Women who Regress too Much and the Men who Enable Them.

You don't actually think the rules apply to me too, do you?

Recent allegations of sexual misconduct that have arisen against none other than pro feminist Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau highlight the problems at the root of both feminist theory and the male response to it.

The alternative left is not anti feminist. We believe in a classical liberal sort of feminism: equality of right and of basic citizenship more generally. We're not against basic civilizational standards of decency where sexual conduct is concerned. It should be discreet and consensual, and in my personal opinion it doesn't belong in the workplace, though I don't regard myself as having the right to demand that of society as a whole.

But there's a big difference between that on the one hand and radical feminism on the other. Deterministic to the core, radical feminism sees all heterosexual relationships regardless of context as defined by male dominance and power and female victimhood.  In this framework, male heterosexuality is seen as essentially predatory and objectifying, and taken to fundamentalist extremes lends itself to the Dworkinite equation of all heterosex with rape, or at least violation of the woman even if she does consent. While most feminists do not go that far, that conclusion is not inconsistent with the ideological trajectory of feminist theory.

Given this kind of dogmatic reductionism, feminist activists have denounced notions of due process and presumption of innocence in the face of sexual misconduct allegations as themselves mere apologetics for male power. Likewise, they've claimed that they and they alone get to define, entirely as they see fit based on their own personal judgement what is and is not sexual harassment. Even a merely offensive statement is now construed as a measurable harm and act of oppression entitling its victim to remedy. Provided the perpetrator has a "privileged" identity and the victim a "marginalized" identity, of course.

All in complete defiance to centuries of western jurisprudence which requires proof - to some degree or another - of offense and harm done in order to secure a remedy, with higher burdens of proof required for more serious allegations. Again, western legal tradition is denounced as so much male excusing of the mistreatment of women. Women, we are told, never make false allegations, and if they do, then perhaps its only fair that men live in fear of it, for women have to live in fear of male predation. Tit-for-tat, so to speak. Failure to "believe women" - which is to say to treat the mere allegation as itself proof of guilt is to disbelieve and thus hate women. Again, in defiance of legal standards that apply equally to both sexes: prove your allegations if you want to secure a remedy.

What is astounding is that these obviously absurd feminist claims are taken seriously in our agenda setting institutions of cultural and legal power. The male response to feminism's obvious and glaring demonization of him has tended, with too few exceptions, to public and collective submission, so as to make oneself appear "woke" or as the man who "gets it" while in the public eye, while privately and individually trying to find ways around it, ways of gaming the system for his own advantage. He tells himself these absurd rules don't apply to him and that he'll never be the victim of a false or frivolous allegation. Conservative and libertarian men and women might scoff a bit here and there, but outright skepticism and opposition towards feminist claims become marginal, and are more easily dismissed as a result.

The MeToo campaign is the culmination of decades of institutionalized dishonesty on part of both feminist theorists and the men who enable them. As MeToo emerged, progressive Canadian politicians have signalled their enlightenment by adopting a remove from caucus first, ask questions later stance on the matter. But as Quillette Magazine reports in a recent article "Grope-gate’ and #MeToo’s Crisis of Legitimacy", Justin Trudeau has changed his tune since he himself has been the target of a recent allegation:

Of course, boilerplate about “the intersection of sex and gender” is now part of the linguistic ether inhaled daily by modern scholars and activists. But Justin Trudeau isn’t a scholar or activist. He’s the prime minister of a G7 country. And it has been strange to see him govern Canada as if he were the chair of a gender studies department. The sight of him now suddenly backing off from MeToo puritanism just in time to defend his own reputation serves to indict not so much Trudeau’s behaviour way back in 2000 (which, for all we know, was perfectly blameless), but rather the unsustainably doctrinaire nature of the larger ideological movement.

Another Quillette article, "On Toxic Femininity", outlines the underlying problem perfectly:

Intersectionalists have in common with one another a particular rhetorical trick: Any claim made by a member of an historically oppressed group is unquestionably true. Questioning claims is, itself, an act of oppression 

This opens the door for anyone who is willing to lie to obtain power. If you cannot question claims, any claim can be made. 

Thus: Racism is ubiquitous. And all men are toxic. I object—but objection is not allowed. Everyone who understands game theory knows how this game ends: Innocent people being vilified with false claims, and exposed to witch hunts. Sexual assault is real, but that does not mean that all claims of sexual assault are honest.

Justin Trudeau is not the only progressive male to have been outed in this way. Indeed Harvey Weinstein himself was an outspoken progressive during his long career in Hollywood. There have been many since then, with US Senator Al Franken and Young Turks pundit Cenk Uygur's ousting from the Justice Democrats being two more that come to mind. This is a predictable pattern now.

They're less the victims of some unfair witch hunt than the outstanding authors at Quillette and elsewhere would have us believe. The progressive left has sold its soul to feminist standpoint theory when it acquiesced to the notion that they're to have no opinion save unquestioned obedience to feminist claims. Liberal males acquiesced to the ensconcement of feminist theory in academia, and they acquiesced to the equation of scrutinizing and criticizing feminist theory with actual misogyny and patriarchal oppression. Evidence of this is seen daily on twitter. They acquiesced by legislation and judicial rulings that upheld vague, sweeping definitions of sexual harassment that in Soviet fashion, punish the ideologically derived social status of the perpetrator moreso than the actual act itself. They acquiesced by normalizing this acquiescence on an institutional basis throughout our entire society. Now that the devil has come to collect, it's worth reminding the Justin Trudeaus of this world that they have no more right to defend themselves against, deny or downplay the allegations than any other male does.

Progressives did this to themselves.

They've internalized feminism's typically far right demonization of peaceable and legitimate expression of romantic and sexual attraction and desire.  A thing they not so long ago fought against Christian conservatives tooth and nail over. They still do in their opposition to abstinence only sex ed and purity balls. It's hysterical puritanism when the religious right denounces lust, it's empathy and wokeness when feminists do it.

The resulting sexual repression and hysteria has had predictable results on their judgement. They've cast aside all legitimate concerns surrounding due process and the rights of the accused now that the accusers have vaginas. Despite progressives being the first to correctly condemn McCarthyite and Satanic Panic witch hunts and moral panics. Despite progressives being the first to correctly condemn zero tolerance and get tough types of crackdowns on vice, such as the war on drugs and conservative drives to censor porn and white wash entertainment media more generally. The potential for abuse - the potential for harassment allegations to be weaponized against business and political rivals should also be quite obvious.

Expecting modesty out of women is repressive and barbaric, but it's quite okay and rational to demand of men to never notice and react to sexual characteristics in women, even in a peaceable manner. Even a glance is objectification and potentially harassment. Of course these are ridiculous and untenable standards of moral conduct, intended much more to serve as clubs in the hands of women in their relationships with men than to actually protect women from real misconduct. But I'm not so quick to sympathize with men who get caught failing to live up to them.  Progressive men - indeed men as a whole, have acquiesced to and upheld this way of thinking. It's time we stopped. We can and must do better than this. Respect for women and sexual/romantic attraction to women are not mutually exclusive.

Al Franken was correct to resign, and Justin Trudeau would be correct to do likewise. Not because of some or another allegation of sexual misconduct raised against them. But because of their willful abdication of judgement in their embrace of demonstrably illiberal ideas and the abuses those ideas open themselves up to, as well as their apparent belief that the rules they so proudly proclaim to uphold in public do not apply to themselves when the lights are low and they think nobody is looking or will say anything. It is a failure of moral and intellectual leadership that ought to disqualify anyone from public office.

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Feminist men: The Latest Failure of Guilt Based Morality

Sargon of Akkad has released a half hour long indictment of that most ill placed of all creatures, the male feminist. The poor bloody male feminist, his reputation far from secure even before the fall of Harvey Weinstein and countless other outspoken progressive men in Hollywood, the media and even the United States Senate. If there's one thing outspoken feminist women and conservative men seem to agree on, it's the creepy, predatory and dishonest nature of the typical male feminist. He really can't win.  View Sargon's video here:

Is it really fair to tar the male feminist in these kinds of terms? Are they all fated to be outed as creepy, grabby perverts? Perhaps not. And the female feminist does not escape unscathed either. If ever there was a woman who I'd suspect would have no problem, none whatsoever with male leering and so on - provided it were the right man doing it of course, it would be the outspoken feminist. Gloria Steinem apparently rather liked being swept off her feet by strong men. Jessica Valenti once lamented "living in a society that made her regret not getting sexual attention from men," or something such. Even Andrea Dworkin was married to a man. 

And can you blame them? As Jimmy Dore - one of the few Young Turks I can actually stand, recently put it: women who enjoy sexual attention from men are not sluts, and men who enjoy giving women sexual attention are not predators. Provided of course, it's mutually desired. Now go back and reread that sentence. Reread it again. And again. Let Dore's words sink in. They will be needed in the post #MeToo era. 

I think the more pertinent question here is not whether feminist men have failed feminism, but rather does feminism ultimately fail as a moral doctrine?  I believe the answer to be the later. Not only does feminism present an untenable standard of sexual conduct for men and women alike, feminism also unwittingly contributes to the very problems it seeks to solve. It does this by inducing the kinds of cycles of temptation, guilt, and inevitable fall that is the downfall of every breed of puritanical morality.  Male feminism is indeed the truest embodiment of the virgin/whore complex you're likely to find in this day and age.

We'll start by looking at the great work of Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, wherein he examines the connection between untenable belief, guilt and the kind of fanatical zeal we see more and more of in feminists, including fallen male feminists:

Whence comes the impulse to proselytize? 

Intensity of conviction is not the main factor which impels a movement to spread its faith to the four corners of the earth: "religions of great intensity often confine themselves to contemning, destroying or at best pitying what is not themselves." Nor is the impulse to proselytize an expression of an overabundance of power as Bacon has it "is like a great flood that is sure to overflow." The missionary zeal seems rather an expression of some deep misgiving, some pressing feeling of insufficiency at the center. Proselytizing is more a passionate search for something not yet found than a desire to bestow upon the world something we already have. It is a search for a final and irrefutable demonstration that our absolute truth is indeed the one and only truth.

The proselytizing fanatic strengthens his own faith by converting others. The creed whose legitimacy is most easily challenged is likely to develop the strongest proselytizing impulse. It is doubtful whether a movement which does not profess some preposterous and patently irrational dogma can be possessed of that zealous drive which "must either win men or destroy the world." It is also plausible that those movements with the greatest inner contradiction between profession and practice - that is to say with strong feelings of guilt - are likely to be the most fervent in imposing their faith on others. The more unworkable communism proves in Russia, the more its leaders are compelled to compromise and adulterated its original creed, the more brazen and arrogant will be their attack on the non-believing world.

What it's saying, and what I think Sargon is getting at, is that feminism is an untenable doctrine and trying to live up to it with forthrightness is a fool's errand. The outspoken male feminist did not try and fail to live up to a reasonable doctrine. Rather, he never ever succeeded in living up to a preposterous doctrine, and compensated for his guilt by shouting feminism from the rooftops nearly every chance he got, until his deeper failings were finally outed and his hypocrisy exposed. The male feminist is the sick symptom of a much deeper, much deeper sickness that is feminist theory itself. The failures of both are intertwined with and dependent on each other.

ALNS, one of my co-moderators on Alternative Left's Facebook page, suggested that it is a no-win scenario. Indeed, it is very much a Kobayashi Maru - a no win scenario specifically designed as such. A no win scenario in which all too many Captain Kirks have thought they could cheat their way out of over the years.

A very different kind of philosopher, Ayn Rand, in one of her rare moments of clarity, attacks the Catholic stances on original sin and family planning in a similar kind of conceptual term in her essay Of Living Death:

But you say the encyclical ideal will not work?  It was not intended to work. It is intended to induce guilt. It is not intended to be accepted and practiced. It is intended to be accepted and broken, broken by man's "selfish" desire to love, which will thus be turned into a shameful weakness. Men who accept as an ideal an irrational goal they cannot achieve never lift their heads thereafter, and never discover that their bowed heads were the only goal to ever be achieved.

Rand's paragraph there describes feminism's true intent towards the male of the species with absolute perfection. The outspoken male feminist seeks to quell an internal guilt, a guilt that feminist theory itself induces and nurtures. A guilt over being male, especially being a cisgendered heterosexual male. Over the visual and sensory nature of his sexuality in particular. Any expression of sexual agency on his part will be put up to "power", "entitlement" , "male gaze" , "objectification" , "sexualization" or any other misused, bandied about feminist buzzword, and a single slip up and the feminist sympathizing male will be outed as yet another typical male who will not part with his "privilege" at the end of the day.

You'd think we'd have learned our lesson with the failure of puritanism and the sundry sex abuse scandals that have plagued the churches over the years. Comparisons between the the fall of male feminists today and the "family values" conservative with latent homosexual tendencies are thus more appropriate than they even appeared at first glance. They fail for the same reasons. Basing your moral system around guilt and emphasis of your own flaws cannot help but fail. Men with, shall we say, unusual sexual proclivities sometimes seek redemption, the spiritual discipline needed to repress the urges or at least easy opportunities to purchase indulgence and forgiveness via joining a morally pure church.  Perhaps the Catholic Church, perhaps a fundamentalist protestant sect, or perhaps the progressive left, feminist activism especially.  Regardless, it will fail where even relative amorality has at least a chance at success.

The correct response, then, would be to reject the present incarnation of feminist theory's inherent misandry and heterophobia out of hand, no explanations, no compromise. Full stop.

Stop equating sexual attraction with sexual objectification because they're not the same damn things. Objectification is not merely a sexual response to someone else's sexual characteristics. It requires an accompanying belief that women (or men) are valued primarily or exclusively for their sexual characteristics and are viewed with disdain otherwise, typically in situations in which evaluation based on sexual characteristics would be a truly inappropriate means of evaluating someone. Objectification and attraction are conceptually conflated almost constantly, especially in the era of social justice on social media. This conflation is dangerous, and must be challenged at every turn.

The outcome of a more reasonable sexual ethic is no unearned guilt, and thus no psychological toxicity to erode at the male's sense of self, which is the reserve of psychological will that he needs to truly conduct himself with honor and integrity in his dealings with women, as with any other kind of person. Because he does not believe his sexual urges degrade or objectify women, he does not use his sexual urges to, well, degrade and objectify women. People always act out their innermost convictions. That's what's really, truly dangerous about men internalizing feminist theory. If they believe themselves to be oppressors, objectifiers and harassers ipso-facto simply for being male, that's what they'll end up becoming and how they'll behave. Sargon's video is loaded with evidence to this point.

If it is respect for women and their equality with men that you truly have and wish to promote, the best way to start is by abandoning this postmodern take on chivalry and putting women up on pedestals that now calls itself feminism. 

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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.