Part 4 got pretty raw and stream of conscious-y there, especially at the end. These are all ideas I am still trying to work through and understand better myself, and the purpose of trying to write 100 blog posts, instead of like, just a handful of essays, is to keep the ideas coming out of my head and into a space where others can read them, talk about them and eventually maybe refine them and present them more coherently. I rarely get 20 separate viewers on this website in a month, so I know this is less about outreach then developing a message in the first place, and I want you to know that too, so that you can also think about organizing against patriarchal misogyny (or PM as I will start calling it here to avoid typing it out 100 times) and the people using it as a political weapon.
One important thing I brought up in part 4, that I need to keep working on, is talking about how Trumpism and Manosphere media personalities are having so much success making misogyny into a fun game or sport, even through the intense and large scale movements to confront sexual violence and harassment that have happened over the last decade. In part 4 I question whether a large part of that appeal is just that it is a space where young folks who are still trying to figure out things about themselves and what it means for them to be men can be safe and protected, even when they do weird, gross, and sometimes abusive things. PM says that, at worst, boys trying to look up women and girls skirts is behavior that deserves a slap on the wrist when a man/boy is caught doing it by a women, and wink if caught by another man. It makes as much light out of sexual violence as it can…as long as that sexual violence isn’t being committed by a group that the current patriarchy is trying to target as horrible monsters. I think that hypocrisy is a waiting avenue of attack against the ideology of PM.
PM requires men to believe that they are inherently monsters, especially in the ways they think about and act towards women, and that it is only their own society’s laws, norms and enforcers that really keep the monster under control. Instead of encouraging men to question how their ideas about sex, sexuality, and their own masculine identities are formed, it tends to just assume all “normal boys” experience the same kinds of pressures, media, and ideas about men as sexual beings, and that all men just want as much unfettered sexual access to the most idealized constructs of the female body, as they can possibly get. Publicly, as in, in the presence of women, PM tends to advance strict, religiously enforced morals about what should guide and limit men’s otherwise inexhaustible desire for access and control of women’s bodies…but in practice, in patriarchal safe spaces, there is a pretty thinly veiled mockery of those religiously enforced morals. That tends to be more overt, the more money and power the inner circle of the group is able to wield, and that is why at the highest levels of wealth and privilege it is not uncommon for “sex is power/power is sex” to spill over beyond rigid gender boundaries (see P. Diddy “freak outs” and RNC city Grindr activity). Within a PM world view, wealth and power is how men get freedom to explore sexual liberation and escape the codes and laws that prevent other people, including most other men, from being truly free to be their own sexual beings.
Which of course is bullshit. People are capable of creating relationships and communities where anyone can explore themselves and each other as sexual beings freely without any money or political power. People have been doing exactly that for a long time, and will continue to do so no matter how authoritarian and draconic the moral police become. So the “special thing” that PM has to offer men who tow the line is basically “here is a really shitty version of sexual liberation that will make you feel guilty for participating in, because it violates the moral standards that we try to teach everyone, and just excuse ourselves from when we have enough power, when we could just not do the moralization around rigid gender and sexual identities.” It is a hollow reward that only makes sense within the frame work that patriarchy is inevitable, even though it requires brutal levels of violent misogyny to maintain.
So why are so many men falling for this BS, and how do we counter it?