Please, Dear Venus, Show Me Now

I feel sorry for Men’s Rights Activists. No, really, I do. Like the people in Plato’s cave, they have a sense of the problems caused by a society that demands a harsh conformity to gender norms; they can see the shadows of the patriarchy on the wall. But just like the people in the cave, they only see a part of it, not the whole. And because of that, they spend their time attacking those who could and should be their allies.

Take me, for instance. The other day, I wrote an article about the continued awfulness of Jezebel, specifically with regard to an article by Doug Barry that mocked a male victim of rape for being a male who was a victim of rape. I based my argument on a clear, bedrock feminist principle: that consent is requisite for sex, and that sexual acts undertaken without consent constitute sexual assault or rape. This is not controversial in the feminist community. Indeed, it’s only controversial in the MRA community, where consent is not so much seen as something important.

Nevertheless, my argument was against Jezebel, which is, if not a feminist site, then a site that is read by many feminists. And because I dared to take a stand against the dread Gawker empire, I have been outed! Yes, it turns out that because I believe men can be raped if they refuse to consent, I am a closet MRA.

I…I’ve always known I was different. I was hiding it because I was rightly ashamed.

Wait. I’m not an MRA. Who would be foolish enough to think I was? Why, Adam Geddes, that’s who!

Even zealots like Jeff Fecke are having their doubts about pop feminism. Days ago he penned a piece entitled ‘Jezebel Continues Its Long, Slow Decline,’ lambasting the online mag for its lax standards. Barring the bits where he bends over backwards to avoid offending his readership, his opinion here is no different from MRAs, the very people he demonized. He points out author Doug Barry’s hypocrisy for making light of sexual assault, when it’s a woman doing the raping.

Well, actually, I pointed out Barry’s evil for not taking sexual assault seriously, something that Jezebel has been willing to do when men were doing the raping, too. I did point out that flipping the genders might also allow Barry to plug into male stereotypes, especially the “men always want to” stereotype, but I didn’t see it as radically different from any other bit of victim-blaming, like, say, this one, where MRAs attack a 14-year-old girl who thinks she might have been raped. (Trigger warning: Reddit. Really, do you need me to be more specific than that?) Reversing the usual genders was useful to highlight just how wrong victim-blaming always is, but I’ve seen far worse written about women who were victims of sexual assault, much of it from the MRA community.

Anyhoo, Geddes notes something that I wholeheartedly agree with him on: that feminists and MRAs could, if both were rational, agree on. Unfortunately, one of those groups is not rational. Hint: it isn’t the feminists.

Although feminists and MRAs actually agree on some issues, they’ll never make nice. MRAs are repelled by the phony political correctness, sophism, and cultural Marxism inherent to feminism. Women right’s proponents despise the lewd speech (perceived as “misogyny”), and focus on the masculine ideals of liberty and self-sufficiency (over security and comfort) inherent to MRAs.

 

One of the things the MRA set completely fails to grok is that “phony political correctness” is actually an arduous attempt to open up society to ideas that it has become opposed to thinking. Far from being cultural Marxism, the push by feminists to make language and society gender-neutral is a very good thing; it allows women and men to be more free to be themselves, and to ignore the demands the culture makes on gender.

That’s why the misogyny of the MRAs is so disappointing, and why Geddes’ calling liberty and self-sufficiency “masculine ideals” so completely misses the mark.

The fact is that liberty and self-sufficiency are not masculine ideals. They are ideals. Security and comfort are not feminine ideals. They are ideals. Ask any woman who’s living alone in New York City if the law should constrain her movements, or require her to marry. Ask any man who’s raising a family whether the police should patrol his city and protect his family, or whether his children’s school should serve decent food in the cafeteria. All humans desire some degree of liberty and self-sufficiency, some degree of comfort and security.

That’s what the MRAs fail to understand — that simply accepting that some ideas are masculine and some ideas are feminine is doing the patriarchy’s work. Are you mad, MRAs, that judges don’t think that you can be a good parent? Well, why would they? You don’t even care about security or comfort!

When you accept that all boys are different from all girls, you accept that there should be proscribed rules for boys and for girls. Some MRAs more than accept this; they embrace it with both arms, lovingly, because they believe that if we could only stuff the genie back in the bottle that they could be on top again.

The MRAs I feel sorry for are the ones who don’t really embrace that, who know that there’s something wrong, but who have locked on to the wrong target. Rather than being angry at a society that tells us that women and men are far more different than we are, they rage against the women who have had the temerity to stand up and say otherwise. They are shooting the messengers, and ignoring their jailers.

Indeed, the fixation on women — their supposed power, their ability to make men’s lives horrible — ultimately derails Geddes’ path to enlightenment. This, for example, is what he thinks my motivation for being a feminist is:

Growing up Jeff Fecke was the awkward, omega kid that tried to earn female approval by blending in with the girl group. Sadly, this strategy never works. That and it’s a type of earthy hell. Cuties cried on his shoulder but didn’t have the decency to toss him the occasional mercy fuck.

Instead of adapting, he grew resentful of the so called alphas that pulled all the babes. The man’s man was his mortal enemy back then as it is now. MRAs are essentially the new “real men,” who seek autonomy from feminine approval or any approval for that matter.

That is just so completely off that I must turn to Billy Madison’s principal to give my response.

I will freely admit that I’ve never been a manly man of manhood. I’ve never claimed to be. Indeed, I’ve never wanted to be. But I’ve never viewed men who were “manly” as a threat, an opponent, or anything else. I don’t aspire to be them, and I don’t care or believe that they “pull all the babes.” I’ve been married once; I was able to “pull” at least one “babe.”

As for whether I fell in with the “girl group” — no, sorry. I was in a group of friends. Some were guys. Some were girls. I’ll admit, I had a brief period of Nice Guyness™, but I got over it long ago.

But where Geddes really fails is in thinking that I am a feminist because I hope it will help me get the chicks. Sorry, Adam; I’m a feminist for one primary reason: my daughter. You see, I can date or not — I’m okay with being single, and dating had its perks, and both have their drawbacks and I’m cool with either state. But I desperately want my daughter to live in a world that does not look down on her because of her second X chromosome. That is what motivated me to write on feminism in the first place, and that is what motivates me today.

You see, when Geddes writes:

Fecke would rather think of the MRM as a band of ‘woman beaters,’ and ‘rape apologists’ because the truth stings. Deep down, he wants to rub elbows with the men he grew up despising as an equal. Somewhere inside him, there’s this little MRA voice he hushes every time he sees clues that current-wave feminism has jumped the shark.

he simply and completely fails to understand what motivates me, or the vast majority of men who view MRAs with a mix of pity and disgust. I have friends who were high school athletes and are good looking and had their pick of girls, and I have friends who were nerds in high school and never aspired to date more than one special someone, and I have friends who are — gasp — girls. And you know what? They’re all my equals, and I am theirs. And you know why I know that? Because being a feminist has taught me over the years that “manliness” or lack thereof has little bearing on one’s worth as a human being.

That is the lesson of feminism, and why the MRAs will never appeal to me, and will never get it. They understand that men and women have different standards imposed upon them. Feminists say those standards are wrong, and work to broaden the definition of what it is to be a woman — and by extension, what it is to be a man. MRAs see that, and try to change those standards to fit their own idea of what is ideal — to make a world where manliness is rewarded, but where men are also rewarded simply for being men. In short, MRAs seek to undermine liberty, and take away the ability of women to be self-reliant. It would be hilarious, if it wasn’t so tragic.

This entry posted in Anti-feminists and their pals, Feminism, sexism, etc, Men and masculinity. Bookmark the permalink. 

27 Responses to Please, Dear Venus, Show Me Now

  1. 1
    Mandolin says:

    I’ve never understood how my feminist, unassuming, beta-personality husband is supposed to fit into their ridiculous frameworks.

    He never had trouble “pulling” chicks so does that make him not a Beta?

    But if he’s not a Beta, why is he a feminist? He doesn’t need help pulling chicks.

    And if he’s an Alpha, then why is he both resistant to and not particularly demonstrative of masculine traits?

    Could be that he gets laid because he’s nice. Really nice–not Nice. Cooooooould beeeeeeeee.

  2. 2
    mythago says:

    @Mandolin: the framework is Procrustean. If your strategy is pretending to like women to get them into bed, that’s OK because it’s game, but if you actually like women and thus they go to bed with you, you’re a beta who’s afraid of the Manly Men. And if you don’t express any interest in being a self-described “alpha”, then you secretly want to be one!

  3. 3
    Raven says:

    MRAs seem to really like the alpha/beta/omega thing (on account of being able to paint themselves as alphas and people who disagree with them as omegas), except that science has found that in the wild it isn’t actually how wolves operate, much less primates.

  4. 4
    Gabrielle says:

    They don’t look down on her for her second X chromosome, they look down on her for being female. Gender is not reducible to chromosomes, and I’m sure they’d look down on your daughter if she was transgender just as much, if not more!

  5. 5
    Mandolin says:

    Well, A) yes, tho also B) I doubt they don’t hate on trans men. So it’s not just gender or chromosomes, it’s the taint of anything that is currently or has once been tainted by the whiff of femaleness.

  6. 6
    Robert says:

    Femaleness means cooties, Mandolin. That’s just science.

  7. 7
    KellyK says:

    Nuh-uh, Robert. You have cooties.

  8. 8
    Robert says:

    Once again science and the possession of a penis come to my aid, Kelly, because circle circle dot dot, I have had my cootie shot.

    Ha! Now I have you wriggling in the crushing grip of reason.

  9. Pingback: Fecke Wars: The Smell of Defeat

  10. 9
    Nancy Lebovitz says:

    Raven, I’d love to hear some details about how alpha/beta/omega (what happened to gammas?) doesn’t work to understand primates.

  11. 10
    RonF says:

    When you accept that all boys are different from all girls,

    “All” is a dangerous word to use. There are almost always exceptions to any generalization.

    Ask any woman who’s living alone in New York City if the law should constrain her movements, or require her to marry. Ask any man who’s raising a family whether the police should patrol his city and protect his family…

    However, I propose that there are differences between the sexes as how to achieve those ends.

    The fact is that liberty and self-sufficiency are not masculine ideals. They are ideals. Security and comfort are not feminine ideals. They are ideals.

    It’s not the ideal itself that carries a connotation of “feminine” or “masculine”. It’s how one reconciles the conflicts between the two. Are you willing to sacrifice individual liberty and self-sufficiency for security and comfort provided by the State? Or would you rather depend on your own resources to provide security and comfort and have fewer State constraints on your liberty thereby?

    I use the concept of having the liberty to walk around in public carrying a gun so as to provide a means of defending yourself and your family as an example. What do you think would happen if you poll a group and ask if law-abiding people should be able to carry guns either openly or in a concealed fashion? I ask this not as a means to advocate for open or concealed carry but to illustrate the differences between the sexes. This seems to me to be a question that would cause a conflict in many people’s minds between liberty and security. Do you think that men and women would answer “Yes” or “No” to that question in the same proportions?

  12. 11
    Ruchama says:

    Are there numbers supporting that, Ron? I just tried to google quickly (got to go teach in five minutes), and I found a bunch of statistics saying that more men than women carry guns, but I couldn’t find anything that asked that sort of question. Maybe someone else would have better google luck than me, since I’m sure it’s something that someone has studied.

  13. 12
    Eytan Zweig says:

    Ron – wait, what? I have never heard about attitude towards guns and concealment being associated with gender in any way, and I can’t figure out why it would be. Is this a real thing among Americans?

    (Note – this is general bafflement, not an attempt to make a point of any kind)

  14. 13
    RonF says:

    Here is a two-year-old poll showing a difference of opinion among members of various groups, including between the sexes, regarding gun control.

    A majority of men (57%) say localities should not be allowed to pass laws banning handguns while most women (51%) say such laws should be permitted.

    Here is a poll that is current.

    There long have been gender differences in opinions about gun control, but both men and women have become more supportive of gun rights. In the current survey, 60% of men say it is more important to protect gun rights, up from 46% in April 2008. Just 39% of women say it is more important to protect the rights of Americans to own guns. But that percentage also is higher than it was four years ago (30%).

    The point being that while ideals of liberty and security are not in and of themselves “masculine” or “feminine”, the approach to securing or attaining those ideals and of resolving conflicts between them seem to be different between the sexes.

  15. 14
    mythago says:

    It’s not the ideal itself that carries a connotation of “feminine” or “masculine”. It’s how one reconciles the conflicts between the two. Are you willing to sacrifice individual liberty and self-sufficiency for security and comfort provided by the State? Or would you rather depend on your own resources to provide security and comfort and have fewer State constraints on your liberty thereby?

    Strangely, I don’t see the poll you cited actually asking those questions. The poll simply asks about gun control. You’re the one who is mapping “security and comfort” vs. “fewer state constraints” onto those opinions; we have no idea if that’s actually what the people responding to the poll believe.

    But hey, I realize you’ll let go of your gender essentialism when it’s pried out of your cold, dead fingers.

  16. 15
    tarad says:

    It should be noted that those in the comments section at Jezebel showed a strong disapproval of that article, so it should not be taken as something that the feminist readers of the website support or some kind of hypocrisy on feminism’s part.

  17. 16
    Dragonsbehere says:

    Hmm, so im hearing a lot of problems, but I’m not hearing any solutions. Anyone care to elaborate a bit on how my existence would be better as less male, or more neutral? Seems the wrong approach to me.

  18. 17
    pillowinhell says:

    Dragonsbehere its not a matter of being less male, which is a matter of which sex organs you were born with. It’s a matter of not being forced with “being manly” or “being feminine”. If you have a protector type of personality and enjoy or view as important putting your life at risk for other people that’s fine. That ideal should not be forced on you however simply because you have a penis and were born with a Y chromosome. It should also not be denied to people born with XX chromosomes and a uterus, if that what is important to them as a person.

    The first solution is to question the ideals of proper gender performance. The next is to question how much of the differences are being inflated by cultural expectation. After that is accepting the ways in which you differ from the ideal. And after that comes realizing that other people will differ from the ideals as well and that this is a good thing because people are more than just what their genitals do.

    I’m sure I’m missing a crapload of important points and I’ve probably just made some errors in thinking that erases important points of view. This is the baseline 101 feminism though and feminists have been pounding on this for decades now.

    I’m giving a very generic example,because I don’t know anything about you or your experiences.

  19. 18
    Tamen says:

    tarad: You should also note that even though most of the 182 comments on that article were diapproving 872 people pressed the “Like”-button on that article according to the statistics Jezebel presents. Since neither of us know how many of those 872 people considers themselves feminists I’d say that neither of us can say anything sure either way whether feminist readers of Jezebel are supportive of that article or not.

  20. 19
    Fidelbogen says:

    The trouble with Fecke’s analysis, is that “MRA” is a straw category and sheer invention on his part. He isn’t talking about any genuine, substantive group of people. If he ever had an honest tete-a-tete with some actual so-called “MRAs”, they would certainly set him straight, and right quickly.

    Yes, the term “MRA”, when it issues from a feminist mouth, is nearly always political myth and fabrication, signifying the necessary “bad actor” in a very cheesy morality script. In sum, “MRA” is a figment of the feminist imagination, and corresponds poorly, if at all, to the objective state of the world.

    The other thing wrong with Fecke’s analysis is his unbridled feminist subjectivism. He merely assumes the feminist narrative as a given — and he especially privileges his own interpretation of feminism as a participant. From there he proceeds, blithely and ignorantly, to foist the feminist paradigm upon his readers. Well in my book, that is not “cricket”.

  21. 20
    Grace Annam says:

    Jeff, I had no idea that your feminist subjectivism was unbridled. Bridle your subjectivism immediately, sirrah, and show proof that you have done so! The feminist part of it, at the very least.

    Privileging your own interpretation of something above someone else’s! It’s simply not done, old man.

    I’m certain that Fidelbogen right – all of your tete-a-tetes must have been dishonest. Either that, or you’ve never had them at all, and you have been Misleading us. For heaven’s sake, please just go talk to one of these men, and let him Set You Straight.

    Fidelbogen, tell us more about this “objective state of the world”, and how one perceives it. Try to use small words so that they get through the feminism which clouds my thoughts. (Mine is bridled, though; you can tell because I’m deferring to you and letting you Decide Everything, so that my feminism won’t get in the way.)

    Grace

  22. 21
    Fidelbogen says:

    No, Grace, you are welcome to your opinion — whatever that might be. Whatever you need to tell yourself. . . tell yourself! Just as Fecke does. ;)

  23. 22
    Jake Squid says:

    Last word!

  24. 23
    TG says:

    Maybe as a side note: I don’t know if picking out quotes of a couple of posters somewhere means anything.

    Lots of MRA sites believe in an open discussion, so they don’t continually ban and prune and delete anything they don’t like, so you are invariably going to get some far-out comments. As an example on the other side, I’ve seen comments on Hugo Schwyzer’s board from alleged “feminists” who may be mentally ill or who may be people pretending to be something like that. Mythago may even have a memory of a poster who people thought was some MRA posing as a caricature of a feminist.

    This whole “MRAs are 100% evil, and feminists are 100% good, always, and we will be the VICTORS, WHO-HOO” is sort of silly. But maybe everyone should get team colors.

  25. 24
    TG says:

    Just a suggestion from me: To tell the teams apart, the MRAs should appear in black wrestling tights with a black mask and should be booed from the start by the audience. It should be clear that they are evil incarnate.

    The feminists should appear in a costume resembling that of Good Witch Glenda in the Wizard of Oz (1939), except that the costume should be whiter because they are always pure good.

    I honestly think this is important, because sometimes I can’t tell who is on what team. People who simultaneously realize that men and women could have problems in life are really a problem. I don’t know whether to hate them because they realize that men may also have problems (and are people too) or to love them because they realize that women have their own separate set of problems.

    I need black-and-white villains and heros, much like Mr. Fecke.

  26. 25
    Fidelbogen says:

    Thank goodness I’m not an “MRA”. So I don’t need to wear any silly costumes. I’ll settle for the bluejeans and polar fleece pullover I’ve got on right now, this very minute.

  27. 26
    Jake Squid says:

    Last word again!