Should Misandry be a Hate Crime?

The UK contemplates making misandry a hate crime. According to the BBC:

Last month, it was announced that a review by the Law Commission would look at whether offences driven by misogyny - dislike, contempt or ingrained prejudice against women - should be treated as hate crimes. 

And now it's emerged the same review will also consider the opposite - crimes motivated by misandry - hostility towards men. 

Ageism and hatred of certain alternative cultures, such as Goths or punks, could also be included in future.

I've always been suspicious of hate crimes laws, prohibitions on hate speech especially. The recent issues surrounding internet censorship make clear my reasons why.  Who decides what is and isn't hate speech? I don't condone the hatred of anyone, but to criminalize it smacks of thought policing. Could people in power exploit these laws and simply shut down voices they don't like or that threaten their interests? That Facebook has recently shut down some 800 pages, ostensibly due to "terms of service" violations or something such exemplifies why I dislike this. It's authoritarianism from behind a happy face.

Especially since this comes suspiciously close to the midterm elections, and observe how many of the pages shut down are the most skeptical of US military aggression in the middle east. The parallels with the Satanic Panic censorship craze as a lead up to Gulf War 1 in the early 1990s should worry us. Get the public worked up about some moral panic or another, so as to give big government and big business broader license to censor with relative impunity.

So with that in mind, I'm quite leery of any bid to expand the definitions of "hate crime" or "hate speech" and think we need less of this, not more. That said, if we are to have such rules, let us at least have them apply to everybody. The idea that some groups of people deserve special protection and treatment as a means of making them equal always seemed Orwellian to me. Shall we raise the chocolate rations from 5 grams to 4 while we're at it? Praise Big Brother!

The fact that this is occurring in the UK, a country wherein a silly prank involving training a pug to salute like Hitler results in a national show trial, is also concerning. While civil liberties are under attack everywhere, the situation there seems especially bad, at least by supposedly democratic 1st world standards.

Not surprisingly, therefore, the feminist establishment in the UK isn't too happy about this, in ways that are not at all surprising.

Making misandry a hate crime will embolden abusive men, writes Jessica Eaton in an opinion piece for ... surprise surprise ... The Guardian!

A campaign started by the Labour MP Stella Creasy to consider misogyny as a form of hate crime has resulted in the Law Society deciding to consider whether misandry should be categorized as a hate crime, too. It is the ultimate example of whataboutery – when a group of people cries, “But what about X?”, to distract attention from any legitimate discussion of Y.

Well, not quite. If the entire moral basis of your ideology is that your demographic - women - are exclusively targeted for hatred based on their gender, then if it can be established that men are also targeted, then a major pillar of your ideology is knocked out. Plus, while we're on the subject of logical fallacies, that acknowledging the existence of misandry would somehow automatically result in distraction of legitimate discussion of issues facing women is the ultimate example of a false dilemma. The idea that we can't discuss issues facing men, unless from an approved frame already established by feminists, because women have it worse overall is the ultimate example of a fallacy of relative privation.

That we can no longer have honest discussions about women's issues if we acknowledge the existence of misandry is not only bad logic, it's also untrue and even anti-true. Our discussions of women's issues would become more, rather than less honest, because these discussions would actually be about treating everybody fairly, instead of continually having to preserve the notion that only women are victimized due to their gender and therefore only women are entitled to remedies for the ills their gender faces. A notion that sounds a lot like defense of privilege to me.

Eaton goes on to describe hate mail and numerous spurious accusations of misandry that she's faced in the past, and her and her husband's role in establishing a male mental health center in the UK. Well, good for you, Jessica, and sorry to hear about your ill treatment at the hands of angry men.  Again, acknowledging the existence and harm of misandry does not equate to the excusing and justification of threatening and harassing behaviors towards women. It does not even mean that we put misogyny and misandry on equal footing as far as actual harm done in the real world is concerned. This leads to an "oppression olympics" dynamic that benefits no one in the end.

It does, however, mean threatening the widespread perception that women are innately morally superior, a perception that probably causes more misogyny than it alleviates. A lot of men would be a lot less angry if there was some collective acknowledgement on part of women that their rules apply to themselves also.

But as you're about to discover, "when you're privileged, equality feels like oppression."

So claims Victoria Smith in an Independent opinion piece published Oct. 16.  Beneath that:

It seems there’s nothing women can have – not even their status as a marginalized sex class – that men will not expect them to share.

Well, isn't a group wanting something to themselves exlusively, a perk shared only by one gender but denied others - the very definition of privilege?

And this above a picture of women dressed in Handmaid costumes, from the film and TV adaptations of Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel, The Handmaid's Tale. Because, you know, women having to share their "marginalized sex status" is totally the same as losing their very names and identities and being conscripted to bare children for the elite in a repressive totalitarian theocracy. Do these Handmaid protesters grasp the fact that in the novel, ideologically docile and censorious feminists assisted the fundamentalist Sons of Jacob in their seizure of power and establishment of the Republic of Gilead, and that this was part of warning Margaret Atwood was trying to convey? One wonders.

And "When you're privileged, equality feels like oppression" isn't the only vacuous feminist slogan Smith hauls out and rehashes for this article:

All of our actions take place within intersecting social hierarchies which place some groups at the top and others at the bottom.

One wonders how much money Ms. Smith makes per year in comparison to, say, a dockworker or a lorry (this is the UK, after all) driver?  One wonders if Ms. Smith can turn on the BBC, or go to a college or university, or go to the print and electronic media and see feminist voices sidelined in favor of voices for impoverished unemployed men or male veterans? One wonders if major media outlets would ever bypass a highly educated feminist in favor of speaking to a men's rights advocate about gender related topics? One wonders how hard Ms. Smith really has it if she was able to afford to attend a top notch UK university and receive exclusive access to instruction in intersectional feminist ideology?

I think we all know the answers to those questions.

So-called men’s rights activists (MRA) routinely portray women’s marginalized status as something to be envied. Feminists are accused of milking historic oppressions in order to appropriate power and resources in a world where positive discrimination in favor of women is rife.

It's not to be envied, it's to be condemned. It is the exploitation of the suffering of the abused and marginalized for personal exaltation. For how long now have financially well endowed women's organizations and advocacy, especially in academia, ignored the systemic nature of economic inequality effecting both genders? Or would mention of that jeopardize that endowment? Just keep dancing to capital's tune, sisters. Just keep framing issues of class and privilege in gendered terms instead of in economic terms, and there'll be plenty of positive discrimination in your favor. Capital will see to that.

And no, the men's right's crowd doesn't present a demonstrably better alternative. While they do have some legitimate grievances that are silenced by an entrenched feminist establishment, a paradigm claiming the dominance of a feminist class at everyone else's expense isn't entirely accurate either. As I like to say, get back to class. And you don't graduate until you get good marks (it helps to say it rather than read it). 

Interestingly, Ms Smith claims, "Attempts to make misandry the equivalent of misogyny rely on two misconceptions: first, that gender is a spectrum as opposed to a hierarchy; and second, that victimhood is in fact a source of power and privilege." Okay, but isn't the notion that gender isn't a spectrum actually heretical in progressive circles these days?

Finally, Smith's article is rife with an element of progressive thought that has recently been satirized by the grey faced "NPC" meme - namely its over-reliance on continually recycled buzzwords, slogans and ideological formula, recited and executed as if it were rote programming rather than sapient thought. It's much easier to fall back on circular statements like "when you’re used to privilege, equality feels like oppression" than it is to address the substance of opponent's arguments.

Off hand, I'd suggest that an entrenched feminist establishment that will never want for cameras and microphones in their faces, funding both in and out of academia for research and advocacy to further their agendas and social media moderation skewed heavily in their favor has every reason to be in an uproar over misandry possibly becoming a kind of hate crime. When you're privileged, equality feels like oppression.

Eaton worries in her Guardian piece that "The concept of misandry is dangerously vague in comparison to the reality of misogyny. I predict that if misandry is taken forward as a hate crime, it will be used to curb discussions of male violence and female oppression. Again."

Well Jessica, welcome to the internet that non-feminists have been operating on for several years now, where cries of "misogyny! racism! Nazism! Homophobia" accompanied by very real risk of loss platform, employment and damage to reputation are the answers received in any discussion that doesn't frame violence and oppression entirely in terms of male power and female victimhood.

Would I like misandry to become a category of hate crime? No. I'd like to see the category of hate crime abolished and everybody actually treated the same in our courts and other institutions. The notion that we are going to achieve equality by treating people unequally belongs in a George Orwell novel. No, that does not equate to the erasure of focus on specific forms of discrimination that certain groups face disproportionately.

But that does mean that some groups are not deemed innately more worthy of concern than others. That arrogance, entitlement and dogmatism, rather than a genuine humanistic concern for the well being of all attends the feminist establishment and is routinely displayed on social media makes clear what the end result of that is kind of doublethink approach to equality is. We should also be clear that it is an elite class of professional ideologues, not marginalized people themselves, who benefit from it.

But if we must have hate crimes laws, let them apply equally to men and women.

Intersectionality is Itself a System of Power

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Why You Should Not Be An Intersectional Feminist

The Wikipedia description of the concept of intersectionality begins as follows:

Intersectionality (or intersectional theory) is a term first coined in 1989 by American civil rights advocate and leading scholar of critical race theory, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw. It is the study of what Crenshaw contends are overlapping or intersecting social identities and related systems of oppression, domination, or discrimination. Intersectionality is the idea that multiple identities intersect to create a whole that is different from the component identities. These identities that can intersect include gender, race, social class, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, religion, age, mental disability, physical disability, mental illness, and physical illness as well as other forms of identity.  These aspects of identity are not “unitary, mutually exclusive entities, but rather…reciprocally constructing phenomena.”  The theory proposes that we think of each element or trait of a person as inextricably linked with all of the other elements in order to fully understand one's identity.

On the face of it, this is not an unsound concept.  So what is so wrong with intersectional feminism that you should not be one?  The devil is, as he so often is, in the details.

An an insightful article critiquing of intersectional feminism, author Helen Pluckrose describes the philosophical and ideological shift that took place as intersectionality became the party line in organized feminism.  And, by extent, the state religion of all first world nations.

Liberal feminist aims gradually shifted from the position: 

“Everyone deserves human rights and equality, and feminism focuses on achieving them for women.” 

to 

“Individuals and groups of all sexes, races, religions and sexualities have their own truths, norms and values. All truths, cultural norms and moral values are equal. Those of white, Western, heterosexual men have unfairly dominated in the past so now they and all their ideas must be set aside for marginalized groups.” 

Liberal feminism had shifted from the universality of equal human rights to identity politics. No longer were ideas valued on their merit but on the identity of the speaker and this was multifaceted, incorporating sex, gender identity, race, religion, sexuality and physical ability. The value of an identity in social justice terms is dependent on its degree of marginalization, and these stack up and vie for primacy. This is where liberal feminism went so badly wrong. When postcolonial guilt fought with feminism, feminism lost. When it fought with LGBT rights, they lost too.

Pluckrose details how cherry picked postmodern philosophy enabled the jettisoning of universal liberal and egalitarian values as underpinning feminist theory and replacing it with moral and epistemological relativism.  I detail elsewhere both the strengths and weaknesses of postmodernism, and how it has, on balance, been a negative thing for leftism.   Long story short, postmodernism asserts that metaphysics and epistemology - the nature of reality and the nature of man's means of knowing reality were, to a considerable degree, socially constructed and subjective.  At the very least, it rejected the idea that there are singular overarching "metanarratives" applicable to all people at all times.  Claims to objective reality were to be broken down or "deconstructed" to reveal that their foundations are little more than self serving biases.  Implicit in this was a cultural relativism that urged people to not be so judgemental of other cultures, even if those cultures appeared on the surface to be less advanced and prosperous than our own.

This is not so, so bad.  But it can be problematic if carried to a natural, logical extreme.  If cultures and morality are truly culturally subjective, than on what grounds could it be asserted that cultures that stressed racial and gender egalitarianism are truly preferable to racist or patriarchal cultures?  How could claims that universalistic liberalism was a western social construct that could be shown to implicitly favor white males be reconciled with racial and gender equality being values belonging exclusively to western liberalism?

If such questions were posed, they were no doubt deemed taboo.  The claims of critical race theory and feminist theory seemed strangely immune to postmodern deconstruction, and tended to be treated as if they were eternal truths binding on all people at all times.  Metanarratives, for lack of a better word.  It was just implicitly assumed that theories built around marginalized identities were infallible.  Best not to say anything, though.  It's not wise to point out the cherry-picking when the people doing it could make or break your academic career.

Thus began the move into intersectionality that Helen Pluckrose describes above.

Add Peggy McIntosh's knapsack of privilege dogma that was adopted into the women's studies canon in the late 1980s, and the prejudice plus power encyclical that also became canonical, and the foundations for the most toxic regressive left theory since Lenin were set.

Intersectional feminism in any kind of practice inevitably becomes a complete trainwreck.

People are all inevitably placed on several abacuses of privilege vs. marginalization:

• Male vs. Female
• White vs. P.O.C (person of color)
• Heterosexual vs. LGBTQ
• Cisgender vs. Transgender
• Thin vs. Fat
• Able bodied vs. Disabled
• Christian vs. Atheist vs. Non Christian vs. Muslim

With identities falling to the left being considered privileged compared to identities on the right.  The tendency in intersectional feminism is to assume that incontestable moral and intellectual authority is conferred by the possession of marginalized identities.  Those with fewer marginalized identities are generally expected to shut up and feel guilty about their privilege.  At the very least, they are not to challenge people with more marginalized identities on anything.  Those with more marginalized identities are implicitly expected to resent their more privileged counterparts, and are given full license via the prejudice plus power rationalization to abuse them as much as they want.  

No intersectional feminist will admit to the above paragraph, but that is the observable truth of it in action.  The problems have become so glaring that even that even Everyday Feminism - the spiritual successor to Pravda if there ever was one, has speculated that its ideological structure lends itself to abuse.  Not that intersectional feminists would deal with such an accusation directly, mind you.  If you are more privileged than they, they would simply point this out and, as far as they're concerned, this would shut down the argument.  

An exaggerated example to illustrate the way this works in practice: In a disagreement over math, wherein a white male asserted that 2+2=4 and a queer woman of color asserted that 2+2=5, typical intersectional feminist sophistry would not take the form of coming out and saying that the answer was five.  Instead, they'd point out that the math textbooks of the past were written by white males, and thus the queer woman of color experienced oppression while being taught, most likely by a teacher who was white, cis and straight, that 2 and 2 made 4.  Claims made under a marginalized person's experience of oppression in intersectional feminism can only be compared to outright divine revelation and command in fundamentalist religion in terms of being absolute in all conceivable ways: moral, metaphysical, epistemological and otherwise.  These claims supercede any and everything else and to contest them is evil with a capital E, beyond even heresy or treason.

The white male would then be chided and told to check his privilege for arguing with the queer woman of color on the matter in the first place.  His insistence that 2 and 2 made 4 would, most likely with some canned formulaic copy-pasta response, be attributed to an unwillingness to relinquish privilege, because "when you are privileged, equality feels like oppression."  Expect lots of reference to "angry white dudes" or the like, often some witty portmanteau: "mansplaining" or "whitesplaining", and some likewise clever and satirical misspelling of  "dewd" or "wypepo."  These kinds of vacuous signalling are, for whatever reason, prized in intersectional feminist circles.  

They've also made an artform of other kinds of disingenuous and deceptive argumentation.  Expect lots of bulverism - short and vague responses that imply that you've crossed some unseen line placing you beyond the pale of reason, morality or respect.  "Wow!  Just Wow!" is the ur-copy-pasta here.  Greenwalding - intentionally taking parts of opponent's statements out of context and making them say something very different than what they were intended to say, is also common.  As are more common logical and referential fallacies including slippery slopes and moving goalposts.  True Scotsmen are unheard of among intersectional feminists.  Two wrongs making a right is the basis of much of its "prejudice plus power" moral system. 

Showing that you "get it" is of paramount importance.  Dogpiling on nay-sayers is one of the very, very few actions that privileged sympathizers (that for reasons I can't fathom, are vast in number) can be almost assured of approval of from their more marginalized superiors.  Appeals to authority come with the territory here, with the "experience of marginalized people" and the theoretical dogmas underlying this kind of thinking being considered infallible.  Emotional reasoning is rampant - a marginalized person being "triggered" is considered oppressive, no matter the intent behind the action that caused said triggering.  Bootleg videos of SJW meltdowns, of the kind so often captured at Milo Yiannopoulos lectures, are a result of this.  

Catastrophization underlies the dogma of the "microaggression", where even the most innocuous actions or gestures on part of the privileged are taken as indicative of privilege and oppression, and therefore just grounds to trigger a marginalized person.  The privileged, of course, are completely responsible, regardless of intent, and cannot argue for reasons outlined above.

The ends always justify the means with intersectional feminists.  As with Lenin and his historical idea of "Kto Kovo" - "Who, whom?" actions are judged not on the basis of whether they are right or wrong, but by who benefits and who suffers as a result of them. There is no recourse or appeal for the "privileged."  

Another Leninist trait is vanguardism.  Intersectional feminists make bold statements on behalf of entire demographics of people.  Are they really speaking for all blacks or all women, or are they speaking for the women's studies department or the black studies department?  They represent themselves and their ideologies, not all people who share their demographics, whatever they may tell you.

Suffice it to say, this is hardly a recipe for mental health or satisfactory relationships.  I do not think it out of the question that there is a disproportionate prevalence of cluster B personality disorders within intersectional feminist ranks.  Like fascism, fundamentalism and Stalinism, intersectional feminism is a completely closed and completely authoritarian system.  This has been shown, with such examples as the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram Shock Experiment, to bring about blind obedience to authority regardless of who is getting hurt, and can even attract outrightly sadistic personalities.  As Nazi and Stalinist examples demonstrate, absolute power combined with a legitimizing ideology is the formula for atrocity.

Of course, intersectional feminists are guilty of nothing on the scale of the holocaust or the holodomor.  But honestly, the only thing holding them back at this point is not having absolute power.  But they are given carte-blanche in most media and academic environments.  This should be troubling for everyone.  No idea should be above criticism.  Sacred cows walk the road into regressive darkness.

Not all intersectional feminists are malignant psychopathic nutjobs.  Many, if not most are well meaning people who genuinely want to give voice to the downtrodden.  The problem is not that every intersectional feminist is a bad person.  The problem is that intersectional feminism as a belief system is both tightly closed and - quite ironically - extremely hierarchical.  And this does attract antisocial people.  Many too deal with psychological problems stemming from abuse, bad upbringings or a general lack of self esteem that they find easy to project onto other people or society as a whole via intersectional feminist rationalizations, as opposed to the challenging work of seeking therapy and healing via challenging themselves.  

Beware of psychologizing people, however, unless you have good cause to do so - you've observed clearly bizarre behavior or, as they do surprisingly frequently, the intersectional feminist just comes right out and tells you they have issues.  I see this in blog posts and magazine articles quite consistently.  Or you are a trained psychologist.  Keep poor mental health as a possible explanatory factor for truly unhinged behavior in the back of your mind, as opposed to it being a go-to response that you can use to easily and conveniently handwave claims you disagree with.  

It also bears mention that economic inequality is regarded as being of lesser importance to intersectional feminism, and class is treated as race, gender and so on are: as an identity.  This is a distortion of the nature of economic class as a vector of identity.  Class is attributable to relations of production, not an immutable genetic trait.  Another problem with intersectional feminism is that in attributing privilege to genetic factors such as race, gender or sexual orientation, the real halls of power: big business and big government, escape scrutiny.  Perhaps that is why media and academia likes intersectional feminism as much as it does.  And libertarians have no less reason to balk at intersectional feminists than Marxists do.  The smallest and most marginalized minority of them all is the individual, who turns out to be completely invisible in intersectional feminist praxis.

If at all possible, do not deal with intersectional feminists unless they show you that they are at least open to other points of view.  Especially steer clear of them if they demonstrate abusive or manipulative behaviors.  Do not allow yourself to become subject to their authority.  A common intersectional feminist strategy is to assume positions of influence and authority in organizations and use them to impose their will.  Stop them if you can, or leave organizations wherein this happens, if you can.

And for the love of God, do NOT let them convince you that they are within their rights to control, manipulate or abuse you in any way simply because they have more marginalized identities than you, and because guilt by association and collective responsibility, you owe this to them.  You don't.  Let me make that crystal clear.  You don't owe it to anyone to be a doormat.

On the other hand, listen with an open mind to claims intersectional feminists make regarding the realities of life for marginalized people.  They can be valuable repositories of knowledge regarding specific social issues.  Not uncommonly, they advocate for good reforms, if you can sort the moral absolutism and panic from the legitimate claims.  Resist the temptation to "whataboutery" in a vain effort to establish moral equivalency.  You will not convince them. Sometimes, agreeing with them, especially when warranted, can disarm them.  Sometimes.

I do not condemn intersectional feminism because, as a white dude, I get short shrift from it.  That is sufficient reason to condemn it, but that it not its greatest sin.  What is truly damning about intersectional feminism is its betrayal of the core values of racial and gender equality.  It turns all of our backs on the reasons we abandoned racism and sexism in the first place.  Because people are more than their genitals, their skin color or who they're sexually attracted to.  And people want to be, and deserve to be, evaluated on more than just those characteristics.  People told to "check their privilege" rightly feel objectified, reduced to bare biological characteristic, by the praxis of intersectional feminism.  

White people can, and should, have opportunities to enjoy healthy and mutual beneficial relationships with people of color.  Men can, and should, have opportunities to enjoy healthy and mutually beneficial relationships with women.  Straight people can, and should, have opportunities to enjoy healthy and mutually beneficial relationships with LGBTQ people.  Poor and working class people should have opportunities to benefit from a progressive movement centered around economic inequality and keeping money out of politics, and the opportunities to rise as high as their talents and efforts allow them.  These opportunities benefit everybody.  Guilt and shame for the marginalized together with resentment and self righteous entitlement for the marginalized benefit no one.  For a fleeting sense of self righteousness, the "marginalized" people who accept intersectional feminism's faustian bargain loose all of the above opportunities.

As I write this, the greatest threat to these opportunities comes not from the Ku Klux Klansman or the homophobic and puritanical fundamentalist preacher.  Rather, the greatest threat now comes from those who have usurped the mantle of the good causes that brought us to the brink of victory over the Klansman and the fundamentalist.  That victory begins to slip away.  We must snatch it back.

View the video on Samizdat Broadcasts!

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.

Thinking Outside the Vox

Way back in the halcyon days of 2010, when hope and change were still things in the democratic party, blogger Julian Sanchez used the term epistemic closure to describe the crisis he saw on the political right in those days.  Long story short, epistemic closure refers to the insulation of both a belief system and the media built up around that belief system against any further knowledge, ideas or lines of reasoning.  Naysayers and dissenters are best ignored alltogether, or tarred by association with the enemy - whoever they are.  But it goes deeper than that: once an ideological system is firmly commited to, lines of thought that even potentially threaten it simply can't be given even the slightest legitimacy.  The rapidity with which the USSR unravelled after glasnost was introduced illustrates the risks invovled.

Hence epistemic closure.  For the American conservatives, the Reagan Era only really ended when our favorite reality T.V star won bigly over the GOP establishment.  Up until then, there was nothing a tax cut couldn't fix and the democrats were forever coming to take everybody's guns away.  Argue with them about any of it, and you'd had the wool pulled over your eyes personally by Obama, Hillary or Nancy Pelosi, who were nothing but Marxists out to destroy all things American.

When Sanchez described this phenomina on the right, he saw little comparison on the left in 2010.   As perhaps a foreshadowing of what was just around the corner, he cited liberal obsessions with racism as being the sole motivation of the tea party as the closest that the left, such as it was, came to its own brand of epistemic closure.

He would not have to wait long for the leftist equivalent to epistemic closure.  Allow me to explain.  Or perhaps I should say, allow me to voxsplain:

One of the most striking examples of this epistemic closure among liberal writers are their forays into “explanatory journalism.” The idea that many people might like clear, smart explanations of what’s going on in the news certainly has merit. But the tricky thing with “explaining” the news is that in order to do so fairly, you have to be able to do the mental exercise of detaching your ideological priors from just factually explaining what is going on. Of course, as non-liberal readers of the press have long been well aware, this has always been a problem for most journalists. And yet, the most prominent “explanatory journalism” venture has been strikingly bad at actually explaining things in a non-biased way. 

I am, of course, talking about Vox, the hot new venture of liberal wonkblogger extraordinaire Ezra Klein. It was already a bad sign that his starting lineup was mostly made up of ideological liberals. And a couple months in, it’s clear that much of what passes for “explanation” on Vox is really partisan commentary in question-and-answer disguise.

The article also mentions the fact that most "voxsplainers" - the tired pontification of liberal canards to the ignorant masses as if they've never heard it before - cannot pass Brian Caplan's Ideological Turing Test, defined as the ability to convincingly and authentically relay their ideological opponent's position on the relevant issues.

Perhaps the most quintessential Voxsplaining I've yet encountered is Aja Romano's protracted voxplanation of How the Alt-Right's Sexism Lures Men into White Supremacy.  It's what you'd expect:

In many alt-right communities, men are encouraged to view women as sexual and/or political targets that men must dominate. The men in these communities don’t see themselves as sexist; they see themselves as fighting against their own emasculation and sexual repression at the hands of strident feminists. 

So called "manosphere" concepts are then used as a kind of gateway drug to interest socially isolated young men deeper into an esoteric politics of crypto fascism and white supremacy.

Well, duh!

The alt-right and the manosphere are full of what the internet nowadays calls cancer - content that is light on intellectual content and heavy on cringe.  But the deeper point here can be summed up in an old African proverb that warns that if you don't initiate your young men into the tribe, they'll eventually come back and burn your village down.  Experts on gang, cult and extremist recruitment tactics have long understood this.  Alienated young men with no roots in the community and little prospect for a good life are easy marks.  Ironic then that the most strident on the alt-right, and their Islamic Jihadist nemesis, are ultimately drawn from the same ranks of humanity.  Ironic, but hardly without precedent.

Absent from Romano's analysis of the Alt-Right and its origins is any prescription of actually countering this that might actually reduce the propensity of young men to be drawn to extremism.  Targets are described as being sexually frustrated and often raised by feminist single moms, and the lure of being a real man as opposed to being weak and emasculated is what's used to draw them in.  The only difference between "Sieg Heil" and "Allahu Akbar" in this case could well be whichever one gets to them first, and what color their skin is.

The article chides the alt-right for offering alienated young men no real advice for dealing with loneliness, emotional issues and relationship difficulties and instead simply scapegoating independent women and minorities for their personal problems.  While this is a fair criticism, it's one that could as easily be leveled against Vox, and its countless clones across the internet.  Apart from scolding young white men for their racism and sexism, what is the mainstream left really offering them by way of an alternative?

Especially since the Vox article traces the history of the Alt-Right through Donald Trump's victory, through the Brexit vote and back to the GamerGate online movement, and to the various segments of the "manosphere" that existed prior to that.  The numbers and influence of these angry white dudes - the rank-and-file, or mooks - to use online video game terminology - of the forces of oppression only grew, despite all of the efforts made by Vox, Slate, Salon, Everyday Feminism, Occupy Democrats, Jezebel, The Mary Sue and other outlets of enlightened progressivism to tell them how very, very sexist, racist and fascist they were being all the while.  In fact, how very Nazi they had always been simply by virtue of being white males.

And now they're surprised when these same angry young dudes turn out to accept and embrace an ideology that actually promotes racism, misogyny and fascism.  They're surprised that the generation of young men these single feminist mothers raised have become exactly what single feminist women have been telling them they were since they were old enough to pluck letters off a computer screen: racist, misogynist and fascist.

Who would have guessed?

That, folks, is what epistemic closure on the left looks like.

Young white males are quite within their rights to reject the online left's obsessive and compulsive idealization of women and minorities.  They are well within their rights to reject the ceaseless narrative of white male "power" and "privilege," especially when it comes from credentialed academics and pundits who have way more power and privilege than many of these young white dudes will ever have.

They are not entitled to have the women to whom they're attracted reciprocate that attraction.  That much is true.  But they are entitled to not have their natural instinctive urges tarred as misogyny, entitlement and objectification.  They are entitled to pursue love in a culture in which all the weight of mass society is not behind the demonization of male sexuality and the equation of female rejection of men with female power and independence.  And they sure as hell are entitled to not have to function in a society that brands their own similar rejection of women (or men passing themselves off as women) to whom they're not attracted as being misogyny, "fatphobia" or "transphobia."

Alternative online communities are not attacking "social justice warriors" because they're all - to the last, racist, mysogynistic and otherwise deplorable.  People of all descriptions object to the SJW's self righteousness, their hypocrisy, their arrogance and their propensity to milk privilege theory and "power plus prejudice" rationalizations for all the self serving double standards and get-out-of-jail free cards they're worth.  This, it would seem, is the real gateway drug to bona-fide fascism, racism and misogyny if indeed there ever was one.  And that should concern us all.

Fighting the alt-right cannot be done by further pontificating to angry white dudes on how very deplorable their anger, their whiteness and their dudeness is.  Perhaps the wisdom of Lao-Tsu could be of help to us - and the wisdom he conveyed in The Tao Te Ching, not The Art of War.  Sometimes the way to victory is by not fighting, but by offering an olive branch; membership in the tribe before the village gets burned down.

The mainstream leftist media shows at best a mixed inclination to do this.  Perhaps the real antidote to the alternative right is an alternative left.  One that might think that full employment, maybe even a job guarantee, might be a more effective way to get young men out of their parent's basements than yet another lecture on girl power would be.  One that has not yet succumbed to epistemic closure and is thus able to think outside the Vox.