Are feminists all secret Goreans?
By David Futrelle
In the hands of a skilled obfuscater, academic jargon can make even the most ridiculous arguments seem almost reasonable. When the obfuscater in question isn’t quite so skilled, you get something like this pretentious bit of pseudo-academic bullshit I recently found via a link on the Men’s Rights subreddit.
The post in question, by an anonymous contributor to a blog called “Cultural Analysis & Philosophy,” purports to explain “Why Feminists Enjoy Rape Fantasies.”
As it turns out, the title of the blog post is pretty much the only part of it that is written in clear, comprehensible English. The body of the post is basically a congealed mass of pseudoacademic drivel that seems deliberately designed to obscure just how completely ridiculous its central premise is.
What is that central premise? The author takes a whack at a thesis statement in the first paragraph. After asserting that feminist women are REALLY REALLY into rape fantasies, our anonymous author says that he (or she, but I’m guessing he) will
evaluate the hypothesis that rape fantasies and feminism are causally connected unconscious compensatory responses of the female psyche to the conflict between the Enlightenment ideal of human equality irrespective of gender and the primordial domination/submission schema of sexual reproduction that pervades the animal world (Janicke 2016; Terranova 2016).
In plain English, what the author is suggesting is that women pretty much all want to be dominated, but can’t admit this to themselves because they mostly also purport to believe that men and women are equal. So their deep, dark desires to be dominated slip out in their sexual fantasies.
But the post actually gets much worse than that. The author implies, without every quite saying so explicitly, that female rape fantasies only arose after the advent of feminism, declaring that “[n]o practitioner or researcher has reported such fantasies prior to 1940s.” Never mind that “scientific” sex research is a relatively new phenomenon and that women may have been reticent in talking about these fantasies with dudes in white coats — if these dudes even asked the right questions to begin with
No, as the author sees it, female rape fantasies happen because of the alleged conflict between women’s desire to be dominated and a world in which women aren’t being dominated as much as they secretly need to be. Because of the Enlightenment and all that equality stuff that came along with it.
A plausible explanation could be that the biological predisposition of females to surrender produces rape fantasies only under certain conditions, for example, if a relevant set of biologically conditioned needs of a female are not satisfied in a given social-environment.
It may be hypothesised that the high prevalence of eroticised rape fantasies is the result of cultural changes that originated in the Age of Enlightenment: the idea of universal value of humanity and the essential equality of sexes.
Eventually, after taking the Enlightenment Pill, societies even start to question “the culture of male dominance and aggression,”ultimately leading “to the rapidly declining testosterone levels in the male population.” Which is the polite way of saying that the Enlightenment made the real men who built Western Civilization into a bunch of soyboy cucks.
And so women not only turned to rape fantasies; they also conjured up feminism, not because they wanted more equality but because they wanted less of it. Feminism, the author suggests, is basically a convoluted (and mostly unconscious) strategy to provoke real men into taking charge again.
Naturally, the blog’s author eases us into this incredibly dumb argument slowly, using bland and evasive academic jargon to try to disguise what exactly they’re doing.
The conflict between the conscious ideology of female empowerment and the unconscious libidinal predisposition to select for a dominant sexual partner may have prevented conscious realisation of the problem. On this picture, contemporary feminism could have evolved not because women were excessively dominated but because in some critical respect they were not dominated enough.
So how do these secretly domination-desiring women get the amount of domination they really secretly want? With some “unconscious libidinal provocation.”
In other words:
The female psyche may have driven those women who are the most psychically conflicted about dominance/submission to continuously escalate the feminist rhetoric, making increasingly bold and even unjust demands in order to elicit a corrective response from the opposite sex.
So there you go: our anonymous author is seriously suggesting that feminism pushes ridiculous “and even unjust demands” that are designed to “provoke” men into a backlash that will put women back in their place, which is where they really want to be anyway. Even if feminists are too confused to realize that this is what they’re doing.
After this assertion, the author backs up a little and spurts forth several paragraphs of evasive academic jargon that seem to be designed to give them wiggle room if anyone ever wants to challenge their ridiculous “hypothesis.”
I don’t think they deserve any wiggle room whatsoever. If you’re going to say something this stupid, own it outright, and say it in clear English. No amount of academic jargon is going to make what you said any less ludicrous.
The “Cultural Analysis & Philosophy” blog claims, amazingly, to be an “ideology-free zone” devoted to “objectivity” and “scholarship” and “non-partisan political analysis.” But if you want to see the sort of person that this kind of “philosophy” appeals to, all you need to do is to read the comments — all two of them — that have been left in response to the post so far. One of the commenters simply jokes that they would have expected a post with this title to have gotten more pageviews.
The other, well, let’s just say he doesn’t hide the true nature of his opinions in academic jargon. “I think you’re over shooting,” writes J.
I’ve dated feminists, and all of them had rape kinks, but I think it’s more just an issue of narcissism. Women hate men because men accomplish more than women can. It’s that simple.
Come on, J, tell us what you really think!
Women hate that men are more than them, so they invent fantasies about “glass ceilings” and female oppression to explain why women cannot match men in most fields of human endeavour. And the result is that women learn to enjoy hating and abusing men as a way of compensating for their feelings of inferiority. Those feelings will never abate, since they come from within, not without. Therefore until humanity is willing to be honest about the fact women are not equal to men, the whole thing will go on until we are all completely destroyed.
J may be an altogether reprehensible human being. But at least he’s not trying to disguise his hate in pseudo-academic doubletalk.