Feminists love hating men, and they also love denying that feminism involves hating men. Just use Google to search for the words “feminism is not about hating men” to get a taste of the ambivalence today’s feminists feel about openly expressing their true contempt for men.
Now, deflection and deception of one’s true emotional nature is a human staple that goes back thousands of years: even the ancient Egyptians used cosmetics to pretty up their faces, a practice women still use today even when feminists half-heartedly tell them that pleasing men with pretty faces is wrong. Women still encourage men to share their feelings – and women explode into anger and reject those men stupid enough to take women at their word about this.
Because the expressions of women’s raw negative emotions are seen as a bit more acceptable than men’s, women are more likely to let loose their rage in public (and especially in private). This emotional repression of the dark demons of the human soul persists to this day: a certain public sense of decorum (and a lot of public shaming) still restricts the public release of emotions in both men and women. Feminists term this decorum “patriarchal repression” but the truth is that women are the real arbiters of what emotional displays are allowed: for example, the open expressions of men’s sexual desires are characterized by hypocritical feminists as “harassment” and “oppressive” even as feminists fight to “free the nipple” and demonize so-called “slut shaming.”
Twenty years ago, singer/songwriter/guitarist Alanis Morissette released her wildly successful, monster album Jagged Little Pill to rave reviews from feminists – even today, twenty years later, the album is still regarded (and celebrated) as a bold feminist statement, according to young female musicians among others. Alanis was such an attractive icon of feminism that she was cast in the role of “God” in the slacker vs feminist movie Dogma in 1999.
I confess, I also loved the album, not because it was feminist, but rather because it tore the mask off of feminism’s man-hate (misandry) in a way that was compelling and undeniable. I also loved it because Alanis’s unthinking conflation/confusion of tragedy with irony in her song “Isn’t it Ironic,” which unintentionally (and humorously) painted feminism and feminists as not too bright overall.
Recently, nouveau feminist and shark-jumping singer Taylor Swift introduced a new generation of fans to Alanis: she performed a duet with her at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. The song they sang, “You Oughta Know” boils with both feminist anger and faux demure womanly regret at a man after he dumps his girlfriend, supposedly for an older, more mentally healthy lover:
But like a hungover college tart waking up and facing a walk of shame after a night of debauchery with a random guy, my devoted feminist canoodle pillow Amanda Marcotte, writing in Slate, has similar regrets about today’s fainting-couch young feminists being exposed to the previously touted angry feminism of Morissette:
Alanis Morissette was a singer who, in the mid-1990s, capitalized on a small but growing trend of “angry woman” rock acts, such as L7 and Hole, and made an absolute killing, selling 33 million copies of her album Jagged Little Pill worldwide. But while her predecessors wrote songs protesting sexual harassment and rape, Morissette’s big hit protested guys who break up with you.
In contrast to sex-negative feminists who hate both sex with men, and men’s sexuality outright, Alanis was a sex-positive feminist who, nevertheless, showed that even feminists with supposedly positive sexual attitudes hated both themselves and men for their sexual choices. Marcotte desperately tries to gloss over this, comparing Alanis to “nice guys” who get angry when women subject them to what Warren Farrell termed “date fraud”: the implicit promise of sex by a woman in return for, say, a man paying for dinner, after which the woman’s promise is withdrawn:
Long before the terms “nice guy syndrome” and “friend zone” were created to describe men who think they are entitled to have a relationship with someone just because they do nice things for them, Morissette tore up the charts with a song about a woman who thinks the same way. “Would she go down on you in a theater?” the narrator of “You Oughta Know” plaintively asks about the woman her ex chose instead. “And would she have your baby?” Begging and clumsy emotional blackmail isn’t a good look on anyone, male or female.
Yes, whining like a jilted lover is not attractive, but neither are women who use deception and fraud to manipulate men. While men are not entitled to sex with women, men are entitled to feel angry and violated when women use the promise of a relationship to defraud men of their money, time and children – the same sort of anger Alanis sang about.
Of course, if the feminist demand for “equality” were actually honest, Marcotte might acknowledge that both men and women can feel a justified anger at being lied to. But because this type of equality is another feminist lie, all Marcotte can do is deflect the blame for it onto men, like all feminists do.
