Posts Tagged ‘ Takedown of an Anarcho-Misogynist ’

Takedown of an Anarcho-Misogynist: Reproductive Freedom

Here’s the introduction to this series. I followed up with a post on marriage, monogamy and violence. Both posts together got combined and cross-posted at the Gonzo Times. Thanks to Punk Johnny Cash for the platform.

We continue today with a classic “men’s rights” position–one that, in it’s essence, I agree with. However, it’s so obviously disingenuous, always accompanied by massive misdirection, and seething with anger towards women that it’s a really interesting study of the misogynist mindset. We’ll lead off with a quote from Jay Batman.

The fact that I ejaculate during sexual intercourse does not mean that I consent to all possible outcomes including pregnancy and fatherhood. I have consented to the immediate sexual act, and in order for me to be considered a father, I must consent to fatherhood, which is a separate transaction altogether. I retain autonomy and sovereignty throughout all phases of my existence, and reject the idea that consent can be implicit. A woman may choose to engage in motherhood, but that in no way obligates me to the converse of fatherhood. It does not matter how many times I engaged in sexual intercourse, if my stated intention was merely sex, I cannot be said to have consent to reproduction.

Reproductive freedom for a male is summed up by the ability to deny consequence for consensual action, just as it is for a woman. If we are to be equal, a male’s ability to abort his decision by refusing to accept obligations for the consequence of sex in the form of parenthood must be honored . . . There are two distinct choices, but a woman’s feminist outlook seeks to render one choice out of two for any man in order to coerce and force him into a role she wants for herself. His capital must be pilfered to support and sustain her choice.

In Jay Batman’s world, and the world of most wildly uninformed people, abortion is a cakewalk. Simply kiss your sympathetic sexual partner on the cheek, drive up to the window of the friendly and inviting drive-thru clinic, terminate the pregnancy for $19.95 and be about your way.

The reality is much different and is covered so well elsewhere that I’ll just touch on the highlights here. In most places that offer reproductive services, and 87% of counties in the United States don’t, the rulers (overwhelmingly male) have legislated a whole host of hurdles for women to overcome: various combinations of multiple day waiting periods, multiple visits during which women must be instructed on fetal development, see sonograms, listen to fetal heartbeats, and undergo counselling. That’s two or three days off work, probably away from home (for many, more than 50 miles) at locations that are under regular threat of bombing and seeing providers that are not infrequently assassinated.

The various procedures, which could easily be carried out by a trained technician, must be performed by one of the 2000 or so medical doctors (mostly over the age of 50) that are still practicing. All these legal hurdles drive the price up tremendously.

To be fair, access to reproductive options are much better in some respects than in years past. In many places, it’s possible to get a morning after pill, which is reasonably convenient and affordable. But for the self actualized women who are able to overcome social and religious pressure, economic and psychological circumstances and take this kind of pro-active control, the morning after pill is rarely a necessity. For these women, partnering with responsible condom wearing men is the first line of defense against pregnancy.

That’s right, the least expensive, most available, and highly effective means that every man has at his disposal to avoid the snares and pitfalls that Jay Batman feels the all powerful and fiendishly deceptive gynarchy is laying out–the latex condom. It’s the kryptonite against the tricksters and gold diggers that populate his imagination and it’s at hand in every gas station, convenience store, pharmacy and grocery in the country.

Jay accepts that every woman should have absolute control over her body, and he expects them to exercise this control to avoid the burdens of parenthood. Every man has the same degree–actually a much greater degree given the relative costs and convenience of the remedies–of control in avoiding unwanted children. He still seems somehow more sympathetic and concerned for the man who has unprotected sex.

Now we come to the point of agreement, and this is a challenging idea that I first heard not long ago on the Flaming Freedom podcast (this episode touches on it). The idea is essentially that a man should have the right to abandon a child and essentially waive all future claims of custody, visitation, etc. in exchange for avoiding financial obligation.

I think Jay would be surprised at how unpopular the idea would be among fathers. Currently, they largely able to avoid financial obligation by threatening abandonment, maintaining a low legal profile, or simply not paying and hoping that the mother won’t go through the onerous, expensive, and time consuming process of attempting to bring the unwieldy court system to bear on the father.

Currently many less-than-honorable men get to have it all: freedom from financial obligation as well as contact with his children. In the world Jay imagines with an either/or choice, this would be virtually impossible.

That said, I think I am in agreement. In a world in which female reproductive options were as readily available and as inexpensive as they would be without puritanical male legal interference, where arbitration supported the enforcement of contracts freely entered without regard to gender, and most importantly–and this would be the biggest change, I think–where a woman faced no threat of violence for exercising her autonomy; in this world, I think that it should be possible for a man to opt out of fatherhood immediately following intercourse.

Such a world would be a radical, reality altering improvement for women.

2011
03/22
CATEGORY
of Other People's Ideas
Reviews
TAGS





2 comments

Takedown of an Anarcho-Misogynist: Marriage, Monogamy and Violence

See here for an introduction to this series of posts.

Jay begins his post with the following premises:

. . . societal conventions that deny a man’s natural and innate inclinations to preach some false idea of domestication as the ideal are the creations of a matriarchal tyranny.
We men are not naturally inclined toward monogamy or marriage. Societies that promote such end results are clearly the product of male hatred on the part of the women who drive such values. Women have appropriated the state and religious institutions to systematically de-masculinize men and relegate us to a less virile, less potent existence.

One would think a libertarian would understand that a tyranny of any sort cannot exist without the use of force. I’m not clear on what, exactly, is preaching the idea of monogamy and marriage as ideal–I guess the Abrahamic religions (why not the Sarahtic religions?) are usually interpreted as endorsing these things–but whatever the source, it’s pretty clearly using non-violent persuasion to get the job done in the western world.

This conflation of verbal pressure with violent aggression seems to be a trend among misogynists. In another, follow-up post, Jay paints the following picture

Think of the man like the Gadsden Flag bearer, and you get the picture: he’s got it in his head that striking back is the way to go, but the female standing in front of him, though half his size, has a mouth like a Gatling Gun and can tear him to shreds with it. It’s emasculating, but it’s what women do.

This echoes a similar sentiment expressed by a commenter on a Punk Johnny Cash article.

Add to this, women who can’t keep their mouths shut, who use their words as surrogate baseball bats to bludgeon their man into submission; or women who stand in doorways to prevent the man from leaving the room/house so as to DE-escalate (caused mainly by the rise of “Feminism,” another statist invention). . . they kind of deserve what they get.

At least Jay pretends to live in a world where a verbal confrontation results in the powerful man gently weeping in response to a discussion with a woman. The second commenter seems more closely connected with reality, where 4 million women apparently can’t keep their mouths shut each year and get what, apparently, they “deserve”.

It’s important to frame a verbal confrontation in physically violent terms so that men who initiate aggression against people can be let off the hook on a pseudo-self-defense clause.

In the good old days, of course, even this nonsensical veneer of legitimacy wasn’t needed, and this brings us back to the topic of marriage.

Until the tyrannical matriarchy appeared on the scene, marriage was simply a legal claim to human property. If a woman was beaten, raped, killed, or forced into labor, the legal question was restricted to which man, typically a father or husband, owned her. If the perpetrator was the owner of the woman, the issue went no further. If, he wasn’t, restitution was owed to the owner and the attacker and often the victim were further punished by the legal authorities.

This arrangement varied slightly from place to place, but was always essentially a transaction among men:fathers and sometimes would-be husbands as part of an often much larger exchange of property.

Women, for their part, were kept by in a dependent state by the inability to own property, conduct business, travel unescorted, etc. The skill set they were consequentially raised to develop was that of a domestic servant, taking care of the children, the sick, the elderly and maintaining the household. They were raised to be obedient and submissive and were therefore amenable to religions, which praise obedience, submission and forgiveness as virtuous–more on this in a future post.

In the last fraction of human history, state capitalism has subsidized the movement of women into the workforce by taking over some of the traditional roles: care of children, the sick and the elderly primary among them. This isn’t, as Jay posits, a result of an emerging and powerful state-feminist alliance–such an idea is laughable when one compares the numbers of men and women among the captains of industry and social engineers that constructed the state welfare system–but as an entirely predictable corporate-state alliance that always seeks to subsidize inexpensive labor for the owners of capital.

Jay’s other point in the passage is that the women force men, through the apparatus of the state, I guess, into monogamous relationships. Again, this is absurd. Men have never been held to a standard of monogamy, certainly not in the modern west. Women on the other hand have always been held to an exacting standard with phenomenally inhumane penalties for adultery.

The fear of raising another man’s child factored into both the control of women’s freedom to move, to associate, and to own property as well as the devastating penalties exacted on women for sex outside of marriage. Men never faced anywhere near the same degree of retribution for non-monogamy.

As to what is “natural” for either sex, the point is moot and largely unknowable. In a few hundred years, when women have absolute and unchallenged control of their reproduction and face no physical threat from partners, it might be possible to determine what sexual behaviors are natural and which are a result of violent institutions. My guess is, nature being what it is, that people will tend towards a wide variety of arrangements that will overrun any modern predictions.

In any case, the current situation is rife with violence and the threat of violence as well as the historical hangovers of sexual repression and institutional dis-empowerment of women–reasoning about the future of human sexuality is like predicting the future course of technology at the point that the catholic church ceased systematic interference in the conduct of science.

Overall, the extraordinary claim that women are secretly controlling the agendas of institutions that have always been overseen and staffed by males and have always relegated women to a “less virile less potent existence” requires a tremendous amount of evidence. While Jay provides a number of anecdotal instances of women who act less than honorably toward men, by any metric and at any time and place in history, men have used their physical superiority and their political privilege to completely dominate women. This isn’t a matter of “reading the right books” as Jay complains he is always asked to do. It’s a recognition of very rudimentary and basic fact of human history.

To blame women for perpetuating the institutions that have always assisted men in maintaining dominance is the height of chutzpah. To pity men that can’t willfully beat their “mouthy women” and then wonder why females avoid one’s ideology of freedom is willful callousness. To blame women in general for the behavior of the women that one chooses to associate with the definition of bigotry.

We’ve got alot more to cover folks, so if you have any desire to direct the conversation, please drop a comment.

2011
03/21
CATEGORY
of Other People's Ideas
TAGS




2 comments

Takedown of an Anarcho-Misogynist: Introduction

The next several posts will (barring sidetracking) be related to a discussion going on at the Gonzo Times. I’ve always liked the Times because they address issues that a number of other anti-authoritarian sites seem to overlook in the name of expediency. One of these issues is gender. As I documented in the previous post/podcast and as is summarized (along with subsequent developments) by Punk Johnny Cash in this recent post, a number of misogynists, some self-described, have predictably sprung up to attack those voicing questions and concerns about the treatment of women in pro-liberty circles.

Of course, there are alot of ins, alot of outs, alot of what-have-yous involved, but I tend to think that this sort of development is “a good thing.” Occasionally, it’s time to introspect and make sure one’s house is in order, both as an individual and, metaphorically, as a collective. On the rare occasions that reactionaries, especially those that are so obviously poisoning the well, pop up, it provides the rest of us a chance to state our position clearly to said reactionaries and to the rest of the world.

In this case, the world clearly needs to hear the liberty perspective spelled out. Virtually all casual observers believe that libertarianism is a post-hoc political conclusion based on anger towards and fear of government takeover by non-white and/or non-male people. This conclusion is based on the media amplification of a few conservative voices that, in fact, hold that position in ways subtle and obvious[1]

What we shall look at over the next few posts is a flurry of activity on the Gonzo Times website by one of the bloggers there, Jay Batman (one of the aforementioned self-described misogynists). His case, stated most comprehensively in an initial post can be addressed in a dozen ways that have sprung into my mind. I haven’t even finished reading it. Maybe he ends the entire thing with a retraction, in which case, my bad for not finishing before responding.

In any case, these issues deserve addressing as they will doubtless arise again (and again) in the future. I’m not sure I’ll be able to keep at it until each and every failing is revealed, but I will do my best.

  1. [1] An compelling discussion on how ideology is used to provide psychic cover for prior trauma can be found in Freedomain Radio’s Bomb in the Brain series. ↩
2011
03/20
CATEGORY
of Other People's Ideas
Reviews
TAGS





Write comment

Follow me!

Subscribe . . . DO IT!

A Twitter Badge and/or listen to me tweet

Networked Blogs