I’ve yet to decide if my arrival as a female MRA is due to finding men adorable and long suffering or finding other women insufferably fraudulent. I think it’s somewhere between the two.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve met some women I’ve loved and I’ve met some men I’ve hated, it’s just that I discovered, at some point, that it’s not because of their gender it’s because they are individuals with unique characteristics that I liked or loathed. People are people. They aren’t just a sign on the zodiac and they aren’t just their gender. Feminism disagrees and they want to taint half the species. It’s impossible to embrace feminism, if you’re an honest person, because feminism relies on you believing what amounts to an intellectual field of cow patties.
In 1991 I encountered Gloria Steinem’s scribblings, and Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth. Steinem adeptly explained a thing called Patriarchy. Wolf dealt with anorexia, mass media images that forced a debilitating, self-loathing, sense of inadequacy on the average girl, and she talked about Barbie.
I was never a huge Barbie fan. I preferred dollhouses where I could be God to a miniature world, solving house problems where there were no stairs to the third floor by having them fly as if in an invisible elevator. In my dollhouse world anything could happen. Barbie seemed large and grotesquely clumsy. Smaller was better. In fact, when my best friend and I played dollhouse we always fought over who got to play the baby because small and vulnerable was the best thing to be in our little world.
It’s not like the baby got the best speaking parts, it was just preferable to be the thing that got the most attention. Barbie presumably got attention because she had big boobs, perfect teeth, and designer clothing. That was stupid. Dollhouse kids got attention just because they were small and cried; much more in our realm of experience. As to Patriarchy, one thing I’m sure of in our miniature Patriarchal imitation world is that neither of us fought to be the dad.
The only other ongoing debate I had with my seven year old girl friend was over who was the smallest when we were born. Our fertile imaginations got quite microscopic. I think I won but I’m pretty sure she’d insist that she had won.
I can’t say why she wanted to be so bloody small but, for me, it was likely due to getting the crap beat out of me by kids of both genders on a fairly regular basis. I thought being small would both make them less likely to find me and would encourage those watching to step in and help me out a little more. Everyone fawned over little people.
Neither Steinem nor Wolf dealt with the actual issues or experiences that I could call to mind but they drew me into their literary bosoms easily because, though they couldn’t make me small, they offered me something quite awesome instead: the right to blame all my problems on other people. The only cost for this open licence to demand pity and compensation for declared unfairness was my honesty, integrity, and pride. I’m rather ashamed that it took me two or three years before I realized that cost was too great.
The Patriarchy was an interesting thing. As far as rule making goes, it was my experience that women led the field. Mom was the person I needed to please. She set the standards for behaviour and scholastic expectations and she meted out the punishment. Aside from those basic etiquette issues, it was the girls on my block and in my school that told me how to look, what to wear, how to act, what to feel, and what to be attracted to. Girls are pretty fucking hard to please. You know if you don’t please them, too, because the punishment is stiff for failure to comply; humiliation, a potential punch to the stomach, a whack with an umbrella, but the worst was social rejection: Not by one girl, but by them all, after secret meetings and much whispering.
Boys, on the other hand, were much easier to please. They liked it when I played sports, ran fast for the track team, or was willing to barrel down a whitewashed hill of virgin snow on my toboggan into the river they assured me was frozen over. They never lied about that, though they occasionally overestimated how thick the ice was. Pleasing women: An endless, thankless, difficult task. Pleasing men: A lot of fucking fun.
But these are childhood stories. By the time I encountered Steinem and Wolf I was 21 and had been through puberty plus some life experience. I’d moved out of the family home five years earlier, had already had a live in boyfriend in a relationship that led me to the book Men Who Hate Women And The Women Who Love Them, and pretty much given up on my romantic dreams of living a life full of passion and love.
I didn’t leave home because I had a bad family. They’re actually exactly what they were supposed to be. Sometimes living Leave It To Beaver is the best way to figure out what’s wrong with The Beaver. Everyone around me was studying and practising how to be someone everyone else can respect and forgot that self-respect was just as important. I suppose it’s natural for teenagers to rebel and I was born at just the right time to be a Vintage Goth. The black hair, heavy crosses made of irony, and Robert Smith with his cereal box octopus and smeared lipstick who was the hero of my disillusionment with the world.
I don’t know if you’re old enough to remember the octopus. It came in a little plastic bag covered in cereal bits near the bottom of the box and when you threw it at the wall it would slowly climb down. When it got covered in hair and/or dust bunnies you simply washed it in clear water and it was good to go again. Kind of like feminist Patriarchy Theory creates a new wave every time the old one is looking shoddy and not sticking very well.
The things that made me happy were very small. They’re still small. I collect finger puppets.
So, what’s a Woxan?
Despite the title of my article, I am not Woxan. I mock them because I’ve learned that you either laugh or you cry. The Woxan is a creature that took form while I wasn’t paying attention. After I turned away from the ideology that tried to tell me all the dads and humans with body parts I’d never have are, despite all evidence, more concerned with my destruction than busy worrying about their own lives, I just stopped paying attention. That’s near twenty years of festering cow patties.
I noticed when Feminists started calling themselves “womyn” to erase the “man” part. I noticed when The Vagina Monologues became trendy, along with saying the word “vagina” in general. I somehow missed the part where “rape culture” became a thing. And what a thing it is. A big fucking steamer. I’ve been raped and I can assure you that no one thinks it is okay. No one.
I also somehow missed the moment where it became bad to be a person who was born into a body you learned to like, bad to have all your limbs and organs functional, bad to be heterosexual, bad to be born white, and bad to have a penis. I missed when simple words like “privilege” stopped being something to be thankful and humble about and became the mark of Cain.
The thing about not being surrounded by bullshit is that you smell it really quickly and pungently when it crosses your path. I highly suspect that feminism, which is behind all these new trends, has saturated the world with their bullshit so thoroughly that what seems obvious has become nearly impossible for many people to notice. It’s not impossible… just nearly.
So here I am, a Vintage Goth, with not a hope nor a care in the world of fitting in with the mainstream patty whiffers, saying “Holy shit! Can’t you smell it?” For the women who have found careers and advantage in pretending the world doesn’t need or want men, I give you a new name. For those professional feminists, for those shameless promoters of histrionic victimhood, I give you a name free of any “y” chromosome. I call you Woxan.
I hear you roar and it’s fucking pathetic.
