views the individual women in his life through the lens of ideological archetype.  His expectation is that they assume a sort of maternalistic stance in relation to him, as a guide and teacher in his ideology.

Those of us who understand the dynamics of the virgin/whore dichotomy should see how this can go so wrong.  Since he regards his inherent sexuailty as a degrading and oppressive thing, he cannot help but express it in degrading and oppressive ways. His repressed urges he projects onto his political opponents, for whom he expresses the absolute blackest of hatred in, quite curiously, the most degradingly sexual ways.  Especially reprehensible to him are women who do not meet his archetypal expectations, whom he sees as not merely ideological, but moral traitors.  That which is idealized will come to be hated precisely to the degree it was idealized after it falls from the pedestal it was placed on, and the most natural way to express this hatred is with precisely the means by which men are held to degrade and oppress women: open sexuality.  Notice how there is no misogyny like the misogyny displayed by progressive men towards nonfeminist women. 

For the dogmatic ideological male feminist, this is not a betrayal of his principles, but rather the end result of those principles.  He failed to display respect for women because he never really respected them in the first place.  He never respected human beings, rather he objectified them in the most underhanded and duplicitous of ways.  He idealized an ideological abstraction and valued that only in as far as it served to maintain his own psychological equilibrium. 

Doubtlessly, many male feminist sympathizers will claim that none of the above applies to them, and they are quite capable of having mutually consensual sexual as well as platonic friendships with women.  I have little doubt that this is often true.  But it is true in spite of, rather than because of, the feminist ideological sympathies.  If you need an ideology in order to respect women, I'd suggest you have deeper problems.  If I'm not describing any particular male feminist reading this, don't take offense, but rather take note.

Sadly, many of the men who've been posting #howIwillchange hashtags in response to women's revelations of sexual misconduct at male hands will only double down on their ideological convictions, which will in turn only intensify rather than relieve the underlying psychological tension. If they truly wanted to change for the better, they'd confront their own fears of interpersonal intimacy (and - this is experience talking - that's hard to do!) and humanize their perceptions of both sexes, rather than double down on ideological categorizations.