Masculinism
What possesses people to be so cruel to one another? How do they justify it to themselves? How are people able to so thoroughly separate their conscience from their actions? On the one hand, if someone has perpetrated a wrong against another, it is easy to understand how that second person would retaliate and be able to justify cruelty in that situation. But how does a person knowingly and repeatedly cause another physical or emotional harm, if that person has done no wrong to them?
If you have any sense of right and wrong, how do you justify using and manipulating others for your own purposes, if in doing so you are causing harm to them? That’s the very definition of parisitism – a relationship in which you receive benefits, but at the expense of the other. All “real” parasites lack conscience, morals, sentiments – they are creatures of stimulus response. How can human beings lower themselves to this most inhuman level of behavior?
In patriarchal societies such as this one, women have historically been on the receiving end of all sorts of grievous injustices. Sexual politics have mostly favored men, to the point where some women view the wrongs done to them as some manifestation of fate, i.e. it is inevitable that a man will do them wrong. As the sexual climate has changed, and the pendulum has swung back to grant women more power, many do not use it merely to level the playing field, but to enact a reprisal, to perpetrate the same kinds of wrongs that were done to them.
It is much the same as how a battered child grows up to beat his own children as an adult. Why? Why would you do that? You’ve experienced that kind of hurt, and it was terrible, so how can you possibly do that to someone else? The way sexual dynamics work in American society now, though, women no longer have to have experienced that wrong in order to be capable of enacting it upon another. Chances are that they know another woman who was wronged by a man, have been influenced by them, or perhaps even raised by one. Through direct influence and through conversation, a veritable culture of female vengeance has emerged, only now it’s not a necessarily a response to anything, but a pre-emptive strike, an ideology of “I’ll fuck you before you fuck me”. Women who engage in this kind of behavior are worthy of being called “bitches”.
In women’s defense, I will say that men have not sat idle in this new climate, and have done their part to keep the scales balanced, sustaining the historical mistreatment of women – be it through physical or emotional abuse. Perhaps even the majority of men still carry in them the potential, even the predisposition to mistreat women. Is this enough to justify the woman’s new role of savage manipulation? Vengeance and counter-vengeance, the sexual climate has become something akin to competition – even combat – a race to see who can be the most cruel, and who can do it first.
I’ve been using metaphors like “battle” and “combat”, but a more common one to describe this tit-for -tat is “the game”. In the game, men and women both behave in ways that attempt to manipulate the emotions and thereby the actions of the other. Quite like a game it is, actually – chess, perhaps – with one person trying to predict and pre-empt the moves of the other. There is nothing wrong with prospective partners creating a challenge for one another (e.g. a woman playing “hard to get”); quite the contrary, it makes the prospect all the more enticing. However, once the waters have been tested, and once both people have a good feel for both each other and for what’s possible between them, the game becomes mostly obsolete. If the game or any form of emotional manipulation continues, such that it begins to damage one person or the other, then it is not only obsolete but immoral. This is the kind of behavior that I was referring to earlier, and which in fact inspired this entire article.
Sometimes a prospective relationship isn’t even at stake when this kind of manipulation takes place. It is far too common to see people play on the emotions of another for some personal gain – such as sex, financial compensation, or even comfort. There are countless ways that men and women can interact, but in any kind of relationship – be it friendship, romance, or sexual partnership, the utility has to flow both ways. As I mentioned earlier, if only one partner benefits, while the other gains nothing – or worse, is hurt by the exchange, then it is nothing short of parasitism. For women, it is the risk of being the “host” in this sort of relationship, fused with the feminist spirit of self-empowerment, that enables them to be the perperators instead. But hundreds of years and countless instances of the roles being reversed does not justify even one episode of this behavior. As for the men, they have no excuse at all. In the end, this is not about being a man or a woman; it is about being a human being – first and foremost.
So in this new sexual climate, what place is there for The Individual who does not wish to be immersed in all of the festering cynicism, antagonism, and manipulation? Is he to be an unfortunate casualty of the battle, even though he never bothered to pick up a weapon? The battle has become so prevalent throughout society that the unwillingness to fight has, for women, become an undesirable trait in men. That is to say, the guy who truly is sensitive, who truly does appreciate women, respect women, and who is kind – suddenly becomes something less than a man.
Feminism rightfully arose in response to male dominance, and will remain a force in gender politics until such a time that all things truly are equal. What is to be the male response to the kind of spiteful female antagonism that often comes as an offshoot of feminism? Well, just as we don’t speak of discrimination against “white” people, since they retain a very real sense of racial dominance, it seems silly to talk of “masculinism”, because we still live in a patriarchal society. But somewhere in the battle between feminism and patriarchy, are real people being burned by a conflict in which they never took part.
Perhaps the men amongst them should introduce a new movement – indeed, masculinism – in response to this travesty. Masculinism would not be a response to feminism, nor would it be a movement to encourage “vengeance” against or the mistreatment of women. Males who engage in such despicable behavior, contrary to public opinion, are not men at all. They’re assholes. Masculinism, then, is a movement to redefine what it means to be masculine, what it means to be a real man. A real man feels no compromise of his manhood in being sensitive or thoughtful or genuine, because he is so secure in it. A real man does not need to spar back and forth with women to reinforce delusions of grandeur or self-entitlements of dominance in gender politics.
Masculinism, then, is a response to this new sexual climate as a whole, a demand for a radical shift in the dynamic between genders. It is also a movement of common sense. Because deny it as we might, or feign indifference to maintain a good front, men NEED women just as certainly as any human being needs companionship. What is the use in pretending otherwise? In the end, once you’ve tired of the stupid volleying of power – which usually means you’ve just grown up – you’ll realize that is okay to be vulnerable, that it is a part of the human condition to invest yourself in others emotionally. So will the real men please stand up? It’s time to take the world back from the assholes. Perhaps then the real women will feel comfortable and safe enough to stop being bitches…