I’m not a card-carrying feminist, but more of the accidental feminist variety. I’d reluctantly gone to two women’s lib meetings when I was at CU, and thought: meh; how very revolutionary to burn yer bras. The accidental part concerns the fact that I labored in many traditionally ‘male only’ venues: construction crews, learned carpentry, worked ‘maintenance’ for the City of Cortez to make enough money to go to massage therapy school, later built a house with Mr. wd, learned to lay river rock, cold-chisel paving stones, and all that. I got my first construction job after being pinched in bum by some asshat where I was waiting tables in Breckenridge, CO; I said fukkit, threw my apron on the bar, and got the hell outta there.
Luckily, Mr. wd is also by way of an accidental feminist, and taught me a few more tricks of the trade when we built our house, and was hired by a number of lesbian couples to build their houses, and most especially to teach them and their female friends how to build: plumb, square, measure, cut, and fasten. When I found a vintage T-shirt with the logo above in our local thrift store a decade ago, he had a hella lot of fun wearing it.
But more seriously, when I read the following exposé, it nearly blew the top of my head off. I’m not on Facebook, so I can’t peek in to any of the following on Julian Vigo’s page even if I knew which one of the dozen were hers. But I do trust that all of the conversations actually happened. What I’d like to know is if readers have any idea how ubiquitous this ‘radical feminist misandry’ has become. Unless I miss my guess, it pre-dated the #MeToo movement having gone full-tilt McCarthy wild, but…easily my guess may be wrong.
From ‘The Spawn: Feminism’s Misandry Problem’, Julian Vigo, counterpunch, March 30, 2018
“According to Greek myth, the King of the Titans, Cronus (Latin: Saturnus), heard a prophecy that one of his children would overthrow him. In response to this prophecy, Cronus, father to the gods Demeter, Hestia, Hera, Hades and Poseidon by Rhea, devoured his children as soon as they were born to prevent his loss of power. Zeus narrowly escaped this fate as Zeus’ mother fed Cronus a rock dressed in baby clothes which Cronus assumed was his.”
“Through artistic representation, the myth of Cronus has come to be understood as a conflict between youth and old age in addition to those with power who fear losing it to the younger generations.
This story of Cronus is what came to mind this past week when I found myself set upon by dozens of so-called “radical feminists.” I am obliged to put this term in quotation marks to refer to these women since this brand of radical feminism seems to have been hijacked by individuals who are very much out of touch with what feminism is about (eg. women), much less anything related to the tenets of radical feminism. By all accounts from what I have witnessed this past week, what these women believe to be feminism is merely a vindictive table-turning of history, dare I say a buffet of those women who are in any way tainted by their proximity to the male body—especially those women who have not spawned Satan’s seed: the male child.”
The author writes that the beginning of this high-octane contretemps occurred when she’d been considering going to a feminist even this summer, and given that she’s a single parent with two small children, she’d written to the organizers asking if she could bring them along, especially as it wasn’t local, so would involve more than a single day.
“This is the exchange I posted on my Facebook wall:
‘I just received this as an email for a “feminist” event:
“It is a female-only space so we do not allow male children.”
My response: “You have just written the most fucked up email I have ever received in my life. Happy not to attend. Wow!!!”
From this post I received comments like, “Why is that fucked up?” where I was expected to explain to an adult female who considers herself a feminist why barring a two-year old because he is male might present a moral problem for any group which not only calls itself “feminist” but which seeks to liberate all females from sex-based oppression whereby the mothers of these children are necessarily excluded. The irony in posing such a question made my head reel, but no sooner could I realize the incongruence of this assertion did another woman write, “I actually don’t understand, either. I’m not being snarky. I really don’t see why it’s wrong to have female-only spaces.” I had to underscore many times in these conversations that my objection had to do with being asked not to bring a two-year-old male to a feminist event, not the fact that, as per many social events, children in general were not welcome. My disagreement had nothing to do with “female-only spaces,” but dealt with the more serious matter of excluding small male bodies because of some deeply prejudiced views of males from birth.”
Vigo writes that she proceeded to inform these women that she’d had to quit various Facebook groups in the past because some feminists had actually promoted the abortion of male fetuses to counter the injustices of historical femicide and misogyny. Apparently she wrote that barring male children from the event was analogous to that sort of eugenicsism, and protested the ‘demonization’ of male bodies as a political strategy, and good on her!
“I even, somewhat ironically, invoked the term “feminazi” demonstrating how a word so often misused by men’s rights activists, actually makes sense in this specific context of willing and orchestrating away males as a class, all under the guise of “safe spaces.” Certainly, “female-only spaces” is the lie these “feminists” tell themselves to commit to an essentialism of male guilt through birth.
Some women chimed in stating that small boys under five should be acceptable to bring, but such sentiments were rarely allowed to remain unchallenged with others angrily writing about male babies “tak[e] the attention from their mothers,” that female babies “deserve to have female-only spaces,” that “[w]omen have the right to not want penis-having people of any age, in a group or gathering,” and one woman even maintained that young boys “absorb misogyny.” It is as if these women emerged from medieval alchemy whereby the site of evil, the male as misogyny par excellence, is the contagion and not the social and political structures into which we are all inculcated.” [snip]
“And then things went off the rails. And when I say “off the rails” I mean Cronos eating all of his children in one spoonful off the rails.”
Here are a few disgusting (and bogus in the extreme) examples she narrated:
‘5 year olds, and even toddlers rape’; ‘a 2-year-old my feminist friend was baby-sitting grabbed at our breasts with a creepy smile on his face, as in sexist-creepy objectification of women’.
Now a rational person might conclude that a two-year-old had been imagining breasts as a source of nourishment, not sexual conquest/objectification, but how very Freudian Oedipal Complex of them, speaking of Patriarchs…
As Vigo had tried to dialogue with the various misandrists, while noting that feminism about (institutionalized, I’d say) structuralism, not individuals, she was subjected to accusations of ‘patriarchy 2.0, such as ‘the mothers of males exulting in their privilege’; ‘the world is being destroyed by males, and we’re running out of time!’; and her being an example of ‘the cult of motherhood worship’; and as for being ‘hand-maidens for patriarchy sympathizing with their natural attachment ‘to our male offspring which clouded our ability to “sympathize” with women who wanted no “penis-bodied” individuals in their midst’; and my paraphrasing of a UK feminist she’d met with in , bringing her chirren along: ‘you must have been raped to have birthed these spawns of the devil’.
“Apparently there is a whole mini-cult of these “feminists” who pop about the Internet to inform women that all males are tyrannical, to include boys. A few such feminists have actually written a book about how males are “inherently dangerous” with a chapter entitled, “Boys Oppress All Females.” The authors of this text promote the belief that males are naturally oppressive, noting that giving birth does not mean that a female is not “bringing another rapist into the world” and ”that no matter what you do, if you have a boy, he will likely terrorize and assault girls and, later, adult women and Lesbians, and likely will be a rapist.” This text is comedy gold!”
Ack! So Judas Priest, I say let’s go full-tilt King Herod on them, let the gods sort it out later…
The irony of demanding a space free of wee penises where “women could freely love women” wasn’t lost on her. She did spend many further paragraphs noting the solidarity she’d received from like-minded women after the hideous kerfuffle. As in: feminism is a political theory, not a revenge action against males. She finishes with:
“This off-label brand of radical feminism has driven away women because of its very internalized hatred of men—women who are polluted by their physical proximity to males, reproduction, and their male children. Such political narratives fracture any sense of solidarity and ultimately prevent any type of revolutionary action. We’ve seen this story before–and it isn’t a political narrative. It’s a religion.”
(cross-posted at caucus99percent.com)
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
Let me try once again to post here; I haven’t been able to for months due to WordPress and other issues.
Looks like it worked this time. Hello wd. I tried to email you a few weeks ago and it bounced back. Then my car was in an accident and undrivable, I was threatened with eviction from my home of 32 years, not because I wasn’t current on my rent which I always have been, but because my landlady’s adult son died unexpectedly and I became her scapegoat. Then I had a very malicious hacker, I mean really UGLY stuff, sending vicious and obscene text messages to my contacts in my name, trashing my girlfriend, etc. and I was afraid to post anywhere for fear of spreading it to other sites. Which may explain all the unauthorized password changes, etc. which have frustrated my attemts to use any of my (now 6) email accounts. All this on the eve of my hernia surgery, which I had two weeks ago. My dearth of commentary has not been due to lack of interest, believe me.
I read this article yesterday, kudos to you and the author for calling out this sick and insane philosophy. I have met “femi nists” of this type both online and irl, and while I try really hard not to judge feminists, not having walked in the shoes of women in patriarchal societies, this is beyond the pale. King Herod, indeed. It sickens me as much as the “feminists” who have become cheerleaders for the MIC, Obama’s and Hillary’s “humanitarian wars”, the deep state, etc. which even with my limited knowledge seem to contradict the basic tenets of first and second wave feminism.
I’m pretty confident that the measures I took to combat the stalker were a success. I haven’t had any problems since I exited Messenger and changed all the google and email passwords, but if you get any nasty posts purporting ro be from me, they are not. Luckily my friends and girlfriend know I would never post such ugliness. This person knew everything about me, it really freaked me out. Best to you.
Not to say that I don’t have compassion for my landlady. I know how devastating it is to lose a child, having lost my own dear sister when my parents were alive. Her son was a friend of mine, too. Her other son is my employee. And my business partner’s mother is her best friend. Her beef with me is that I allow certain homeless people to stay at my house, as long as they are responsible and trying to help themselves. She is very wealthy, very Republican, and looks down on the poor. I think she’s just acting out, and I’ll try to have compassion for her, but the timing…..when I’ve been sick in bed for months…..it really got to me.
welcome back, c seeker. i’d of course been concerned by your long absence, but was at least a bit relieved when my junkbox had noted that you were now following the café. but unlike every other notification i’ve gotten, there was a phone number attached to it. zo…i’d wondered if you’d been signalling me to call you or something. i’d stuck in it in a saved messages file, wanting time to consider what do do…or not do.
by the time i figured i’d call and try not to ask for ‘cynical seeker’, lol…the danged thing had disappeared. i just checked, and i put the correct email address in the ‘contact me’ thingie, so i dunno whassup with that. but whoosh, what a string of weird and nasty things goin’ on for you. but gol-darnit, you’ve not said how you’re doin’ after your surgery, ya great idjit!
it’s very kind of you to try and see your land-lady’s side of it. has she made up her mind about evicting you, or given you a harsh caveat on not hosting the homeless, even to work a bit for you in trade? j is still homeless in oly, and what he’s reported happening over and over is grievous. not to mention that he’s a brilliant sod, as well. anyhoo, things are goin’ pretty crap for us in mancos (plural of lame, CO, but we try to find relief as we’re able.
yeah, ooof, on experiencing this stuff in RL; the closest i’ve come on the other side is some gay men not caring for women, but nothin’ like this wretched stuff. thanks for the terms ‘first and second wave feminsim’; is there a third now? a fine accidental feminist i yam, eh?
but sure, if i get nasty hate messages from you, i’ll just kick your fanny outta here, lol.
I am wondering if the extreme feminist malady is not yet a further symptom of the decline of empire, in which many extreme behaviors become cults of a manic sort, attracting the desperate.
The description you post, wendye, including the horrid painting, reminded me of college liberal arts study wherein the classical Greek playwrights figured large – beginning with Aeschylus, whose Oresteia has as its underlying theme the plague on the house of Agamemnon involving an ancestor who fed to a father his own children in a feast of reconciliation.
This theme continuing on through Sophocles has its general tone ameliorated by the increasing importance of the chorus as the not so hidden participants in the action of the plays; but then along comes Euripides and ‘”The Bacchae” which is the play that evokes the theme of this diary for me.
cynicalseeker, welcome here. I, like you, have obstacles to overcome in order to post, but yours are the greater ones. We belong to a republic of letters that has been suffering a gradual but inevitable decline over the years since we first met, but well met indeed, my friend, well met!
i can understand why you might think that this sort of misandry is due to the intuitive sense that this empire is dying. and thank you for the parallel to the bacchae, which i’d never read, and dagnabbit, hit the wiki to read. not having the time, i backed out, but interestingly enough over yonder i brought in freud’s oedipal complex to act for the misandrists, and we were off to the races. and jung’s subsequent ‘electra complex’ as well. so yes, a very greek day, and as it turned out, it was the greeks who’d first used the term hysteria as being down to ‘a roving uterus’ and such, and freud had inda sorta corrected it as being open to talk therapy as well, not: anatomy is destiny’, which is what many of this iteration of ‘rdical feminists’ are about.
another commenter over yonder, snode said he’d seen similar misandry in the 60s and 70s, and when i asked for more, he’d brought:
“a lot of pretty radical feminist thinking going and when this happened, from Wikipedia.
“On June 3, 1968, radical feminist writer Valerie Solanas shot Warhol and Mario Amaya, art critic and curator, at Warhol’s studio.[38] Before the shooting, Solanas had been a marginal figure in the Factory scene. She authored in 1967 the S.C.U.M. Manifesto,[39] a separatist feminist tract that advocated the elimination of men; and appeared in the 1968 Warhol film I, a Man.”
and I remember it being written about (prob the Village Voice, mostly) as semi serious, do away with the cause of all the worlds problems. Solanas was pretty well known at the time because of her views, but she was also well educated.”
i’d then dug up more:
“”SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.”
and my stars, there’s even a film version. er…two, i guess.”
‘thrill seeking’, hmmmm. nice to see c seeker’s alive and kinda kickin’, eh? chores, then more soonish.
Well, wendye, I’m doing as well as can be expected after the surgery physically, but I’m in a deep depression. I can’t get hold of my girlfriend, who has my car, and laundry, and I’m very worried about her. Right before my surgery she got this horrible strain of flu that’s been going around, she’ll feel better for a day or two, then it comes back in spades. But my car is wrecked, until I can coordinate it with her I can’t get it to a mechanic, and i have no clean clothes. It’s not like her not to call, last i heard from her was Saturday so either she’s very ill or her phone/charger has died (a somewhat common occurrence) or both.
Juliana, thanks for your kind words. I had read about your posting problems previously and was glad to know it’s not just me.
First wave feminism, as I understand it, was people like the suffragettes and those who came before. Second wave was the feminism of the 60s and 70s. Third wave is what’s happening today, which imo is still largely valid, except for these weird permutations like in this article, and way too encumbered by identity politics.
U
thanks for the 411 on the feminist waves.
I tried another post but alas it disappeared into the ether again. Or i posted it on the wrong thread.
The surgery went well. The pain is almost gone. I’m walking to the store every day. Have to, since my vehicle is disabled. But I’m very depressed and isolated.
The situation with my landlady seems to change daily. Sometimes it looks as if she has relented; then the next day she is livid because I’ve followed protocols she has asked me to follow for years. If they have changed, no one told me. And I’m very worried about my gf, she had this horrible flu that’s been going around. I’ve seen her once since the surgery but then she got sick again.
Juliana, thanks for your kind words.
Weird about the phone number. I sometimes think that my mind is so chaotic that it interferes with electronic devices.
Hope this goes through.
i freed your other comment, no telling why this juke-joint reckon’s you’re Trash. ;-) but srsly, it happens sometimes. but oy, you are on a bummer w/ your depression about your gf. no news is often good news, especially as you’ve said here many times before that she often lets her battery die. were he in the hospital, she could have someone call you from there, no?
no laundry facilities at your flat, then? eeeep, no laundromat within walking distance? maybe you need a fish on a bicycle w/ wire saddle bags. snap out of the doldrums until there’s bad news, or we won’t give ya a gun permit, dude!
p.s. on edit: you might want to engage in a modern version of the sorrow tree parable. consider if there’ anyone on the planet you’d want to swap your life for theirs. and that includes every part of their lives. i never can. for instance, would you want to swap lives with long-time commenter jason i’d told you is actually homeless in olympia and has suffered being physically stalked, his tent ripped off of all but the few possessions except what he carries on his back when he leaves his encampment? the silver lining was that they hadn’t taken his boots, nor a bag of clean laundry that the thieves had overlooked.
and soooooo…you hadn’t meant for me to phone you, then?
thanks for the comments; against my predictions it went well over yonder at c99% as well: 47 comments worth, and not even half were mine. ;-)
sweet dreams if you’re able; i’m not able lately, and i’m not altogether sure i’m finding the dreams instructive. anyhoo, tonight’s sign-off lullaby w/ the awesome annie lennox:
sorry for the late comment. as per American Psycho, I’m a child of divorce. gimme a break ;)
I don’t know much about Marxist ideas about childhood development, but surely a dose of class consciousness would be some antidote to this puerile nonsense. it is amazing how outraged fairly to very privileged people can become. one sign of privilege is, despite the expressions of outrage, the casualness this type of group expresses in its dismissal of people who don’t have the luxury of the same psychic investments they have. can’t bring my kid along? well, sheeeeit, maybe i’ll just miss the revolution cuz i’m struggling to find daycare?
“people don’t want love. they want a big fat slice of revenge.” the washed up commie butler Tuck in “the ruling class.” part of the strategy of division & exclusion is to offer vengeance as a substitute for justice.
I couldn’t help but thinking back to another comrade no longer blogging who, a while back, was ready to chuck humanity, at least the non-vegan portion, in a poutrage about what’s being done to earth’s non-human life. how much the fascist mentality (that’s right Tarzie) demands revenge for violated, utopian ideals. incl, in the case of these feminazis, the sacrifice of those whose only crime is being born.
and #Metoo. bourgeois outrage strengthening the forces of surveillance, repression, etc. just in time for militarizing the border, censoring the internet, inciting Russophobia, blaming Russia for teachers’ going on strike, China trade wars, etc., etc.
well, gotta jet
‘revenge not love’ isn’t something i’d thought of, j. but i admit that over yonder i’d played around a bit with w/ pretend freudian analysis, and might have brought alice miller to profile them from afar, knowing how dangerous that can be.
but a blend of the two might be that these feminazis were sexually abused as chirren, or abused in other ways by male authoritarian fathers, and hadn’t had the blessings brought by ‘helping witnesses’, or others who’d unconditionally loved them. nor had they likely found any therapeutic help for their issues, not that it’s not hard as hell to find good therapists. i wouldn’t even have thought marx would have written on childhood development, having a hard time imagining what it might have consisted of.
‘poutrage’, yes, i reckon they are well-off financially, which allows room for such vicious male hatred. when tarzie began tweeting again he pegged to the top: ‘meat eating is wore than capitalism’. hmmmm. on edit: i remember on his final diary, someone had asked him where everyone had gone. he’d said, it’s okay, i’ve had a good run’ or close to that. and ooowee, hadn’t he? but it caused me to wonder if many had simply objected to his militant veganism. guess we’ll never know for sure.
yeah, when i’d brought up #meToo as possibly giving larger permission to the misandrists, strolling one likened the movement to the salem witch trials, and i sure agree. it was thd who’d said that the movement would likely end up with the opposite effect of what was intended. but then, maybe we’ll get oprah for president!
stay safe well as you can in oly, tom joad on the road.
Apart from a few mythological pronouncements about the “primitive horde,” IMHO Marx and Engels contributed little or nothing of value to understanding relations between men and women, even judged by the standards of e.g. Heather Brown’s basically sympathetic summation at https://monthlyreview.org/2014/06/01/marx-on-gender-and-the-family-a-summary/. (cf. also a review of Dr. Brown’s review at https://isreview.org/issue/93/capitalist-reproduction-and-womens-oppression)
What’s worthwhile isn’t so much any particular formulation in Capital or the Communist Manifesto but instead the dialectic or evolutionary perspective which was never really applied to gender relations in traditional Marxist analysis.
So where what you might call vindictive feminism sees the history of gender relations as an Evil Patriarchy gradually overthrown by Heroic Womanhood, it may be more productive to re-frame the transformation of the family as just another aspect of greater social and economic transformations which are slowly dissolving all human relations into a super-historical soup whose eventual flavor we have only begun to discern.
thanks, jacob. i hope j saw these links as it was his wondering that caused you to dif for them, i reckon, but i may need to point him to them if he’s reading and commenting from his phone. the monthly review one is, as always, too academic for my and…very long, but the review of brown’s book (likely her actual book wasn’t, though) seems to be more in ‘the common tongue’. ;-) it might take a couple more readings for me to absorb it.
the isr site it a good one; a couple of the tankies on twitter sometimes link to marxists.com, as well.
“Great Zeus, why didst thou, to man’s sorrow, put woman, evil counterfeit, to dwell where shines the sun? If thou wert minded that the human race should multiply, it was not from women they should have drawn their stock, but in thy temples they should have *paid gold or iron or ponderous bronze and bought a family, each man proportioned to his offering*, and so in independence dwelt, from women free. But now as soon as ever we would bring this plague into our home we bring its fortune to the ground. ‘Tis clear from this how great a curse a woman is; the very father, that begot and nurtured her, to rid him of the mischief, gives her a dower and packs her off; while the husband, who takes the noxious weed into his home, fondly decks his sorry idol in fine raiment and tricks her out in robes, squandering by degrees, unhappy wight! his house’s wealth.” E’s “Hippolytus,” the speech the eponymous tragic “hero” gives that gets him killed. Reverse the gender binaries, which supposedly don’t exist anyway, and we are right back to the absolute worst of patriarchy. where revenge comes in, I think, among certain women, a small minority I think/hope, is that they want to replicate patriarchy, but, you know, with the bitches in charge this time instead of the punk ass bastards. it’ll be great! earth will be called New Lesbos, now even more testosterone free.
Lady Macbeth to her hub, that “dream of Aeschylus in a northern clime” (Baudelaire):
“I have given suck, and know
How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this…”
(where are the Macbeth kids in the play?)
why should men get to have all the killing & oppressing fun, huh? why should they be the only ones who get to express resentment at being mere mammals, when it’s not even been their milk & blood & uteri all these eons? men got to kill lots of women over the ages, so now it’s women’s turn? or will the mere presence of (more) estrogen in the management office slow the abattoir down a bit? didn’t quite work out that way re melanin, did it?
I suppose that one might have the fantasy that if HRC & Obomba had only had more black women around, the melanin & estrogen would have banded together to cancel out the testosterone (except Obomba’s) and…the US wouldn’t have obliterated Libya or something? is that how it works? if only their had been more blacks, more women, more black women for managerial efficiency’s sake, in the slave mansion at 1600 Penn Ave…
anyway, as Adam West asked in a guest cameo on the Simpsons, “why doesn’t Batman dance any more?” prophetic, the spirit of prophesy lives, as this was uttered 15 years before Nolan’s “Batman Begins” came out. Batman stopped dancing cuz there’s nothing to dance about in the delusion of rich people playing dress up to punch bad guys harder in order to…what? what’s the vision, the goal, the future in minds? it’s nothing. it’s horrible at worst, pointless, boring and stupid at best, as most teenagers in the US & many in the world know:
why don’t the feminazis dance anymore? oh right…
noxious weeds, lol. whoa, those are some vicious and telling quotes. i hadn’t remembered that from lady macbeth at all. but yes, that was what vigo’d been trying to say: they’re reproducing the very authoritarianism they claim to be overthrowing, and behaving just like their male counterparts. a fellow over yonder had quipped about ‘old white guys’ having ruined everything, and i did remind him of any number of females, both elected and appointed, around the globe, who were/are every bit as heinous as their male counterparts.
yep, miz r2p killing floors susan rice, nuke russia clinton, glen ford’s black misleadership fraternity… but yes: the revenge of the oppressed, wearing different hats. but still i wonder about any soul searches they might have used to inquire within as to their pasts being related to their foot-stomping male hatred. have to watch the videos later, but do look above to see the links jacob freeze brought for you. you may not have seen them if you came in on your smart-ass phone.