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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.
Do you mean this statement?
They don’t seem to realize just how small their world is,
how big the outer world is, and how tedious and bizarre they sound to the rest of us.
You mean the “feminist world” where we believe that women are actual people, with life experiences?
That sounds bizarre and tedious to you?
Crap, blockquote fail again.
Stupid IE6
“Oh… and I mentioned Melville (and Carlyle) also as points of information. Stay on track, okay?”
Points of information, sure. But relevant? You’re not making much of a case for that.
“especially when you can go back and read them. . . “
I can indeed, and it’s naught but a clusterfuck. Which was all part of the “plan” (I know how these scenarios work; I’ve seen them far too many times!).
As I said earlier, I don’t respond to the five-hundred gallon treatment.
Yes, I’m aware that it is “You’re”. Unlike you, I can actually catch some of my errors, and I corrected myself before I left earlier. Again, you’re trying to prove you’re smart by keeping reference materials on hand, but the simple fact is that writing is mostly about the editing. You waste words; of the many crimes a writer is capable of, this is amongst the highest.
Well, I fucking hope you just suck at the editting stages. It may be 90% of writing, but it’s still better than the thought that your writing was even sloppier to begin with.
Oh dear, you really are hopeless.
I’m not really worried about the opinion of a squeaky toy. We already know you’re a living monument to the Dunning-Kruger effect; it’s written all over your weak attempts to set yourself up as a counter-philosopher to feminism
FB: If you can’t deal with the comment threads here, the exit is thattaway. not a single person will try to prevent you from leaving.
“As I said earlier, I don’t respond to the five-hundred gallon treatment.”
… and yet you keep commenting?
Actually, fidelbogen, if the “500 Gallon Treatment” bothers you that much, I’m sure it would be easy to set up a tinychat where it was just you and Rutee. Or just you and Holly. I’ll make the popcorn. 😀
“You’re not allowed to self-define, douche.”
Feminism has never allowed the world outside its gates to self-define..so that is nothing new.
But fair enough. I guess that makes us even. . . eh?
And I mean ALL of “us” . . . on both sides.
So you guys stay behind your Maginot line, and maybe we’ll keep it cool, eh?
Oh..and bag the feminist subjectivism.
“…… and yet you keep commenting?”
Why not? When I’m on a roll, I tend to keep rolling. Call it inertia.
“’…… and yet you keep commenting?’
“Why not? When I’m on a roll, I tend to keep rolling. Call it inertia.”
Or diarrhea.
Ha ha ha! What an utterly meaningless statement! Feminists do not have the power to prevent you, or any other human being, from defining themselves. What on earth are you getting at? (And the infamous two-dot ellipsis is just the icing on the cake. 😀 )
I define non-feminism as eating only carrots. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner, nothing but carrots. Can’t even salt ’em.
This defining things game is fun!
And now I can authoritatively say that if you aren’t a feminist, you’re liable to suffer severe malnutrition, so, you know, we win.
“Feminists do not have the power to prevent you, or any other human being, from defining themselves. .”
I agree they haven’t got that far quite yet . .
(Hey, there was another two dot ellipsis for ya. )
fidelbogen: Let me help you out.
It is quite a spectacle to watch MRAs palavering with each other, in a huddle, in their own world. They don’t seem to realize just how small their world is, how big the outer world is, and how tedious and bizarre they sound to the rest of us. They are strong, snarky and cocky only among their own kind in their mutual admiration cavern, but turn them loose in a more culturally diverse environment which doesn’t reciprocate their reactions (or their jargons), and they are callow weaklings. If only they could see themselves as others see them. The trouble with most MRAs I conclude, is that they don’t know shit about feminism. 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.
FTFY
What was the point? What you said has zero content. Any group can be plugged into that screed and it means as much as it did when you wrote it.
Which is, actually, the problem with your writing in general. It’s like fat-free, sugar-sugar free, zero-calorie whipped cream. It looks as if it has substance, but there isn’t really anything there.
Melville is turgid? No. He belongs to a different consensus of prosody, and was working inside the tradition of Hawthorne (now there was someone I’d call turgid) an in reaction to Emerson and Thoreau. I’d not go so far as to say he never wasted words, but I don’t think one can say he was overworking his ideas.
“And now I can authoritatively say that if you aren’t a feminist, you’re liable to suffer severe malnutrition, so, you know, we win.”
And I can authoritatively say that if you are are a feminist, then you are a person of interest.
“Melville is turgid? “
“Pierre” is most certainly turgid. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
fidelbogen seems to be of the school of thought that considers saying nothing in many elaborate words is profundity. Somebody sic Alan Sokal on him, pronto.
fidelbogen: You (all) have a thin skin, don’t you? Interesting, that. . .
The projection is strong with this one.
You could have been thick skinned, looked at the mockery as if it were the flailings of the impotent and the ineffectual; lazing about in the small pond of their insignificance. You might even have penned a witty little dismissal on your own blog.
But no, your manly knickers were in a twist and you had to “show the uppity feminists what was what”.
Even at that, you might have been able to save some semblance of dignity, had you managed to pull the trigger on that and let it lie.
Nope, you had to try and prove to the people here how wrong they were. No evidence, just a bucket of blithering rhetoric dumped on the floor as if it had content.
Then you get offended when people laugh at the laughable.
That’s the definition of thin-skinned.
fidelbogen: Neither Melville nor Carlyle are turgid, since they actually have something of value to say. Your writing, by contrast, looks like a collection of “SAT words” strung together meaninglessly, but in a way that makes it obvious you’ve been itching to use them in a sentence.
Your Latin doesn’t impress me either. Given that the internet is brimming with lists of Latin phrases and insults of varying degree of reliability, you tossing out one would never lead a reasonable person to believe you have any knowledge of that language.
“your writing in general.”
I have critics in both directions — but mostly in a good one.
Oh…point taken per the “MRA” substitution. In fact, I’ve thought of that too, plenty of times.
But
“Your Latin doesn’t impress me either.”
Nor was it intended to do so. I guess you missed the broad sarcasm behind that, didn’tcha?
“It is quite a spectacle to watch penguins palavering with each other, in a huddle, in their own world. They don’t seem to realize just how small their world is, how big the outer world is, and how tedious and bizarre they sound to the rest of us. They are strong, snarky and cocky only among their own kind in their mutual admiration cavern, but turn them loose in a more culturally diverse environment which doesn’t reciprocate their reactions (or their jargons), and they are callow weaklings. If only they could see themselves as others see them. The trouble with most penguins I conclude, is that they don’t know shit about feminism. 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.”
Not quite as good a madlib as the others we’ve had, alas.
“Then you get offended when people laugh at the laughable.”
And when did this happen? I must be getting forgetful in my old age.