Sensitivity and Gender War

Men are less sensitive than women. Indeed, it is a common criticism that men are not sensitive enough, as if this were some sort of personal choice - but it's not. It's just that nature made men this way.

Not all men are insensitive, just as not all women are sensitive. Whatever the rule, there are always exceptions. There is, then, a minority group of sensitive men.

Here's where the irony begins. Women have long complained about men, and feminism has clothed these complaints with political rhetoric (equality, justice, etc), as if these moans emanated from a higher ideological plane.

The targets of these complaints are those insensitive men whose insensitivity rubs women up the wrong way. But, of course, these men are insensitive, so the complaints about their insensitivity don't actually register with them. They don't feel the pinpricks to their conscience, because this is the whole point to insensitivity. It's an armour that shrugs off the stones and arrows of life. It's a thick skin.

Sensitive men, on the other hand, hear those complaints and take them to heart. Because they have thinner skin. And they either feel guilty and become feminists themselves, nurturing the force that attacks them, or they take umbrage and counterattack the feminists.

This turns into a comedy. The thin skinned men lash out at feminists. The feminists see this as proof of rampant male misogyny and demonstrate their outrage. The thin skinned men they are attacking are in fact the very men that feminists would allegedly like men to be - sensitive. But it's that very sensitivity that now makes them feminism's greatest enemy.

Thick skinned men, on the other hand, shrug and move on, unable to see what the fuss is about. They don't understand why women need to be so thin skinned about things, and they don't see thin skinned men as real men - because they appear to be as petulant and thin skinned as women. So they leave the stage, while feminists and thin skinned men - natural allies - fight to the death.

Thin skinned men who hear feminist attacks on men assume that they themselves are the targets. Again, that is a feature of sensitivity.

Thin skinned women (the majority of women) hear the counterattacks on feminists and, because they are sensitive, assume they themselves are the targets. They may not have a single clue about the ideological aspects of feminism. They may not label themselves as feminists. But when they see one woman attacked they assume all women are under attack. Thus do women band together in outrage when one of their number is slighted.

Men do not band together in the same way, simply because the majority of them do not really feel threatened, and don't feel the need to make common cause with those who do.

This is why men don't appear to be able to defend themselves against feminism. Those that do are quickly outnumbered and, because they are sensitive, emotionally wounded. Thicker skinned men don't see that there's anything to defend against.

The ideology of feminism is a lie. Quite simply, there is no coherent ideology. All it is is a mass of sensitivities disguised as reason.

The ideology of feminism has been described in generational phases. There is first wave feminism, second wave, third wave, fourth wave, etc. This just shows that there is no ideology. Each generation of women, from mother to daughter, reinterprets feminism to suit themselves with little regard to what went before.

Liberalism is based on the writings of notable philosophers like Kant and Mills. Marxism goes back to the writings of Marx. Feminism has no touchstone, other than what women feel at any given time. Feminism is made up as it goes along. Women cherry-pick the bits of feminism they want and spit out the rest. Women feel that this is their right.

Women feel that everything is their right. Their greater innate sensitivity defines their need. They will vociferously feed and defend that need just as they would feed and defend their offspring. This is not a personal choice. Nature made women this way.

Sensitivity is not distributed equally among the sexes. It never will be. It is neither a gift nor a burden. It is no more a virtue than a womb or testosterone. It's just a biological fact.

The gender war is a comedy of errors and misunderstandings. It will never end.

Rubber Band Feminism

The home was always the woman's domain - her nest, her secret garden, her spiritual base. Feminism set out to change that. It called upon women to step out into the world and contest men for its dominance. It asked them to see beyond the kitchen sink and to expand their horizons.

That was then. What does feminism call for now? For men to come back and help them with the housework.

Stretch a rubber band and it always returns.

The Paradox

21st Century Feminism:

"I want equal treatment, I want deference and I want special protection. What do you mean that's contradictory? Why can't I have it all?"

Sex and Feminism

I remember, during the 80's, when the 'missionary position' was criticised by feminists. It smacked to them of male dominance, with the male bearing down on the woman. The fact that he was on top and she below seemed, in their minds, to mimic the patriarchal order. In a science fiction novel that I read by, I think, Joanna Russ, her lead character encourages her partner to make love to her with both of them lying sideways - 'because it's more equal'.

It's not equal. It's obsessive, not to mention uncomfortable if done in the rustic surroundings of Russ's novel.

Sex is nature at its most raw. It is, as Camille Paglia says, animal. We are biological animals, programmed to procreate - this is fact, not some cultural or patriarchal imposition.

Nature doesn't give a shit about equality. Equality has no meaning in the natural world. The position of our organs is what dictates the best sexual positions, not ideology.

But in Feminism's eyes, everything is a conspiracy.

Feminism Lesbianism

I wrote here that Feminism is not really about equality. I will go further and say that Feminism is not really about women - or rather, all women. Feminism, at its heart, is concerned only with lesbianism.

Feminist lesbianism despises men, for it has no actual use for them. But it also despises heterosexual women. It hates the way they contort their lives in order to attract men. It hates their overwhelming desire to read heterosexual romance novels and watch heterosexual romance movies, consuming these genres in larger numbers than men consume theirs. It hates heterosexual romance, period. Because it involves that other hated figure - men. It hates the outcome of that romance - children. It hates the whole business of childbirth, nurturing and all the other things that seem to take up so much of women's time. It can hate all these things honestly and without contradiction because, of course, lesbians only desire other lesbians. Lesbians view children the same way men do, for the chances of having to carry them inside themselves are slim. They also view heterosexual women the same way that men do, seeing them as stupid, easily led and incapable of shaping their own lives.

Heterosexual feminists defeat themselves with contradiction. They decry being turned into sex objects by men, then defend the right to wear sexy and revealing clothing in public. They condemn men's commercialisation of women's bodies when they pay prostitutes for sex, but then defend the prostitute's right to work, free from the interference of the state. They demand the right to succeed in the workplace just like men, for women can focus on their careers just like men, then demand that other women look after their children for them while they do so. They demand the right to abort foetuses, at any time, then condemn men for being cruel and heartless. They claim that women are, in fact, the same as men, and can do anything that men can, with calls to let them serve in frontline armies, for example. Then they campaign to end violence against women - and only women - as if women could not defend themselves and needed extra-legal protection.

Lesbian feminists don't have to worry about making themselves look incoherent with such demands. There is nothing in feminism that contradicts lesbianism. And that is because lesbianism is what feminism is really about.

'I'm also very aware why very masculine men are not represented in academe. Very masculine men cannot sit still long enough. And so all the ideology of feminism is coming out of these women who are married to wordsmith men, who are not that combative or confrontational to begin with, because the really masculine men, the high-testosterone men, are so restless they can hardly sit still in class.

'People of the white upper-middle-class professional elite have very little direct contact with working-class men, even though the working-class men are everywhere around them and are keeping everything going. They are the ones who are the janitors, the construction workers, the plumbers, the police and firemen, and so on. It's everywhere.
But the world that those men have created works so well, they maintain it so assiduously, that there has been a contempt on the part of these complacent, pampered, coddled upper-middle-class people who are spouting a lot of this rhetoric. There's this arrogance that masculinity isn't something that we need anymore--this is the Gloria Steinem line: Masculinity is something that is pernicious and is the cause of all wars and destruction and violence and battering against women, and slowly we're going to be programming it out of our youth.

'I said it in the Playboy interview: All it takes is one natural disaster for that entire artificial world to come crumbling down, and suddenly everyone will be screaming and yelling for the plumbers and the construction workers. Only masculine men of the working class will hold the civilization together.

'I'm very, very worried about this new kind of bourgeois imperialism which predicates the ultimate human type as someone who is good at sitting still at a desk.'
Camille Paglia

Feminism is not really about equality. In its post-war form it emerged from the Left's view of class consciousness - sex consciousness if you like. It is, therefore, a form of sectarianism.