To the Feminists

 
     In my youth I went along with the feminist outlook. In college the
Center for Women's Studies was my study hall. But at 22 years old I ended
up in the woods with a bottle of wine and a package of sleeping pills
inside me and got a whole new outlook on sanity.
     In the past several years I have grown less and less able to relate in
a positive friendly way towards women generally. I am emotionally wary when
any women are around because all of them will at some point throw me into a
choice between forsaking my honorableness and personal dignity or getting my
feelings brutally trampled.
     The women all appear to do the same to each other. Most of them appear
to me to be coping by either maintaining intense formality with all other
women or by forsaking any attempt at maintaining dignity or honorableness
with the other women. Those who chose to stay connected have to establish an
intellectually suffocating undeclared psychic hierarchy. Many feminists
describe men participating in this with women in the world of big business,
and condemn the guileless techniques the men use to protect their feelings.
     Somehow many apparently sensitive intelligent women fail to note the
relation between hurt feelings and war-like behavior when engaged by
an expressively lifeless person committed to boy scout dignity and
honorableness. One feminist author even went as far as to suggest that her
daughter, who she unabashedly describes as a brutally inconsiderate,
hysterical whining brat, should get the same respectful encouragement in the
economy accorded her two lively but considerate sons.
     My approach so far has been purely defensive. If the woman oppressing
me shows any openness to promoting my well-being then I make my best effort
at reasoning with her. If words fail to make a difference or I see no
possibility of compassion from her then I choreograph her out of that
aspect of my life, with as little character condemning as possible.
     As a result I have little or nothing to do with any women, even my
girlfriend and a sister who lives half a block away. I try to get to know
men at home or in the neighborhood as much and as fast as looks voluntary on
their part and emotionally safe for us. I keep the cost of staying at my
house low enough that no-one leaves for lack of money.
     Men seem to have all the conscious interpersonal subtlty of an ice
cream truck so I wrangle with them also. I deem that both the vicious bitch
and the table face buddy are mentally ill; the result, I believe, of dog eat
dog society.
     In my life I have only seen directly connected, long term kindness
among people who were "on the clock" in a male dominated business or in a
tight conceptually bonded group. I mistrusted the feelings too much to
resist eviction though. Work in those groups looked like a form of emotional
blinkering, like alcohol or prozac or a telephone friendship; a setup for a
terrible crash when the avaricious bedrock decided to shift or anything
emotionally deep touched anybody.
     I think people invent religions, clubs and political action groups at
least partially to fake a society. I explored that a bunch and found the
same feebleness of foundation as at a job. They all require intellectual
scapegoats whose villianous image must be preserved at all costs. I could
not forsake their scapegoats so I was a poisonous influence and had to be
kept at a formal distance. Notably these groups encourage fairly horrible
humiliating expression towards their scapegoat people, some even to the
point of sexual rape, serious injury or murder, but always inclusive of
finding ways to hurt their feelings.
     The successful genuine societies I've read about in National
Geographic invariably make the mistake of permitting, even encouraging, a
verbal definition of their society. Thus they eventually get classed as a
unifying scapegoat by a conceptual group. Those that aren't destroyed
outright get poisoned so bad by hurt feelings that they completely lose
their cohesion, their members becoming committed to some form of blinkering
adaptation to dog eat dog society.
     I believe that is what has happened a lot in America; to the point
that almost no-one I've ever met has significant experience observing an
unblinkered sincere society. We all watched our societies fade and are thus
lacking in confidence. But genuine love happens in my life to some measure,
regardless of deterent. I plan how to meet it.
     Making society or remaking a society looks logically absurd to me,
since any genuine fondness out of me is destroyed by discovering that I'm
the object of that. But especially I reject any theory of society that
advocates deliberately hurting the feelings of random victims, such as
"fuck'em if they can't take a joke", or the mockery of someone's birthday
at Rock 'n Rodeo, or the behavior advocated by Reevaluation Co-counseling,
or the feminist rationalizing of being a heartless bitch.
     In my old age I've even gotten shy of making a point of unity out of
any heartless focus, such as working in the industrial world, watching
television, playing a radio, driving in town, eating in a restaurant, or
analytic discussion that doesn't actually matter to me.
     That I've seen, anyone who encourages me to be actively heartless
towards someone will eventually direct that same form of heartlessness
towards me. Anyone who condemns my emotional self-defense, or expresses
bloodless enthusiasm for something I've created, I also take as a warning;
of the spirit that drove me to kill myself.
     40 years of devotion to a conceptual identity has put in my life quite
a bit of wonder for an indolent person to want to step in and own if they
can only figure out the right words to trick or shame me into allowing it.
The feminist concept of what I owe to people devoted to a life of crippling
self-pity doesn't wash for me. I hold that if the spunky male entrepenuers
are denied their current sovereignty then we will all lose the fondness
that drives them. We will have only indolent men and we will eventually live
like eastern europeans in heavy pollution, terrible poverty and random
violence.
     One of my roommates, who had never shown much interest in getting to
know me, sat on the porch with me one day to discuss his woman trouble and
his life direction. I'd had many long discussions with his mother, and had
had his girlfriend as a roommate, so I had some opinions but he left
without the answer he wracked his brain for. This essay is especially for
guys like him.
     Unlike me, that day he downed enough booze and pills. I did not expect
that at all. Like me when I did it, he was quite at peace with his fate. He
was just carefully removing all doubt about his assessment. Later that day
he visited many other friends of his for a similiar final gesture. From his
description, his death was euthanasia to cope with cronic hurt feelings.
His mother, who liked to visit or go out with him once a week or so, had
left town a couple weeks before to live elsewhere for awhile.
     His seriously rocky relationship with his girlfriend was at a point of
estrangement. She had just spent a week visiting a fellow out of state who
she had met on the internet. For a few days he'd gone in and out of getting
numbed out and stupid enough with beer to call her and express his agony in
a pale echo of the totally undignified inconsiderate manner that she had
done likewise with him for several months living at my house. She demanded
that he call when he wasn't drunk. She had her own cronic agony.
     She was raised by a lesbian couple and several of their friends. Often
she would remark to me of what a trial that was to live in a home with
feminine cathartic free for all, though that was where she was living again
when he was calling.
     I called his mother and girlfriend, when I found out several days 
later that he'd died, to tell them. I skipped the funeral at his mother's
church. I credited the religion with contributing to his paradigm of
melodramatic autonomy, that I believe was the root of his and my terrible
heartache.
     All the women he and I knew were feminist. Our lives were oriented to
somehow make friends with girls within that outlook. I tried to get some of
the women at that Center for Women's Studies to at least discuss the
possibility of an equally horrible emotional sexism against men, but I
lacked whatever was needed to win an interest. I was the elephant man.
     A year or two after my feeble suicide I had established an emotionally
supportive group household that (unknowingly) permitted me to commence a
two year study of feminine life, by focusing every waking minute on my
emotional condition to the exclusion of all analytic creativity. The
experience left no further confusion about heartache and completely
shattered my presumption of feminine innocence.
     Women were relatively nice to me while I was so much like them and
many men adored me, but what the other people were doing with our shared
melodrama seriously disappointed me. The men were utterly, mindlessly run
by seductions and commands from me and the women and the external society. I
saw none of the men consciously originate anything that touched my
feelings. The women were quite creative with emotional interplay, but with
not a flicker of fidelity. They focused incredibly intense seductions and
commands on each other in a massive and competitive psychic brawl that had
all of them reeling constantly, from confusion and tragic disappointment.
     What I can call friendship was not even a possibility. The boy scout
ideals of doing a good turn daily or being sincerely reverent looked as
ridiculous as a mouse befriending an owl. None of the men showed any
awareness of my specific manipulations of them. A lot of the women spoke of
men faking innocence, I think actually believing that to be possible.
In the whole two years no-one remarked about me having changed, even at a
full scale family reunion. I really don't think anyone noticed.
     But I noticed huge differences. I became the object of all the
harshness that the feminist writers complain about. In serious discussion
my viewpoint was crap to everybody. Men spoke of me as cute and little,
though I'm six foot three. Mechanical or analytic challenges put my brain
into some kind of strange paralysis which the mockery made considerably
worse. Though my physical endurance was better, heavy lifting was dangerous
for getting pulled muscles. For the first time I discovered bruises
actually do turn a genuine purple color, not just in the comics, and they
can take several days rather than hours to heal. I ate maybe a third the
quantity I was used to and still felt bloated a lot. Overcooked food took
on much greater appeal. I actually recognized value in soup and tea. Ice
water showed itself to be a highly effective mood calming drug. Driving a
motor vehicle was quite dangerous, as if I had never done it before.
Cooking, which I always invent on the spot, was much easier and more
delightful with a written recipe, even for something as simple as hot
cereal, so I wrote a bunch of my own instructions.
     I was enormously inspired to create artwork, for the effect it had on
my feelings during its creation as much as the interplay with others and the
echos later. I drew countless pastels, wrote poems and songs, rearranged the
house furnishings, made unusual arrangements of food, and eventually a quilt
and a puppet show. I read a girl scout handbook and tried many new ideas
for conversational style with others. I became a magician at house
meetings.
     And I felt a deeper lonliness than I'd ever known before, like I was
somehow living unseen by all the others. I never did get brutally loud like
some of the other women. I could not join the brawl, I was too horrified.
So I remained invisible, like the other men; like my mother and the mother
of the fellow who killed himself. In the melee no-one could safely present
their being in a gentle way.
     I went on a road trip with two other women and a man who appeared to
also be like I was being, but from birth. None of us were coupled and no
flirting occurred. We went to a rural property to camp for a day and right
away all of us took our clothes off, not to swim or sunbathe just to be free
of them. The clothes were unnecessary there; until one of the women read
over my shoulder part of the journal I was keeping describing my feelings
about each of them and the course of the day.
     I allowed her to read it, hoping to break out of this terrible
invisibility somewhat, without recourse to the normal emotional brutality.
She looked hurt and the invisibility deepened even further. The others all
put their clothes back on and went to visit a public swimming hole. We
became more clearly a gang of marauding indolent children, seeking novelty
of any kind for a respite from the barrenness of our spirits; bound
together solely by the car and the enormous distance from secure
familiarity. We collected treasures on the ocean beach and watched a
constellation, that I've never seen before or since, rise over the ocean in
a perfect giant V. We shared a special and memorable period in spite
ourselves.
     Other than a four mile foot race that I trained for, I made no attempt
at any comventionally masculine endeavor while carrying this handicap of
emotional focus. And I made no attempt to excel in the foot race. I didn't
even give any thought, let alone writing, to the obvious moral dilemma
around me, presuming that that was best left for when I returned to my
normal identity. I have this same view about any feminist woman wrestling
with morality while remaining obsessed with the condition of her feelings to
the point of mental paralysis.
     Feminists have expressed to me either the view that men are pretending
not to see the psychic brawl happening around them, and are actually just
as heartless as a woman, or that biology has locked women into their
emotional awareness and feeling based identity, so that our society must
incorporate feminine hell in order to be fair.
     I certainly had no clue, in my youth, that the women around me were so
coldly self-obsessed and I still actually do my best to promote the
well-being of those around me short of a direct attack on their part; and
more to the point, I am an entirely average man in this way, to the best of
my understanding of my associates. While watching the interplay of feelings
continuously, I never once observed a man consciously sabotaging anyone's
well-being unless under direct emotional duress from that person, and even
then only to the degree necessary to physically escape. I befriended one
hot-headed man who clearly was on a frightening hair-trigger that I never
saw spring even when I spaced out a life jacket that I could not afford to
replace. I saw men mindlessly parrot cruel behavior and remarks without
noticing the effect. I note the same in myself, even now that one would
think I had control of it. I can only prevent this in myself by avoiding
any relaxed time among cruel women. I am just as stupid a man as I ever
was.
     I certainly don't go for the idea that a woman cannot simply take a
conceptual identity in order to obtain male priviledge. I've known two
women who did and they had ambition put on greased wheels. If a woman drops
her right to absurd self-pity and engages her mind and body in genuine
decisive action, she's Joan of Arc, all sexism vanishes.
     The real issue to me is human kindness to both sexes. I need the lack
of real kindness between women to be put squarely on the table and the
expectations of male behavior to be based on a presumption that the men,
and the children, will unconsciously and relentlessly echo that standard
regardless of any promises, intent or artificial police action.
Particularly I want sexual rape recognized as a crude form of the kind of
heartless power expression what women do with each other and with men
routinely.
     I need lonliness, and the feeling of one's gentle feminine spirit
being unknown, to be overtly defined and recognized among women. I need
visible danger signs allowed and displayed in the bullpit of normal
relations when women are present in their usual mode of heartlessness. I
need for feminists to deal directly with this traditional criminality that
only women can see, to either to do something about it or to openly approve
the mindless unconscious echoing of it.
     In my life I will name this criminality and separate myself from it by
whatever means necessary. When I have to deal with a man echoing it, I will
give him something kinder from myself to echo. I will define love as a real
wish to be physically with someone and a wish to totally actually know
them and be known by them; a feeling, not an opinion, unrelated to money,
christmas cards, and friendly one-liners. I will define all other
interpersonal human interest as predatory and self-centered, not
necessarily harmful but definitely a risk of hurt feelings with no hope of
appeal.
     But all of this so far has been addressing the feminist appeal as if
it were sincere. I still hold out for that being possible at least with
some women. The other possiblity is that the arguments and campaigns are
solely motivated by a conviction that men are allowed to have more fun with
the toys and opportunities of the modern economy, and that maybe they can
be pussy-whipped into sharing more. I think that fun, as the women I've
known use the term, is an experience solely possible while entirely focused
on feelings. Hense few of the men are having more fun. Those men who focus
on feelings a lot inevitably miss out as much as any woman, or maybe more
so. For myself, fun is a pale worthless substitute for spiritual wonder,
and that I have seen, all of the Top Gun sort of fellows hold that view
also. I use the term fun because women do, not because it motivates me at
all.
     I wish all the feminists that actually care would walk a mile in my
kind of shoes.



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