Why This Blog Is Here

(This is a repost from q-arewenotmen.blogspot.com - an erroneous mirror.)

The purpose of this blog is to break into what I see as a fairly underexplored segment of both scholarship and public discussion: specifically, feminism as it applies to men.

I'm not just talking about feminism in relation to the straw-man men it often, out of necessity, creates for itself, or in relation to men in the aggregate. What I intend to explore in this blog, provisionally named Manhood In Crisis, is how necessary feminism is for men.

As such, and because I consider it absolutely necessary to break the idea that feminism is somehow exclusively for women, I am going to be writing from and for men. There might seem to be a contradiction here; there is not. I might, eventually, feel possessed to link to female feminist critique that I find insightful or useful, but what matters to me is reaching as many straight men as possible. The wrong I seek to right here is that so many straight men have been told by society and by one another that feminism is either a case of uppity womenfolk or sacrosanct and Not For Them.

Part of this is because feminism as a social movement has basically died. It remains alive in academia; academics don't have to be clear, and in fact sometimes delight in being gleefully obscure. When feminist academics discuss the patriarchy, men have been taught to react as if that means them, that because they have testicles they are automatically and wholly on the side of the opposition. This becomes something of a self-confirming error; if you think someone's declaring you their enemy, you'd be inclined to fight them. And if you're inclined to fight them, well, they might be inclined to see you specifically as an enemy where they weren't before.

Please forgive feminists for incindiary rhetoric, or for muddled language. If you read them closely, which society essentially forbids you to do - in the same way it forbids you to read more or less anyone closely, because it thinks your role is that of a brainless ox - you'll find the oppression they lament is a part of your day-to-day life as well.

I'm specifically writing for men here: straight men, probably straight white men too, although I suspect what I have to say pretty much crosses race boundaries. I'm lower-middle-class, but I've got a pretty commanding understanding of and personal experience with life in more or less every economic class. I appreciate woman-oriented feminism, but it is not what I am here for. There are billions of blogs doing that better than me.

When I say 'you', or for that matter 'we', I am talking to the reader - a straight man in the majority, who society tells you that feminists want to do away with or to burden or injure. This couldn't be farther from the truth.

The reality is that when feminists talk about the oppressive force - the patriarchy - they are talking about the same society that keeps your pay between the level that will sustain you and the level that will satisfy you; they're talking about the same society that wants to make sure your children stay in the same economic station as you; they're talking about the same society that threatens to draft you and shove you in harm's way for the benefit of the richest citizens. The patriarchy is those who would pull the wool over your eyes. Convincing the mass of men that patriarchy works out in their favor is the best trick they ever pulled; they managed to divide and conquer society without even putting in too much work.

The patriarchy isn't man; it is men, and only a few of them. Patriarch doesn't boil down to man but father, and in this case has an extremely negative connotation - one of usurpation, of people assuming the role of paternity without earning it or behaving appropriately for it. The patriarchy is not us; the patriarchy is not a father figure to us; the patriarchy is an abusive stepfather. While our sisters might suffer worse, we still have to endure a lot of unfortunate stuff because of that abusive stepfather's expectations.

So, with that in mind - that the patriarchy, the enemy, is the force which defines manhood as burdensome and womanhood as to be resented, which encourages us to take out our frustrations at the injustice of the world on our fellow-suffering wives, sisters, daughters, and mothers, and which ruins men and women alike.

The point of this blog is to document, and in the long term to fight, the efforts by the patriarchy to castrate us. And there's a lot to document.

Let's look at an issue where the common wisdom is that men gain the warm fuzzies and lose something substantial: paternal consent for abortion. This means that the man who impregnated a woman who seeks an abortion has veto power over that.

Now, he - or, surprisingly, she - who carries the standard for the patriarchy would argue that this gives us what we deserve: the right to decide what happens with life we create. In a weird, horrible sense, this might well be true. But consider what it does to the woman.

Any woman who has to endure one of those vetoes happens is gonna be fucked - seriously fucked - because she'll be having a kid she doesn't want by someone who is enough of a dick to force her to bear it to term and give birth to it. Suppose you meet that fucked woman; suppose you know that fucked woman. Now suppose you know dozens of them. Every law like this - which takes power over their own bodies away from women and gives it to men who would, if they were decent men at all, have no use for it - makes women think of themselves less as people and more as a lesser category.

Self-respect is sexy. I've met one (count 'em, one) woman who isn't a complete nervous wreck about her sexuality - and we're getting married in a few years. She's got self-respect, because she somehow escaped being acculturated to believe that her purpose is to roll over and take it when her husband is horny and then leverage that into QVC money. Stuff like paternal consent laws erodes that; most women aren't comfortable enough with their own bodies that they're willing to think of themselves as equal to their partner in every reasonable respect.

I carry her groceries because I'm buffer than she is. She corrects my papers because she's an English major and I'm poli-sci. That's about it, gender-difference-wise. Compare this to my other girlfriends, who worried constantly about losing me to other women, who made more money than me but felt intent on driving me into debt to have me take them out places. The attitude the patriarchy promotes is a poisonous one; it is the belief among both women and men that men are more basically personally fit than women, are intellectually stronger, and deserve to enjoy a place of leadership.

If the patriarchy had its way, every man-woman relationship would comprise a father and a daughter. Those are the grounds on which they used to not only justify a man beating his wife, but encourage him to do so and consider him suspect if he didn't: it was a good man's job to correct and guide his wife and to spank her when she got out of line. Just like a good father and all.

If that sickens you, congratulations! You love women, like the vast majority of straight men (and lesbians, although I'm not qualified to talk there). That's the most bitterly obvious way in which the patriarchy fucks us as men: it takes women away from us and gives us little girls instead. We can't get into relationships without having to worry about acting as the better of someone we'd like to respect as an equal; we can't have one night stands without having to wonder if she really wants it or if she's just rolling over because that's what she's been taught to do.

In the paraphrased words of Andrea Dworkin (no shit!), if sex is about power, sex can't be about sex. To extend that even further: if love is about power, love can't be about love. That's one of the basic dilemmas of being a man in the face of the patriarchy: we can't love without fearing that we hurt; we can't even get our Bone on without having to worry about it being some kind of rape.

Here's one of the lovely things about demolishing the patriarchy: guilt-free and awesome sex. When the idea that men are entitled to sex (and women are burdened with it) is no longer in common currency in our society, we can at last basically assume the veracity of consent when we get down and dirty. Women will no longer have to develop defense mechanisms against pseudo-men who think they are entitled to sex for being nice; when they want sex they'll come looking, and when we want it so will we.

Wouldn't it be nice to live in a world where dick-fixated car salesmen don't talk to you first when your spouse or girlfriend is looking for a car?

Wouldn't it be nice to live in a world where there are no wonderful women who can't enjoy giving head because all of their boyfriends thought they deserved it and would barely express gratitude for it - let alone reciprocate?

Wouldn't it be nice to live in a world where nobody laughs at you if your wife is out-earning you -- or assumes she ought to be putting her career on hold so you can have a child and a job?

Wouldn't it be nice to live in a world where you know your partner wants to be with you because nobody is making her?


This blog is about what it means to be a man, and, more or less, a human being. This blog is also about those who know what it means - but want to hide it.

This blog's purpose is to watch the perfidy of those who would prefer we see ourselves as cogs in a great machine and our beloved women as our inferiors - so far inferior we can never see ourselves in them.

This blog is about escaping the shackles of the patriarchy, which wishes to make masculine eunuchs out of all of us, and becoming real men.

It's a tough road, but with a good deal of introspection and debate - and that manly act as old as time, cracking the right Goddamn heads - we'll be able to take pride in our worth as human beings rather than our distance from the artifice of femininity.

Are we not men?