For feminism to work, apparently we need to be appealing to men. We need to be nice to them. We need to make them feel like it’s a non-threatening movement that will take all of their interests and needs into account and hold their hand as we transition into an equality that will in no way disadvantage or even moderately disrupt their current privilege. Unfortunately, a lot of women take this message to heart because doing anything contrary to it presents as almost frightening. This is why, despite the stereotypes of separatism and misandry that are so repeatedly levelled at feminist activists and workers, so many women bend over backwards to try to be as accommodating as possible to men’s sensitivities. These women believe, with the best of intentions, that we are better served by stroking men’s egos than by issuing some straight talk to them.
No. Feminism is not obligated to provide equal space at the top for men to lead us. That idea is completely ludicrous. It isn’t our duty as women to set a better example so that we can confidently advocate for equality without fear of being accused of hypocrisy. Resisting the urge to allocate time, money, resources and space to ensuring men are given authority in the feminist project isn’t ‘silencing’ them – it’s a deliberately political act that reasserts the rights of women to lead ourselves in a world that would still prefer we toddled off to the parlour after supper so the men could smoke in peace.
Let’s ignore for a moment the fact that the world beyond feminist institutions (and often even within them) does little to nothing to prioritise inclusivity of anyone who occupies a marginalised identity. This ‘inclusivity’ that’s expected of us – the inclusivity that’s in fact demanded of us if we want to demonstrate the true spirit of ‘equality’ – is little more than replicated patriarchy. Consider the reasoning. We need men to speak if we want anyone to take feminism seriously. We need men to speak to other men if we want them to listen to our message. We need men to speak if we want to show that we’re not out to subjugate them all and install a matriarchy.
Really? We want to dismantle a patriarchal system which values men’s voices over women’s and prioritises them in almost every sphere that’s given value in the world, but if we want our movement to be successful in this venture we need to elevate men to the head of it?
None of that makes sense!
Men’s voices are considered to be fundamentally more authoritative than women’s – this is one of the core expressions of patriarchy and has been throughout all of history. So how is it remotely challenging that perception to insist that men’s voices are the only ones that will be heard on feminism?
Additionally, feminism and the treatment of women has always been constructed differently by men as a group than it has been by women. In our society, a man is able to consider himself a feminist (indeed, he’ll often be promoted by himself and numerous others as a feminist deserving of praise) simply because he says he won’t tolerate violence against women. But how does that same man react when a woman discusses sexual violence with him? Let’s say she argues that women should be able to walk wherever they want, whenever they want and trust that if something ‘bad’ does happen to them, the public and police response won’t be to issue warnings to women about modifying their behaviour. Is his reaction to listen to her input, acknowledge her experience and agree that, of course, she’s absolutely right – the emphasis should always be on a zero-tolerance approach to criminal activity and a blanket support for human-being women people? Or, as my own experience suggests, does he react by telling her that she’s wrong? That everyone has a responsibility to take care of themselves and make wise choices, that this isn’t victim blaming, it’s just common sense, that there are Bad People out there and we don’t always know who they are and how dare she or any woman tell him, a man, that he isn’t allowed to advise his daughters or wife or sister or friends that they need to take more care on the streets?
There are exceptions, of course. But in the vast majority of cases, when men speak to other men about feminism and gender equality, it is through the prism of protection and paternalism. Men, we mustn’t do this. Men, we need to take care of our women better. Men, we need to make a pledge to always be Stand-Up Guys. Very rarely will you hear these conversations being framed in ways that incorporate women as anything other than objects requiring masculine defence.
When this tendency towards paternalism is critiqued by women, it is us who bear the brunt of the resulting anger. Why aren’t you being more supportive of men? Men are just trying to help. You’ll never win men over if you keep telling them what they’re doing wrong. You’ll never get men onside if you keep being mean to them. Don’t you dare tell me that I don’t care about women. And then, the best one of all: You’re everything that’s wrong with feminism today.
If you’re still uncertain about the subtle ways in which this paternalism is enforced, consider the different ways men and women are treated when either group advocates vengeance for victims of domestic violence. Men are allowed to say things like, ‘I would beat the shit out of any man who was a wife beater,’ or, ‘Those bastard men who rape women are pigs and they ought to be castrated and then shot.’ Pop culture’s cup runneth over with stories of men banding together to ‘teach’ other men a lesson, while women have been conditioned to find this kind of vigilante behaviour attractive. This starring role of Woman Protector is almost exclusively assigned to men, and as reward for their efforts they receive standing ovations and showers of bouquets.
What happens when women say these things or act in similar ways? When women talk about protecting ourselves against violence? When women reference the steps we take just to walk to our cars at night? When we talk about what should be done with rapists and wife beaters and misogynists, or indulge in fantasies of what we might like to do to them? What happens when women stand in front of men and say, ‘This is what our lives look like and this is why the world is so fucked up. If you care about that in the slightest, you’ll stop telling me and other women what to do and you’ll start listening to what we think YOU can do to help make the world a better place’?
Wow. Fighting violence with violence, hey? That sounds a bit hypocritical. Shouldn’t we be arguing that all violence is bad, not just violence against women? Violence is never tolerable. Also, Not All Men are like that. I insist that you acknowledge Not All Men behave in this way before you make that argument, otherwise I’ll have no choice but to ignore everything you say and write you off as a man-hater.
Men cannot change the world FOR women, because men have no concept of what it’s like to live in the world AS women. They don’t know what it feels like to have their specifically gendered experiences either immediately discounted or assessed (unconsciously or deliberately) as exaggerated. They don’t know the trauma that accumulates from hearing constant commentary about all the ways in which they’re weak, how they inherently lack merit, how they possess less business acumen, how they cannot help but be overly emotional and irrational, how they could succeed just as well as the other side if they tried hard enough, how they’re all their own worst enemies and how in fact it’s other men who disadvantage men the most. Men cannot understand how infuriating it is to have circumstances of safety be reduced to behavioural change not in perpetrators but in victims. Even those opposed to victim-blaming attitudes can’t really appreciate the impact that being exposed to them has, especially when opposition to these ideas is often met with abuse and ridicule.
How can men possibly hope to change the world in all the ways that women need when half the time they don’t even realise we’re living on two different planes of the same dimension? We are the only ones equipped to lead the feminist fight because we are in possession of knowledge that can only be gleaned from experience. Surrendering control of our liberation to the same men who benefit from us being denied it isn’t just a dangerous exercise in irony – it’s a guaranteed way to ensure nothing truly changes.
Women are being killed on a weekly basis by men who hate them so much but want desperately to
control them. We’re raped, violated, abused, pushed around, undermined, ridiculed, mocked, beaten, bullied and degraded. And to make matters worse, we’re told that our complaints about these things are overwrought, hysterical and defamatory.
Suck it up, princess, the world isn’t fair. Get over it, it’s just a joke. A good cock up ya will sort you out.
And still they ask: Why do you hate men?
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10 –
HATE MALE
‘It’s really a Shame that a man wasted Sperm on a low life Cunt like you! Should’ve masturbated into the toilet!’
This was tweeted at me sometime in the early months of 2016 by a fellow using an obvious nom de plume. It’s fairly typical of the kinds of love letters men send me on the internet, right down to the questionable command of grammar and random capitalisation. It was also written late at night, which makes sense when you realise it’s part of the ritual he and his ilk need to prompt the sad, sweaty erections that precipitate the good old-fashioned hate-wanks that characterise the entirety of their interaction with women.
You might expect that being sent something like this would deeply wound me or at the very least hurt my feelings, but it mostly just amused me. Does Mr Anonymous think sperm is in such short supply that men are seriously required to pick and choose where they expend it lest they be guilty of endangering the species? Just think of all the other things my father could have done with his precious deposits if he hadn’t wasted it on a low life Cunt like me! He might have created some edgy art (it was the eighties, after all) or used it to fertilise a tree. Perhaps he could have ejaculated into an envelope and sent it to an unsuspecting lass alongside a note calling her a ‘fat-arsed whore who can’t get laid’, coincidentally pre-empting Twitter in the process. So many opportunities to really honour his ball boys, and he wastes them on making a wretched life like mine.
What a Shame!
Of course, I’m not meant to laugh at this. No, I’m meant to read it and feel humiliated and small. I’m meant to think of myself as a dirty, rank piece of shit whose lack of value is so profound that even a puff of jizz shot into a toilet represents more of an accomplishment than the entirety of my sad, sorry existence.
Reader, it doesn’t work. As I’ve said on numerous occasions, there are only so many times you can be called an ugly cumdumster whose twelve-inch vibrator probably doesn’t even touch the sides of her gaping cunt (actual marriage proposal sent to me by [email protected] – I said yes, obviously). All the hateful slurs, the misogynist attempts to undermine you, the furiously violent descriptions of what they’d like to see done to you (to save you the time of wondering, I’ll just tell you that it always comes back to rape and/or mutilation) . . . after a while, it all becomes white noise. Angry white noise, sure, but white noise nonetheless.
This doesn’t make the onslaught of it any less annoying. As much as I can genuinely, hand on heart, say that I do not care whether TruthSword45 and his cartoon avatar finds me repulsive or not, I do resent the tedious waste of time involved in having to read his nonsense at all. I get it, TruthSword – you think I’m a grunting hog with daddy issues who’s only angry about rape because it’ll never happen to me. I invite you to count the fucks I give in the field in which I store my fucks where there also happens to be no fucks left because the field is made entirely out of concrete and actually doesn’t even exist.
Listen, I’ve been the target of hostile online abuse for the better part of a decade. Long before we constructed lives for ourselves on social media, I was reading emails from men obsessed with musing about the state of my genitals, the instability of my mental health and the apparently deep and traumatising lack of attention I’d received from men my entire life, starting with my father. One of the first articles I ever wrote for a mainstream newspaper audience involved me disclosing the fact that not only had I had two abortions, I also felt no guilt or regret over them.
To say this didn’t go down well with the conservative News Ltd Sunday paper readership would be an understatement. A Current Affair even tried to do a story about it, which tells you all you need to know about the general public sentiment. I chose to ignore the requests for contact from ACA’s producers, largely because I’d actually rather wear a thermal suit made entirely out of soiled nappies than have that appearance on my résumé.
But this was my first taste of the kind of hostility that greets women who speak their truth, particularly to a mass audience. Abortion is legal in South Australia (where I was living at the time), and it’s provided for free through the public health system. In other words, I hadn’t done anything other than exercise my rights to access reproductive health care in a state that does not provide limitations on the number of allowable procedures. From a purely emotionless standpoint, this was no different to the time I had a potentially cancerous mole cut out of my right arm, except that skin cancer probably would have been easier to deal with than an unwanted baby.
After my abortion piece was published in the Sunday Mail, I was inundated with hundreds – and I mean hundreds – of emails and online comments about how disgusting and inhuman I was. Anything you can think of, I was called it. Slut, whore, ugly cunt who needs to learn how to keep her legs closed, selfish, irresponsible, stupid, murderer, baby-killing sow, slag and so on and so on. A guy wondered how someone as ugly as me could have found one man willing to fuck me, let alone two of them. Another agreed, stating I was ‘uglier than a dead dog on the side of the road’ and the very fact I’d had sex at all was a miracle.
People hear that a woman’s had an abortion, and they become giddy over the permission they feel they’ve been granted to degrade and humiliate her sexually. I knew this was what would happen when I wrote that piece, but I didn’t anticipate just how torrential the hate would be. I didn’t know that, years later, I’d still be receiving messages about it from Men’s Rights Losers all over the world, or that my apparent nickname at News Ltd in Sydney would be ‘Cankles McBabystopper’ (a term coined by the blogger Tim Blair, whose multiple paid Daily Telegraph blog posts about me include one titled ‘Transitioning’, where he uses a close-up photograph of the hair on my upper lip to ponder whether I might be turning into a man).
The fact is, women who put themselves out there have always been subjected to abuse. The intensity of that abuse has been compounded by the sheer magnitude of the online space, but it all spawns from the same motivation: to shame us into silence so that we scurry back to our little lives, leaving men to dominate and control all the power that remains. If we complain about the excessive cruelty used against us, we’re accused of being ‘too sensitive’. We can’t take the heat. We crumble at the first sign of opposition. We want to be treated like children. We’re babies who need to be taken care of. We need to toughen up, be more like men. Learn to roll with the punches, understand that everyone gets joshed and riled and we shouldn’t expect special treatment just because we’re delicate little baby girls who want to be given everything for free.
Allow me to tell you about the time I ruined a man’s life.
It was November 2015. Some guy had come to my Facebook page to tell me I would ‘jibber less with a cock in my mouth’, which was a new and imaginative pick-up line that I had not heard before.
I was disturbed by his comment not because it upset me, but because his avatar showed him photographed with his kids. This isn’t unusual; despite popular argument, men with children aren’t immune from holding repulsive attitudes towards women, nor does their paternity stop them from contacting those women in an attempt to harass them. Misogynists have to come from somewhere after all, and parental conditioning is usually a pretty good start. Unfortunately, the existence of children (particularly daughters) is often used to discount men’s capacity to be sexist. The theory is that being the lord and master of girls you’ve created somehow makes you more invested in the freedom and liberation of girls everywhere. Apart from that being patently untrue, it’s also pretty gross thinking. Girls don
’t become humans just because they’re related to you, and plenty of men see their daughters and wives as subordinate to them. Still, the argument that ‘he can’t be sexist because look, he owns a few women’ is still trotted out as if that somehow settles the matter. (See: Tony ‘one woman in the cabinet’ Abbott.)
Part of my tactic in fighting the abuse of women online has always been to signal boost it for the benefit of people who either don’t know what it’s really like or insist that women lie about how prolific and violent it can be. It’s reasonably effective, especially because it often results in even more abuse being directed my way. (Seriously – these guys need to get a new strategist; they kick so many own goals.) With that in mind, I screencapped this guy’s comment and wrote a separate post about it to demonstrate that yes, actually, men with children and wives and sisters and mothers can also be gross, misogynist pigs.
In response, a young man named Michael Nolan popped by to add his two cents.
‘Slut,’ he wrote.
Now, on the scale of abuse I normally receive, this doesn’t really rate much of a mention. As far as its capacity to cause an ouchy, it had about as much impact as the guy who contacted me yesterday to let me know I am a ‘stupid bad person’. Still, the casual arrogance of it annoyed me. This was a post that put on full display the kind of man I’m often told I’m making up or exaggerating. I had his photo, an example of his violent attitude towards women and evidence that he was raising children – but none of that mattered to a bro like Nolan. It was just another one of those jokes that women are expected to suck up and swallow without complaint so we don’t inconvenience the dudes who confuse being asked not to abuse us with being grievously oppressed. Nolan seemed to feel completely entitled to compound the intent of that humiliation by spitting ‘slut’ at me, just so that I and other cunt-whore-bitches like me would be reminded of what position of relevancy we occupy in the world.
Fight Like A Girl Page 16