I was a full-time misandrist for the majority of my life starting around Jr. High. After a while, around age 28 or 29, I became just an occasional misandrist, and now (30) I am free of misandry.
People ask, “How does that work?”
Well, you grow up in Santa Cruz, CA, read feminist texts, and then read science texts. It’s not too hard.
This is for starters. The picture only gets dimmer and darker as a boy goes into advanced teenage years.
And so on.
Ever read HowardBloom? If I ever want to get back into hating men, I can do one of two things: (A) Listen to Nine Inch Nails, or (B) read Howard Bloom.
Before you know it, you’re a male who’s a proud supporter of the ScumManifesto. I know, because I was. And I told my friends that I was. I took it quite seriously, until about a couple years ago.
Being a man is all about hard work, no fun, total responsibility, and constant relentless sexual suffering. When you’re not doing those things, you’re responsible for every suffering a woman may experience.
I would think to myself: Men are territorial, petty, egotistical, petty, and seek domination. They are forceful, and take without asking. They bark, shout, rape, and are otherwise cruel, wearing a thin veneer of respectability to cover brutality. Their excuse is, “If I didn’t, someone worse than me would,” and that’s the male sense of goodness: Someone who will take power and do good with it – but not so much good, that someone will think that they can freeload, or not so much good, that people think they’re weak. There you have it: The male code, the logic of domination. Not too pretty, is it? It’s basically evil.
And I had written further: There are plenty of other excellent reasons to hate men; They’re ugly, for one. That’s usually sufficient for me.
I didn’t always hate men. There were times where I was full of joy, life, and sanity. But it necessitated that I didn’t think about it. As long as I didn’t think about it, I could be happy. But whenever I thought about it…
When we ultra-sounded Sakura, we waited nervously.
Finally, the woman told us, “Congradulations, you have a daughter!”
I shouted, “THANK GOD!”; a wave of fear and exasperation passed – I had been terrified that I was going to have to raise a male.
In my mind, I saw so many possibilities for her life: She’s going to be happy, kind, and friendly. She’s might become a scientist, or a lawyer, or a leader. Perhaps she’ll be a programmer girl! She is the right gender, at the right time; There is so much promise for her: She can become anything she wants to become, do anything that she wants to do. She can be both strong and beautiful, the ultimate integration of humanity.
The fears, the terrors, the possibility that she could have been a he. A boy with no place to go. Rejected by society. Named “troublemaker,” and pumped full of Ritalin, unless I could find the energy to protect him, perhaps move to transfer him to another school. Possessor of a demonic sexuality dragging him like a needy corpse to attach himself to an angel. A pack animal, made to bear loads, and carry them across long distances, struck with whips if complaining. Doomed to either become a monster (and get sex,) or to become a slave (and never have any.) It was my greatest fear that I would have to raise a boy.
It was the second happiest moment in Sakura’s birth, but unlike the happiest moment, it was an unholy happiness.
TransferingMisandryToMyDaughter
For 7 years, (fortunately I came to my senses,) I taught my daughter that girls were better than boys, women were better than men.
Originally, around age 5 or 6, my daughter would heard me say bad things about boys and men, (masculinity in general,) and argue, “Wouldn’t that mean you hate yourself?” Somehow, her school had taught her that hating yourself is not a good thing.
Well, yes, on occasions, that is exactly what happens. And I said, “Well, Sakura, there’s not really a whole lot to like about men,” when she’d ask that question.
I remember a day in the last year, something came up, and I said, “Well, boys aren’t really bad.” And my daughter looked straight at me, and said, “What?!” I don’t know if she was more shocked by the idea, or the fact that I had said it.
The beginnings of the change for me began last year, at the StoryfieldConference.
Somehow, I got the attention of Mark Jones, a Tibetan Buddhist practicioner, and he somehow got me to open up. (He calls his practice “HSL,” for Heard, Seen, and Loved, and it’s something a remember to this day.) I explained all these things I was feeling, and how much I hated men.
And then I realized, right there, on the spot, why I hated men so much: Because the life of men was so completely full of suffering, I wanted to get as far away from it as I could.
I wanted to have been born a girl. All these things, to get away from the world of suffering, the world of men.
And in talking with Mark, I suddenly realized what I had to do: My heart had to open in compassion. For men.
Look, I’m just going to tell you something right off the bat:
We are not a society of compassion for men.
Everyone has compassion for women, we are not a society that has compassion for men.
Somehow, compassion for men just fell right off the map, long long ago, if it was ever even there in the first place. This is uncharted waters.
It’s not about seeing men and sending them good thoughts.
And it’s not about being impressed by men’s suffering, stoicism, or skills. “How proud, how honorable.”
No, it’s about:
If the masculine spirit were an incarnate God, surely he’d have lost his kids, home, and money to Hera, taunted by women, and been turned into a resourceful homeless man who’s been beaten, kicked in the gut and in the balls, and left to die underneath a bridge somewhere, without a tent or sleeping bag.
This man needs love, compassion, and also sex, not more judgements.
You know, I don’t think I can just tell you what men need, and I don’t think I can convey the depth of what compassion for men needs.
I can hear it now,
For the guys:
The metaphor is of armor, and the armor is made of Stoicism.
Well, if you like, keep carrying around that heavy suit of honor.
And who knows, you may gain sufficient power to break the ranks into the teeny tiny 1% of men whom women actually respect and see as sexual creatures. Then they may, from their hearts, actually desire sex with you.
Until then, though, you’re not going to be getting any of the love, sex, and romance that you desire. Dating will be pleasant, but after that, you have a life of suffering ahead of you. You dig your own grave.
Men talk differently in private than they do publicly. We all know how this works.
Life can be very, very, different for us. Contemporary women will find what I’m about to say very threatening, and their minds will immediately recoil and laugh cruelly at what I’m about to say, but here it is: Women can treat all men as good people, as sexual people (rather than the invisibles that we are today,) with honor, care, respect, sensitivity, love, attraction, and sexual desire. I realize that that’s the exact opposite of how women treat us today, but I have strong faith that it is possible, because it’s like that in other cultures. And women, I believe it’s possible for you to reach this state of consciousness, without losing your rights, autonomy, property, futures, and so on. We just have to rethink things a bit.
For women:
Read NorahVincent, SelfMadeMan.
She’s a lesbian woman who decided to see what men’s world was really like, by dressing up as a man for more than a year, and hanging out and working with men.
She was astonished by what she discovered, and yet she only ever attained the ranks of “effeminate man.” Her effort was amazing, I just want to point out that it’s even deeper than what she discovered. She said, “Men are not what you think.” She’s absolutely right.
Women will never know that men suffer, if men will not speak up. Men will continue to have their rights, their imaginations, their spirit, their vitality, their dignity, their desire, systematically stripped from them, if we do not speak up. Men are the greatest threat to men; I have faith that if we can voice our grievance, women will respond.
We need to have a genuine spiritual awakening. We are accustomed to treating other men as competition for women. This is absolutely true. We have not treated other men as objects of compassion, only women.
But we need to build compassion for men. And we need to figure out how to dramatically increase the pool of sex. Sex and feeling and vitality are completely interwoven for men, this is what SexAndSpiritInMen is all about.
Can we encourage promiscuity in women? Can we open our eyes to what a wasteland marriage is? (When couples say “we’re friends,” when people say “friendship in marriage is the best,” realize that you’re looking at a SexlessMarriage, and in all likelihood, he’s the one suffering.) Can we legalize and evolve prostitution? Can we endorse mistress relationships? Can we get young men laid?
All these ways, we should be able to unlock sex. A friend of mine visited Thailand, and when he came back, he had this to say about America: America is a sex prison. America is where you go to completely shutter men away from sex. He now habitually goes to Thailand at least once a year; It’s clear to me that this is therapeutic.
Women may say, “How disgusting, how degrading,” but I have a man’s heart, and I know that it is therapeutic. When they say “disgusting” and “degrading,” realize that they are talking about the masculine heart.
Compassion. That’s what we need. Compassion.
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