On Male Feminists
Monday, March 12, 2012 at 9:31AM Some random thoughts on these pitiful fools...
In my opinion, a male Feminist is a masochist, a self-hating aberration. But being too contemptible about these individuals is in my opinion not the correct reaction, these individuals are in an unenviable position after all. My argument here rests on the assumption that Feminism is essentially a hate movement which views male identity as malignant and in need of changing, or alternatively eradicating. I will demonstrate my point on this report in The Atlantic. The report is about a fall from grace of Hugo Schwyzer (seen on the picture accompanying this post), a professor in Pasadena City College. I quote from the report:
On December 24, 2011, feminist writer Hugo Schwyzer was banned from participating in Feministe, an influential feminist site. The outrage was sparked by an interview in which Schwyzer discussed his own checkered past, including consensual sex with his students. Underneath the post, Feministe commenters drew attention to an even more astonishing admission -- in a year-old post on Schwyzer's own site -- that in 1998, while intoxicated, he had attempted to kill himself and an ex-girlfriend.
"Why are you giving this animal a platform?"demanded one Feministe commenter. "There are three-and-a-half billion women on this planet with inspiring, thought-provoking stories and insights to share, and you choose instead to promote the self-serving rhetoric of a narcissistic sexual predator."
Hugo is a deranged fool who has uttered several confessions accompanied by some moralizing about his actions in the past, probably in the blind belief that he will be understood by his Feminist comrades. He wasn't.
I am not going to moralise on the merits of sleeping with your students here, but every evidence suggests that the girls consented to sleeping with this freak. I mean, getting taught by him already means you are screwed big time, so you might as well just bend over and let Hugo do the rest. He was never accused of rape or anything of the kind, and frankly we don't even know whether he didn't make all of his admissions up. But he admitted to being a violent abuser, and to screwing dumb undergraduates, and that is an unforgivable sin that you can never find atonement for within Feminist circles. Even if you are haunted by the demons of your past deeds, and have stopped these activities a long time ago, and you preach to men telling them not to do such a thing.
If you do not understand what I mean, check out this psycho-rant from Schwyzer's fellow male Feminist:
Yet there are women who are defending Schwyzer’s right to be identified as a feminist. As a male feminist myself (or a feminist ally, if anyone out there objects to a man identifying directly with feminism), I can say that in my experience, there is a real hunger for male allies among young feminists. That is certainly understandable on the level of principle, given that feminism is, in the last analysis, about changing society for the better for everyone — and it’s also understandable on the level of strategy, because male privilege, while illegitimate in itself, is a useful thing to have on your side.
What I think that the example of Schwyzer shows, though, is that suspicion is very much still warranted. Already in the 1970s, Ruether was warning of the tendency of male allies to attempt to “take over” — and Schwyzer is a particularly unsavory example of that, hijacking the feminist movement in the service of his own attempt to erase his history of abuse. If he really cared about women, the first thing he would do is leave them alone. If he really felt moved to get involved with women’s issues, he should have put himself in a position of submission, allowing women to direct his energies to where they found it most useful. Imposing oneself on women in order to enact your own personal redemption narrative is just a continuation of the same basic pattern of behavior that you need to be redeemed from.
The standards for any man to become a leader or public figure for feminism must necessarily be stringent, and the men themselves need to have the kind of vulnerability and openness necessary to question their own motives and to take criticism seriously. Very few men are seriously prepared to accept that kind of accountability — indeed, I would hesitate to claim that for myself, as I’ve never really been put to the test in any serious way — and that is one sign that feminism is still urgently necessary.
Being a male Feminist is a hard job, it requires you to practice an extra level of masochism. You heard that, men need to accept they are accountable - for being men, for being the patriarchal oppressors. It really is clear from the above, that as a man in the Feminist circles, you are viewed as malignant, as the problem essentially.
The belief in patriarchy and male privilege, which in my opinion is an entirely false construct not based on any objective reality, is very prevalent among male Feminists, it is the foundational stone of Feminism after all. Based on this is the imperative to submit to women, because they owe it to them. See what PZ Myers (a male Feminist who invades the atheist space with the quasi-religious message of Feminism) wrote:
We men have the benefit of a culture that has put us in a position of default social dominance, whether we deserve it or not. There is this bias that colors our interactions with women (and vice versa), and we are perpetuating it when we patronizingly try to explain to the ladies that we want to be more attentive to their needs.
You have to surrender your attitudes. You have to SHUT UP AND LISTEN. You have to be willing to listen to a woman disagreeing with you, without dismissing her complaints as unimportant.
I now return to The Atlantic, the following paragraph only underscores what I am saying:
Oddly enough, this outrage came just days after Schwyzer had proclaimed his solidarity with the feminist movement by withdrawing from an online magazine called The Good Men Project. As its name suggests, the site was built around a simple question -- "What does it mean to be a good man?" -- and Schwyzer had welcomed the opportunity to preach his brand of feminism to a mostly male audience. But on December 14, 2011, the site's founder, Tom Matlack, published a piece called "Being a Dude Is a Good Thing" in which he argued that men and women were fundamentally different, and that women refused to "accept men for who they really are." It wasn't "ethically possible," Schwyzer wrote on his site, "to remain silent while the site with which I am now best associated took an increasingly anti-feminist stance."
What's in the name: 'The Good Men Project'? What is in posing the question: 'What does it mean to be a good man?' The fundamental assumption that men are not good and they need a project to become good. Tom Matlack had the audacity to deviate from this a little bit. To a man unhindered by Feminist-inspired self-hatred and masochism, such thoughts never occur, he simply has no need to justify his masculinity. No need to submit to feminine energies, and other mambo-jumbo, only the kind posting at The Good Men Project has such a need.
We read more about Tom Matlack's plight few paragraphs below towards the end of the article:
But even as other feminists were condemning him, Schwyzer was breaking with The Good Men Project over what he saw as its anti-feminism. GMP has a tricky relationship with feminism. Lisa Hickey, the site's editor, explains that while it is "not anti-feminist by any stretch of the imagination," GMP is not explicitly feminist. "We're just coming at this from the perspective of men first."
Indeed, Hickey has some reservations about feminism. "There are many forums for women to talk about things like this [gender roles]," she says. "In the process of looking for equality, feminists have been trying to get time for women's voices. I don't want to say men have been shut out -- but there hasn't been the openness to this sort of conversation." Some of GMP's content flirts with anti-feminism: In a currently popular post entitled "I Have Female Privilege" author Rachel Goodchild declares, "I am very aware that I no longer live in a man's world. This world is a woman's world. And us females are now the humans holding the privilege."
The day after GMP founder Tom Matlack posted his essay "Being a Dude is a Good Thing," he embarked on a testy exchange of tweets, using language that Schwyzer found sexist. One tweet read, "My point was that some men are afraid to speak up out of fear of female reprisals. Kind of being proven right here" and another, "I really thought the MRA [Men's Rights Advocates] guys were crazy until I engaged the wrath of the feminists. Insane."
I would not say Tom Matlack took the red pill and saw clearly how deep the rabbit hole goes, this looks more like a blue pill overdose and Tom Matlack being sick and disoriented. And all of it for writing a boring and submissive article where the argument was that men have to be men for the women in their life. I'm amazed!
I was always under the impression that The Good Men Project was a Feminist project given their basic premise, and the fact they published Schwyzer. They certainly had dealings with the Feminists. If they happen to be open to different views, this is only commendable, but I am not certain that such an introduction of a dissenting discourse will score them any points with the Feminists.
Throughout this post I haven't once used the term 'emasculation' but this is what male explorations of the world of Feminist thought ultimately lead to, sometimes quite literally. I end my post here.
Reader Comments (3)
'Let us hope that the idea of male studies cannot be cut off as easily as an unwanted penis.' :-) :-) :-)
@ Hack
The author, Paul Elam, was talking about a non-Feminist study of masculinity. A scientific inquiry into masculinity unhindered by the straight-jacket of Feminist ideology. ;-)
I realize what Elam wa getting at...I just found the summation to be well...quite vivid...:-)