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.

Why I am not an MRA

Doesn't it make you swoon?

I know I'm going to catch flak for this, but I don't care much for the men's rights movement. I do think they make good points - I've read Warren Farrell for example and found his work quite profound. In fact, it really takes a wrecking ball to this idea that men have conspired to make the world a wonderful place at the expense of women. You can't reasonably believe that after reading Farrell's works.

Why I don't really relate to the MRM is rooted in my overarching distrust of identity politics. I do think that there's all kinds of room to criticize the excesses of feminism, and some points made by the MRM are valuable in that regard.  Decades of ideological protectionism has produced a very real feminist echo chamber with next to no external checks on its claims.  The MRM can by helpful in remedying that.  The MRM also brings our attention to real issues that men are confronted with.  Glaring disadvantage (to varying degrees depending on jurisdiction) in divorce settlements and child custody arrangements being the most obvious example. 

The feminist demonization of male heterosexuality; this presumption underlying much of feminist theory that male sexual attraction towards women is somehow demeaning and objectifying of women is something else that needs to be challenged and the present taboo against disagreeing with feminism desperately needs to be broken here.  The MRM can help in that regard.  The equation of compliments and polite civil greetings on part of men towards women with harassment, objectification or even oppression, commonly seen on social media, is a manifestation of this.  If taken at all seriously, especially in any kind of public policy context, this kind of thinking could effectively close the door on prospects for male-female encounters of all but the most institutional kind. 

The ever expanding definition of rape, and the ever narrowing definitions of consent, and the increasingly onerous requirements for obtaining legal consent - an express verbal "yes" given for every touch, kiss or caress, and even that be nullified if there's any alcohol or mental illness or any factor that could in the slightest call into question the strict legal capacity to give consent, constitute another manifestation of this.  The end game here, I suspect, is to make legal intercourse, for all intents and purposes, impossible for men.

Although most feminists profess to disagree in principle with the notion that all things "boy meets girl" are inherently sexist or oppressive - and may even trot out their own relationship as proof of this, the restrictions imposed on gender dynamics by these kinds of very popular demands made by very widely circulated and credible media outlets that represent the mainstream of liberal opinion on gender issues, would make establishing even platonic, let along erotic relationships extremely difficult.  That many feminists choose to make exceptions to their own rules for themselves and the men they get the D from should not be taken as proof of feminism's flexibility and open mindedness.  It should be taken as proof of moral hypocrisy on part of the feminists so doing, and a tacit admission on their part that their system of sexual morality and conduct is no more reasonable and in alignment with human nature than that of the religious conservatives they so smugly see themselves as superior to. 

Compound that with inundation of  feminist perspectives casting heterosexual relationships in so consistently negative a light; as being about nothing other than unequal distribution of domestic labor, unequal pay, riven with male insecurity and unreasonable male behaviors contrasted to the relief women are expected to seek and experience in all-female spaces, as characterized by universally poor male sexual performance and an expectation of female preference for marital celibacy, dildos, lesbianism, asexuality, promiscuity, anything other than relational intimacy - all hermetically sealed by a propensity to yell "fragile male ego" at any dissention from any of the above on part of men - as if this kind of petty weaponized rejection is something we should just sit back and relish, and feminist gender dynamics become a mortal threat to healthy heterosexual relationships, even if it turns out to be death by a thousand cuts rather than a swift beheading. 

A strong MRM could be a countervailing force for reason and love in gender relations.  On the other hand, groups like MGTOW could just up the ante and make things worse rather than better.  Don't get me wrong: you, dear reader, be you male or female, have every right as far as I'm concerned to live your life as you see fit, and if that involves not having a significant other of the opposite sex, good luck to you.  I once wanted an unattached life myself.  May you succeed where I failed.  But to advocate widespread rejection of the opposite sex, as feminism often implicitly and, in the case of separatist feminism, explicitly does, and MGTOW likewise does, is to advocate for the infliction of protracted neurosis and frustration culminating in a demographic holocaust upon whichever population is to embrace this as a form of gender based political activism.  It would inflict incalculable and irreparable damage on the psychological fabric of such a society.

But even a less strident form of male activism than MGTOW could end up becoming a gender flipped version of the worst aspects of feminism.  I've noticed that in every debate I've ever read between feminists and MRAs - though flame war is a better description in just about ever case, since debate implies a reasoned exchange of views and that's most definitely not what happens - the exchange always boils down to each side saying to the other, "you're just ugly and can't get laid" - with cats and mother's basements figuring in there somehow. Inevitably, one side resigns in frustration over the strident unreasonableness of the other, and both remain more convinced than ever that the opposite sex is hopelessly screwed up.  There's not much of a future in this.

Taken to their logical conclusions, demands upon heterosexual relationships would end up more closely resembling shari'a law than they would anything previous generations of liberal feminists struggled and fought for.

Wait a minute ...

Of course,  feminism - in its more reasonable forms, is still needed to protect and safeguard the rights of women. Life is certainly not all wine and roses for all women at all times, and men are not blameless. This is especially true in communities where, for religious reasons, women still very much are second class citizens.  This is what I find both astounding and disturbing about What looks like an alliance of feminists and Islamists, particularly in opposition to the Trump presidency.  While I don't condone the more boorish things Trump has said about women, you can't compare the danger posed to women by macho locker room bluster with the danger posed to women by shari'a law.  Given the dour attitudes that both feminists and Islamists appear to have towards free and fun expression of happiness and attraction between the sexes, however, I can see the kinship the two might have with one another, though from where I sit, it promises to be a stormy relationship.

What I worry about regarding the MRM, though, is its own potential to become a kind of rank gender partisanship. That "Male good female bad" thinking could, and does, easily arise from it.

Because that, in its own way, is exactly what happened to feminism. What began as being "just about equality" or just about "the same treatment of women as for men" has become a blinding and fanatical form of gender partisanship. Motivated by dogmatic adherence to feminism, whole cohorts of young women (and their male sympathizers) have circled the wagons and harnessed collective groupthink to hermetically seal themselves away from any kind of criticism or dissent. Driven by a sense of universal and historical mission, these women regard themselves as quite entitled to ceaselessly make unilateral demands of men with no countervailing concessions, tar all men with collective responsibility and guilt by association for the very real crimes and misdeeds of some men, and to effectively kill any prospect for intimacy and trust between the sexes by making militant confrontation the permanent and universal norm for gender relations. Backed by unilateral academic and media support and an arsenal of canned responses and copy pasta with which to respond to nay-sayers, the impact that this has had on gender dynamics is nothing short of devastating.

As an antidote to this, we need to step back from identity politics. We don't need a male version of the same thing. Given what we should now know about ideological and identitarian polarization, feminism and the MRM will most likely feed off one another and each further radicalize in response to the other. This is certainly what I've seen in every single exchange between MRMs and feminists that I've ever seen. If that process becomes normalized, it could well mean the death of heterosexual love in its entirety. The prospect of this worries me greatly. I really hope people of both (yes, both) genders can learn to take a step back from their attachments to gender ideology and start reasoning honestly about these kinds of issues.

The Other Red Pill: Engendered Failure

In 1993, Warren Farrell, Ph.D. exposed us to many poignant truths about the reality of being male in America at the time.  Among them are:

• 94 percent of occupational deaths occur to men.
• Every workday hour, one construction worker in the US loses his life
• Men have been the overwhelming majority of the cannon fodder in every major war ever waged.
• Most successful suicides are male, and unemployed males commit suicide at twice the rate of their employed brethren.
• 96% of the adult homeless in San Francisco are male.  The national median at the time of writing was 85%.

And more besides.  Things have not improved either.  Not for most men anyway.  Eighty percent of job losses in the 2007 to 2009 time span were male.  This led to the coining of the term "mancession", which did not end until 2015, according to some sources.  Except for black males, which must doubtlessly be the fault of white privilege.  

Some men have done quite well through it all, however.  Which ones?   Probably not the ones reading this, despite what the feminists are no doubt telling them about their male privilege.  Which all men have, regardless of race, sexual orientation or physical ability.  Or, you know, anything else that might impact social inequality.  If you're still confused, go and take a cl ... I mean course on it.  The important thing is that men as a cl ... as a group supposedly have all the power and women have none.

And the statistics bear that out, as any woman will tell you.  Women still suffer from a very real wage and wealth gap compared to men.  Which can only be explained by men, all men, hording all the money to themselves.  But not evenly.  White men, quite naturally, have the most.  Even the homeless white men referenced above?  Well, yes I suppose.  The historical reality, after all, is that blacks were slaves and were discriminated against in the Jim Crow era while whites were not.  That's the only real explanation open to us, since race and gender are the only social axes upon which wealth and power are distributed.  So all white males benefited, and benefited equally.  Or so the best social commentators of our time will tell us.  The ones who graduated at the top of their cl ... I mean, got the best marks while in college.

The Myth of Male Power was a book not lacking in power.  It quite effectively takes a wrecking ball to notions popular at the time of its writing, and still popular today, that men have gone and made everything wonderful for themselves at the expense of all women.  Which needed to be said.  It apparently still does need to be said, and even I've said it.  But not nearly as well as Dr. Farrell said it.  In some respects, The Myth of Male Power is in a cl ... a category by itself.

Men continue to be the disposable sex, and growing numbers of men continue to be mad about it.  And so they should be.  Though the mancession is over, most men are finding job prospects limited and wages stagnant.  If you take the "red pill" and go into the online "manosphere", you will find that feminism has been responsible for most of men's woes over the years.  We can only guess that all of those military and workplace fatalities and the economic struggles that working cl ... I mean just men face are due to feminism also.  Even though feminism is scarcely more than two hundred years old and men have been dying in wars and working in drudgery for a lot longer than that.  

And I don't blame the manosphere types.  They do have legitimate gripes with feminism.  No, really.  They do.  Because many feminists have been blaming all men, at least collectively, for their own struggles, which are sometimes different but quite frequently look the same as well.  Lagging wages, declining opportunities, all too frequently outright poverty.  Whose fault could all of this be?  After all, corporate profits are up again.  Who could be making it if not white men and their centuries of privilege?  It's not like there's any other cl ... I mean category of people who could be benefiting at the expense of women?

Well that's obviously preposterous, and you'll learn that quite quickly the deeper into the underworld of the internet you go.  You'll find that it goes beyond feminism.  The deeper problem is "cultural Marxism."  Or should I say, (((cultural Marxism))).   You see, this "Marxism" has to do with this guy in the 19th century who must have figured that white western civilization was a bad, BAD thing because it oppressed and colonized women and people of color.  And what's funny about it is that if you go to college and take a cl ... course on critical theory, for example, or women's or black studies, they will indeed teach you that those terrible things did happen.  And the only reason they happened was because racism and sexism.  For the benefit of white males, just for being white males!  After all, it's not like there's any other way that any other cl ... group of people could have benefited from the dispossession of indigenous people and African slavery.  

Or so the cultural Marxist colleges will teach you.  But it's all a lie, don't you know?  A (((lie!)))  Any fool worth his salt knows that white males are struggling to get by these days.  Well, most white males, anyway.  The real blame lies with the Jews, or so I've read, because I can't imagine any other cl ... category of people who might benefit from stagnant wages and unemployment among the white male working cl ...

One other thing that I've run into with all of this study of the politics of race, gender, culture and oppression.  And that's this idea of linguistic reclaimation -  a once dirty, derogatory or forbidden word being brought back into acceptable use by the communities that experienced oppression under that word, or perhaps by the absence of that word.

Right off hand, I'd say there's one word that people of all races, genders and sexual orientations have been far too afraid to say for far too long now, and our racial and sexual politics have been distorted almost beyond reason and recognition as a result.  The first task of the Alt-Left should be to reclaim that word.

A good place to start might be to take a look at what that Marx guy (Karl, not Groucho, in case you were wondering) really had to say.

Men apparently have no balls. Really, they don't.

No, this isn't some current year gender attribution thing.  Nobody has been misgendered due to incorrect pronoun usage.  But this is nearly as bad.

Laurie Martin is unhappy that women need to start asking men out, because men have "no balls."

There's no door-holding, no hand-holding and definitely no free drinks. There’s no taking off hats or courting through invitations. There are no smooth moves, no jackets to dinner. There are no flowers, no tables by candlelight … If you're a single woman, you probably envisioned your twenties as a roaring social scene full of expensive dinners and lavish nights out. 

Oh noes!  No free drinks?  No expensive dinners?  Women might actually have to approach men they're interested in?  Whatever is this world coming to???  Whatever is an oppressed woman in a patriarchal society to do???  Load up on chocolate and start buying cats would be my advice.

Believe it or not, I'm not actually going to pick the article apart.  Not that much anyway.  That would just be too easy.  Give it a read and think long and hard about why the Laurie Martins of this world are romantically challenged.

We're dealing with a new breed of men here and it's not the kind we grew up dreaming about. It’s the want-what-I-want-but-don’t-know-how-to-get-it type; it’s the sweet and cuddly mama’s boys who grow up terrified of making the first move; it’s the guys who have so much to say but don’t know how to say it.

Oh, I'm sure guys know just what to say to Laurie Martin and exactly how to say it too.  The absence of a comments section at the end of this article means that Laurie Martin probably knows it too. That the entire weight of all social media is given to the 24/7/365 condemnation of men who act as Laurie Martin thinks we should as "misogynists" and "sexists" who "harass" and "objectify" women due to "entitlement", "rape culture" and "male privilege" might, just might have something to do with their reluctance to sweep poor miss Martin off her feet?

Or maybe men with half a brain have better things to do than buy flowers, drinks and candle light dinners for entitled little whiners who then go on about the same men lacking balls, having fragile egos or being immature?  Lord knows, I do.  Watching paint dry and grass grow is exciting in comparison.

Not that some men do not warrant these descriptions, mind you.

Does miss Laurie Martin even want a relationship at all?  Because it looks to me like what she's pining away for are the trappings of romantic love completely divorced from the mutual love and respect that gives those trappings any real value.

And the role playing.  Damn, the role playing.  More role-playing than a Wizards of the Coast convention.  Men need to make the first move.  And hold doors open.  And take off hats.  And court through invitations - not that these are bad things in and of themselves.  Nothing wrong with a bit of LARPing. I've done it myself.  But the real problem here isn't with the trappings of romance per-se, it's with the article's author's sense of entitlement to them.

I could go on, but like I said, too easy.  Because maybe on a deeper level, our entitled little Laurie Martin just might have a point.  Though not for the reasons she undoubtedly thinks she does.

It's not a big secret that men are losing interest in relationships with women compared to the way they used to be.   Not all that different than what women went through when the feminist second wave broke out late in the last century.  It is not the kind of sensational and demonstrative movement that feminism in the 1970s was.  This quiet revolution is taking place below the radar, not something that social media appealing to a largely feminized, cosmopolitan audience is going to pay attention to, except to ridicule as a fading bastion of old world misogyny.  In light of the above, however, men going their own way or taking the red pill (though not the red pill they should be taking) are, as individuals, acting completely rationally.

As individuals.  But collectively, it's no less self defeating than the most absurd feminism these days is.  And this is where I think Laurie Martin might have a point.  Dropping out of the mating game all together, or taking up some kind of "pick-up artistry" only adds to the underlying problem.  What this signals to women is that relationships with women, except maybe as one night stands to be obtained through psychological trickery, are of little value to men.  Which is not a message that's likely to quench the fires of feminist self righteousness any time soon.

What can men do, or what could men have done differently?  Could men, and sympathetic women, have instead confronted feminism en-mass?  Not out of any reverse sense of victimhood and entitlement - the hegemonic notion of the 21st century; that victimhood and marginalization confer an innate moral superiority, is not more becoming when men do it.

Rather, what if men took the stance that good and healthy relationships with women were actually worth fighting for?  And what if they advocated for this individually and collectively, the way they've done in the past for things like civil rights and even feminism?

• What if men slapped back after holding a door open?  There's nothing sexist about courtesy and politeness?
• What if men effectively organized and campaigned against the demonization of male sexuality at every turn, rejecting the Catholic-turned-feminist dogmas of "objectification" and instead saw consensual sex as a good and healthy part of the appropriate kind of relationship.  This would mean zero tolerance for the equating of compliments to harassment to a sustained and organized push back against the ever inflating definition of rape to hold men responsible for the decisions that women make and might later regret?
• What if misandry in media was met with the kind of outcry that such alleged "misogyny" as a male daring to display attraction to a female now garners?  Not because of concern for male fragility - we can take a joke, after all, but out of respect for mutual respect, and how important it is for relationships both platonic and sexual?

And that just for starters.  And women would be more than welcome to join too, since this isn't a movement for men's rights but rather a movement for good, positive relationship norms.  What if women took the organizational savvy and social media outrage they typically reserve for politically incorrect white males who dare display attraction for women - "objectification", after all, and direct that instead to people of both (not all, but both) sexes who contributed to the present day culture of gender based hatred, against members of either sex?

I suspect you'd have a lot less demonstrable misogyny, for one thing, since the unmistakable whiff of childish egocentrism, daddy issues and sexual neurosis that presently motivates a lot of feminism would not attend this fictional movement of mine, and so men - and the kinds of men miss Martin seems to wish we were rather than spineless numales and feminist men-who-get-it - would be much more likely to support it.

I suspect there'd be a lot fewer single, lonely and romantically/sexually frustrated people out there of both genders.  Relationships would last longer and be more mutually satisfying due to a culture of mutual respect rather than one of mutual derision.

You can bet there'd be a LOT less feminism because men would make it clear that they value the women in their lives, and act accordingly in the most intimate of forums.  We're a long, LONG way away yet from realizing that men cannot defeat feminism outside the bedroom.

I suspect it would just be better in so many ways, with a lot of spin-off effects that would help in other areas of human experience and endeavor.

Imagine the possibilities!

Alas, such a movement has not been and is not to be.  Hell, so few people of either sex have seen erotic heterosexual love worthy of any kind of spirited defense over the last forty years.  Such a defense would have taken balls - precisely what so many people, of both sexes in recent years, have lacked.