I have concluded elsewhere that men as a group owe no special collective favor to women as a group, any more than Democrats as a group would owe any special collective favor to Republicans as a group. In view of the objective political situation of men in Western civilization, such is the only conclusion to which moral consistency would lend itself.
However, I know that plenty of feminists would take issue upon this point. And being feminists, they can do no less. If they agreed with this way of thinking, they would no longer be feminists. And why? Because the entire feminist enterprise is constructed around the overarching and atmospherically all-pervading premise that men are the problem. This is so because feminism is a hate-fueled, anti-male, female-supremacist movement, and such a movement couldn’t possibly embrace the view that men and women are BOTH the problem. No, that wouldn’t work – it would bust their gearbox all to hell!
[quote style=”boxed” float=”right”]The fruits of feminism bespeak an enterprise embued with the spirit of moral rapacity…[/quote] If in fact men are the problem as feminism supposes, and consequently that women are not, then it would follow that men specifically are under some form of obligation which would translate as a debt owed to women. And such indeed summarizes the general wind that has wafted from the direction of feminism and spread widely into other quarters. That is why I say that the feminists would take issue with the idea that male and female are political parties: because it implies that men and women are equal cutthroat gangs competing equally to cut each other’s throats. The feminists would favor a scenario in which one of those gangs (men) would bare its collective throat voluntarily to the gang wielding the knife.
But what does it mean to say that “men are the problem”? What is this statement really driving at? Which “problem” does it refer to, exactly? I have implied that this idea lies at the root of a world-view. A paradigm. But how can we spot it in action? What signs or tracks does it leave?
Here is what to look for: any time a woman does something notably blameworthy, or any time something goes awry between a man and a woman, a feminist will nearly always search for a way to either get the woman off the hook, or reduce her share of blame to a barebones minimum. Female wrongdoing will always be extenuated in whatever way possible, if not denied altogether.
The bias is persistently male-negative. It is evasionary of any realization, or any frank admission, that women in the depth of their nature are just as rotten as men. You can almost hear the female-justification hamster spinning its little wheel into overdrive in the backs of feminist heads, any time the least shadow of womanly or girlish malfeasance confronts them. They are not a bit concerned to know what actually IS; rather, they fervently wish to know what, according to their template, must be. It is a deeply rooted emotional reflex which transfixes the core of their world like a pivot or an axle or a black-hole singularity.
In fact, let’s give it a name.
Let’s call it the “must-be” maneuver. Yes! This little trick is the alpha and omega, the sum and substance, the necessary precondition for everything that feminism seeks to put about in the world. It must be that a man is to blame in every argument, it must be that he doesn’t listen, it must be that he is insensitive to her needs, it must be that he is using male privilege, it must be that he has control issues, it must be that he has anger management issues, it must be that he is “condescending” her, it must be that he feels threatened by intelligent women, it must be that she was violent in self-defense or if not, it must be that she attacked him pre-emptively. On it goes.
And should it prove impractical to pin the blame on a particular man, it is always possible to fall back upon men or maleness in the abstract: it must be the patriarchy which oppressed her into lying, killing, cheating, stealing or stumbling! It must be male-dominated power structures which drove her to anorexia or smashed her head against a glass ceiling!
Inherent to the must-be maneuver is the exclusion of examination. A commonsense, rough-and-ready calculus might suggest to the layman that male input is to blame in at most half of the suggested cases, and that prior to concluding what must be, we should interrogate the full range of what might be. However, such a proposal is anathema to the feminist paradigm, and if you presume to make it, it must be that something is amiss in your character, your education, or your political leanings.
I cannot overemphasize the formative foundational character of the must-be maneuver. I could even call it theological or cosmological: “In the beginning, Goddess created man and woman. And Goddess said, ‘Let man be the problem – for verily it must be so.’ And behold, it must be so.”
[box type=”alert” icon=”none”]In a compressed way, the must-be maneuever fits the model of Kant’s hypothetical imperative: “If you wish feminism to be viable, then the principle that men are always at fault must be reiterated at every possible opportunity.”[/box]
This idea that “men are the problem” is an eternal unsupported premise, and like the god of the infinite regress, prior to everything in every way. It is never a point of arrival but always a point of departure. Feminism did not give birth to this idea – the idea gave birth to feminism! Feminism grew from the idea and not the reverse. At no point did feminism ever not contain this idea, and at no point was feminism not contained by this idea. At no time did feminism ever go in quest of the idea and finally get to it by any chain of reasoning – the idea was always present at the outset! And had it not been present at the outset, feminism would never have set out.
Feminism never studied the world in order to formulate the idea, but rather studied the idea in order to formulate the world, for it is by light of the idea itself that feminism seeks to know what the world “must be.” Yes, men are the problem – and come hell or high water, the world according to feminism must be shown to reflect this!
Such is the platform on which feminist ideology asserts its political claim against men on behalf of women: that men, being the collective source of a unique and historically-rooted trespass against women, are under a collective moral obligation to make good.
When we scalp the duff down to the bedrock we uncover, in the end, manichean dualism – a cosmology in which good and evil (or light and dark) are separate cosmic principles eternally at war with one another. Further, the principles are said to be perennial and uncreated: they did not come about due to interactions in the ecology of occurrence, but were present from the very foundation of the world. They are not different branches on the same tree, but different trees altogether- and they grow from different roots. As such, they can never coherently exist side by side because they share no genetic mutuality – they will forever bear the stamp of their separate beginnings, and they will harbor mutually irreconcilable systems of logic. Accordingly, their relationship is and must forever remain paradoxical and fraught with tension.
In the manichean cosmology of feminism, male equals darkness or evil, and female equals goodness or light. There are NO zones of gray. There is no spectrum. There is no continuum. For feminism, man equals bad and woman equals good, and if at times woman appears to equal bad then it must be that appearance is not reality in that particular case, and so a contorted explanation must ride to the rescue and set things straight!
In feminism’s paradigm, man equals bad and woman equals good. And in the feminist mind, this correlation can no more be established by any chain of demonstration than the dualism itself can be said to have evolved historically. For just as the manichean duality was prior to all things in the order of creation, so likewise it must be prior to all things in the order of feminist logic. To demand that the truth of it be proven, would decentralize and desacralize it. This in turn would radically deconstruct the entire feminist enterprise.
This has consequences for the two-party model of gender politics. The feminists want to place women on a footing of moral superiority to men, which in turn implies deferentiality or servility by men. Men, being one with the principle of darkness, must in theory be taught to respect their betters – who are one with the principle of light! This indeed postulates a kind of political struggle if you want to call it that, but it is a one-sided struggle: men must be forced to “surrender”.
Stated in such terms, the “political struggle” sounds more like plain and simple warfare.
But in fact political struggle is not quite the same as warfare. Although it is true that political parties are not deferential or servile toward each other, the situation differs from war in that the parties understand they are governed by rules of play which in theory do not include ultimate subjugation of one side by the other. That is to say, the Republicans at least in theory do not have as a goal making the Democrats grovel, or vice-versa.
(Von Clausewitz famously called war “an extension of politics by other means”, and I will leave it to the reader to reflect upon this privately, since it would make too much of a tangent to the present discussion.)
Thus, no feminist who is truly a feminist could accept the two-party model of man-woman relations as a set way of life, for that would imply that good and evil are somehow not subject to a moral comparison – which in turn defeats the purpose of the manichean paradigm as an occult motor of the feminist project. And why? Because if good is not “better” than evil, if light is not “better” than darkness, then there remains no validating metaphysic for female supremacism and man-hating as a whole. And I can assure you that feminism bereft of those things would be like unto a banana which is all peel!
Thus, it is essential to the collective purpose of the women’s movement that the movement be engaged in a manichean struggle with an eternally culpable foe who must be vanquished.
Granted, if you put the question point-blank, most feminists would disavow the manichean paradigm as I have described it. But this is less of a contradiction when you realize that stated individual beliefs and unstated collective intentions can easily go their separate ways. Therefore, as a famous philosopher once put it: “By their fruits ye shall know them.” And the fruits of feminism bespeak an enterprise embued with the spirit of moral rapacity and undertaken with a view toward conquest. Any feminist who tries to talk you out of this critical insight is playing the game of cognitive fragmentation.
