The blogger Fidelbogen likes to think of himself as some sort of grand theoretician of “counter-feminist” thinking. Which means that his posts are usually far too long and ponderous to read, much less to write about. His ideas – at least judging from the few posts of his I’ve had the patience to wade through — are really not much more advanced than your typical MRA; he’s just much more pretentious (and long-winded) about it.
He is, in other words, the sort of guy who could take 3000 words to explain the rather basic MRA notion that women control men with their vaginas.
I mean that quite literally. Our excitable MGTOWer friend MarkyMark recently drew his readers’ attention to a 5-year-old post by Fidelbogen with the enigmatic title “Ideas Which Go Against the Grain,” which offers, yep, a 3000-word précis of the evils of pussy power. Perhaps against my better judgement, I’ve decided to give it a detailed look. Strap in!
I’ll give him credit for one thing: despite his vague title, Fidelbogen states his thesis quite plainly at the start:
Female sexuality is raised high upon an altar like a golden calf. Male sexuality is looked upon as a ratty old kitchen chair with a cracked vinyl seat, under suspicion of mildew.
Well, ok, not the very start. Right about here:
This disparity, this imbalance, this . . . . inequality, accounts for most of women’s power over men. By extension, it accounts for a great deal of feminism’s leverage in the realm of gender politics.
In other words: vagina=power.
I leave it to the poets to wax lyrical about the mysteries of the eternal feminine, and to the psychoanalytic priesthood to plumb its shadowy depths. As a political tactician and theorist, it is my cold-blooded task merely to figure out how the world works, blabbity blabbity bloo.
Ok, those last three words are my paraphrase of his argument. Focus, Fidelbogen, focus!
The higher valuation assigned to female sexuality generates a seller’s market for women in the so-called game of love. That is how the world works; women do not queue or cluster in quest of men’s favors. No, it is nearly always men who act this way around women.
And this leads to, yep, the dreaded Pussy Cartel:
Deprived of euphemism, the case is this: women have cornered the market on sexual intercourse, and are able to dictate the price and the accompanying politics much as OPEC might set the terms for oil. …
Understand, that the higher valuation of female sexuality translates into both female power and loss of male power. Since female supremacy is feminism’s driving ambition, it makes sense that the women’s movement has undertaken to siphon power away from men using every siphon hose imaginable.
Normally, I would assume this last bit was some kind of sniggering reference to blowjobs. As Fidelbogen seems to be utterly without a sense of humor, I have to assume it’s merely a belabored metaphor.
So how do the evil feminists siphon away male power? By driving along some sort of road:
Certain lanes, deeply rutted by age-old usage, serve handily along feminism’s route to power.
So after siphoning their way down this road, we (and the evil feminists) arrive at what I’ll call (to keep Fidelbogen’s metaphor going) “Courtship Lane.”
The word “courtship” is revealing. Men are the “courtiers”, which is to say lackeys or sycophants who wait upon the pleasure of their “lord”. In courtship, more often than otherwise, women hold all the cards. Feminists, being women, are well aware of this. But they are also aware that the realm of courtship, while being women’s greatest zone of power over men, is likewise a critical link in the chain of power which binds men specifically to the designs of feminist domination.
After a bit of empty rhetoric, Prof. F continues:
Most women are aware of their superior sexual bargaining power. And many women have been politicized to some degree (more or less) by feminist ideology. This latter group will most certainly carry their politicized outlook into the sexual bargaining arena, and in their minds both feminist ideology and the knowledge of their age-old power will meld together into a troublesome sort of hybrid entity.
Fidelbogen, alas, does not take the opportunity to name this dastardly “hybrid entity.” Let’s just call it THE FEMIGINA!! (In all caps, with two exclamation points.)
At this point, Prof. F loses what little steam his argument has, and begins prattling about this and that and the evils of feminism. I will attempt to convey the gist of it with the following excerpts. In order to truly capture the flavor of it, I will replace the traditional ellipses – used to indicate excised material – with the phrase “blabbity blabbity.”
Blabbity blabbity to gauge the extent of feminist indoctrination among the female population would be like measuring the spread of a gaseous substance with a rubber band. Blabbity blabbity [f]eminism has blabbity blabbity secured a tremendous power over men by means of a momentous bio-political conjunction. Blabbity moral corona of the ideology blabbity female noosphere blabbity blabbity feminist-tinted spectacles blabbity blabbity the path lies clear before us.
And then he comes to his point:
Men should cease to value female sexuality beyond a certain fixed rate. Once the cost exceeds this rate, the value should fall to zero—leaving the purveyors in their deserted market stall.
Yep. That’s right. He’s talking about what we here on Man Boobz know as the Cock Blockade.
Blabbity blabbity it would go against nature blabbity blabbity laborious gritting of teeth. Blabbity blabbity supremely human accomplishment. Blabbity blabbity we are more than simply animals.
And he comes to another point:
Devaluation of female sexuality would alter the balance of power between the sexes. There would come a point where a man, any man, could make the personal choice to cast loose from women altogether—in all but the peripheral aspects of his life.
Blabbity blabbity men would need to cut each other some slack blabbity blabbity stop competing with other men in the customary arena where female flesh is the prize. Blabbity blabbity. The question “are ya getting any?”, along with the adolescent mindset it signals, would be out of place in this altered scheme of things.
And this would put the ladies in their place – standing lonely in their vagina stalls, gamely trying to interest men in their now worthless vaginas.
Women would be the courtiers, the ones who queue and cluster. Deny women their fundamental age-old power, and feminism would find itself reeling in shock as though from a serious blood loss. The best way for men to free themselves from the boa-constrictor grip of feminism is to free themselves from the power of women.
So now I have the image of lady boa-constrictors with head wounds standing in a line, displaying their boa-constrictor vaginas with a sort of desperate hopefulness to the wholly uninterested men who pass by.
After a good deal of blathering so tedious it’s not even worth quoting in part, Fidelbogen begins to ponder the power of “no.”
[M]en must play hard to get. They must learn to exercise the very same option which has historically been the province of women, namely, the power to say NO.
Saying no lies coiled at the very heart of playing hard to get. Saying no signifies a withdrawal which generates a vacuum along its line of retreat, and this vacuum by its draft draws the other into a pursuit by default.
I feel a bit of a breeze myself, but I think that’s just because Prof. F is talking a lot of wind.
Let’s move from breezes to earthquakes:
The changes I am discussing here would amount to a tectonic realignment of unquestionably world-historic magnitude. An inversion of the Victorian pedestal.
The old way of doing things, Prof. F tells us,
I have decided to call it the pussy paradigm—a somewhat vulgar expression to be sure, but it has the common touch!
Ironically, the common touch is something hetero dudes will have to become masters at if they swear off the ladies. Prof. F continues:
So, this pussy paradigm belongs in the category of things which predate feminism’s arrival in the world. And when the feminists got here, they saw in a flash where their advantage lay, and they closed in, and they threw a harness around it.
They threw a harness around a paradigm?
The heart of feminism is female supremacism, and the heart of female supremacism is the pussy paradigm. Remember this if you remember nothing else.
So what does Prof. F call his pussy-optional way of doing things? The “optionality paradigm.” That is, dudes can have sex with women or not, whatever they want, and shouldn’t pressure one another to score with the ladies. (I’m not quite sure how, in Professor F’s economic model, the price of pussy can be reduced to zero if some dudes are still interested in it, but I confess that I only sort of skimmed that bit of his post. Life is short, and Fidelbogen’s posts are long.)
More blabbity blabbity:
The future, in theory, should see a migration of the optionality paradigm toward the center of the map within hetero-normative male culture, along with a corresponding displacement of the pussy paradigm toward the perimeter. This would exactly reverse the present disposition of forces. The optionality paradigm would, at that point, become the ruling paradigm.
After reading this turgid turd of a paragraph , I decided to cut my losses and skip directly to Professor F’s grand conclusion. Which turns out to be neither grand nor much of a conclusion:
My endeavor in writing has been to flesh it out somewhat. To write about it is to give it a form, to make the inchoate choate, to fashion an anchor of words that can hold things usefully in place so we can discuss them, if need be, with a view toward implementation and concrete action. The time to draft contingency plans is now. Put these ideas in your thinking cap and ponder their utility.
Even better, put them in a small bag, weigh it down with rocks, and toss it into the nearest large body of water.
Jesus, this turned into a long post. Still, it’s only about half the length of Prof. F’s original.
Please, oh might penis haver, explain the feminism to us. My tiny ladybrain awaits!
Haha, never fails. You’re.
I think my favorite part of this squeaky toy is that he thinks he’s the picture of normality. My little overblown windbag, I promise I’ll play with you more later, but I have to run for now. You seem like you’ll be much more fun to bat around than one of our other major trolls.
@Rutree: What non-feminist “talking points” are you referring to? There are many, many of them indeed. The non-feminist world is big, you know.
“You keep trying to prove your smart with a thesaurus,. . “
Correction: that should be “prove you’re smart”.
“Your” is the second person possessive. “You’re” is a contraction for “you are” — which is what I think you meant, yes? 😉
And no, I don’t believe there is one feminist movement in lockstep. I believe there are a variety of sub-movements in synch.
Rutree, you’re already making a fool of yourself and you don’t know it. Good thing you have only an audience of your peers around here — they’ll never tip you off about that!
There’s a fool here, but it’s not Rutee. I guess you want to double down on the utter ridiculousness shown in your OP.
hellkell: explain your statement. Enlarge. Elucidate.
First of all, you’re an MRA arguing on Manboobz. The only actual outcome of your behavior is going to be entertaining Manboobz readers without actually advancing your cause one iota. Hence, that makes you, at the very least, making an irrational decision and probably quite foolish.
I think what I said speaks for itself. I don’t owe you anything.
I would argue that the MRM and it’s various off shoots and subdivisions has just a great a propensity for insular language and tropes as feminism. Certainly, the preponderance of acronyms, terms like “alpha-cock carousel” and “pussy paradigm”, the seemingly undending subdivisions of “alpha” and “beta” categorizations, the numerical rankings for attractivenes, almost all of the short-hand used by MGTOWs, are only a few of the examples that spring immediately to mind.
You can make jokes about “mansplaining” and “Nice guy (TM)” and it certainly won’t bother me. But to imply that this is the sole provenance of feminism is very pot and kettle.
I’m not certain how much of this thread of comments you’ve read, fidelbogen, but you may well be surprised to note that -in the beginning of the discussion at any rate- several feminist posters agreed with some of your essay’s points.
Typo: “… has just as great a propensity…”
If feminists don’t know what feminism really is, doesn’t that just mean… that feminism is something else?
It’s not this Platonic ideal that can exist separately from the people actually working on it.
Peppering one’s writing with turgid 50-cent bon mots (yes, I’m being sarcastic) does not make an intelligent or persuasive argument. It’s quite the opposite, in fact — pretentious and signals to your opponents (who are not as dumb as you think) that you are a bully who is trying to cover up a lack of substance with purple prose. Sure, fancy words can be very effective when they are apt. But, writing a paragraph, then going over it and replacing every other word with an obscure synonym culled from a thesaurus, as if that’s going to awe anyone who’s ever read a decent book — that’s a pathetic, amateurish technique that would be embarrassing even in high school, and against which your English teacher doubtless cautioned you (fidelbogen) before you were old enough to shave. When it’s used, it’s clearly obvious to the reader, so not only is it deception, it’s really bad deception. It is a method employed by uneducated people desperate to inflate their intellectual image and laboring under a delusion that their readers are idiots.
@ fidelbogen
I don’t often advocate violence, but if you walked into my house or a group where I’d gathered with my friends and opened with that kind of comment, you’d be walking away with a bloody nose.
Go shit on your own lawn.
One of these days, fidelbogen will have to explain how feminists can be “callow weaklings” one minute, and dominate the court system and the universities the next minute. His enemies are either as strong or as weak as he needs them to be, apparently.
Oh, wait, I know! It’s because the men in those institutions only appear to be in charge of them… actually they’re weak-minded fools, ruled by “pussy power” and feminine tears. Or something.
“I don’t often advocate violence, but if you walked into my house or a group where I’d gathered with my friends and opened with that kind of comment, you’d be walking away with a bloody nose.”
Yo, cynickal. Funny you should say that, because I’ve just been thinking I for one would LOVE to meet you in person. Exchange views, as it were. See if you’d be as brave and snarky as you are on the internet. 😉
oooh watch out guys we got a tough guy
everyone stand back he’s gonna internet punch someone
There has to be an app for that.
@All&Sundry:I don’t respond to the ‘500-gallon treatment’, especially not coming from several mouths all at once.
@Ozymandias: Your name is familiar. You run the “teh menz” blog, don’t you? And we are supposed to be grateful for the supposedly “open-minded” editorial stance, yes ? A quick criticism: the trouble with your blog is that it’s written from a feminist perspective, and that is not the way to ingratiate yourself with non-feminists. They feel they are being “humored”, and that doesn’t go over well, not at all.
“First of all, you’re an MRA arguing on Manboobz. The only actual outcome of your behavior is going to be entertaining Manboobz readers without actually advancing your cause one iota. “
Am I an “MRA”? What IS an MRA, anyway? And am I “arguing”? And what do YOU think my “cause” is, assuming that I am trying to advance one?
@cynickal: whaddya know, I too am cynical!And I too don’t often advocate violence. By the way, I’m not sure exactly which statement you are referring to. If it’s my first one, then you should take it as a ‘heads up’, because it’s a mighty common (and rapidly growing) attitude among many people. Perhaps you are not aware of that?
Point being, that they have no privileged authority to self-define — the rest of the world can see perfectly well what feminism is, and draw its own conclusions.
Now when you say “… the rest of the world…” are you referring, particularly to the manosphere, the rest of the Western World, the rest of the word on a completely global level?
And what are the conclusions that the “…rest of the world” has drawn?
@Amused (and others):
If you’re gonna critique somebody’s “turgid prose”, you should at least read ‘The French Revolution’ by Thomas Carlyle, or ‘Pierre’ by Herman Melville. That should put things in perspective. As far as I’m concerned, those works are the benchmarks; the gold standards.
If a person writes pretty well “south” of the standard set in THOSE turgid works, then there is no call to find fault. Really, it’s all a matter of taste. What’s-a-matter, you a casualty of the video age? Got a 12-second attention span? Tsk-tsk!
Hey, here’s a Latin tag for ya, just to be really ‘pretentious’:
“De gustibus non est disputandum.”
But then, it really IS a Latin tag; it is not “pretending” to be one. So maybe it’s not right to call it pretentious?
“And what are the conclusions that the “…rest of the world” has drawn?”
The non-feminist world is a big place, and its conclusions are no doubt many. But I do not doubt its capacity to draw conclusions in whatever form. Or its inherent right to do so.
Making a fool of herself like, say, someone who misspells someone else’s handle and doesn’t notice?
He really can’t help himself, can he? He’s like the Amplified Bible of MRAs.
What am I saying? Why am I sitting in this chair? Why am I on this program? And what am I going to say next?
@fidelbogen: I’ve read a great deal of Melville. That doesn’t make you any less of a dick. At least Melville had a series of silly puns, an overarching theme about revenge, and a fun description of whale cock–all you got is an arch “Oh, *am* I arguing?” when you know full well that you came here to tell us we’re all fools. Own up to your own agenda, bucko.
@katz: I was going to try to work in a “what is love?” joke, but that video is way better.