A couple of weeks back, I wrote about Men’s Rights Inactivism — the almost complete inability of so many so-called Men’s Rights activists to actually do anything like real activism in the real world. I was inspired by a discussion on the Men’s RIghts subreddit in which numerous MRAs reacted with defensive anger after another MRA called them out on this notable failure.
A fellow called Henry Blair responded by insisting that he was a real activist, noting (as I said in my posst)
that he had self-published a book setting forth his ideas about “Lovism,” a philosophy that he thinks should supplant both feminism and Men’s Rights activism. (It’s ranked as the 5,695,898th most popular book on Amazon, so it’s not exactly selling like hotcakes.) He’s also, he says, set up a (largely unread) blog and several online forums that he admits “haven’t taken off yet.”
Well, having now read some of his blog I can say I’m not exactly surprised that he’s having trouble getting people to sign up for his “Lovist” campaign. Let me share some of the garbled, er, insights into men, women, and love I found in a blog post of his with the grammatically challenged headline “Feminism seems more than anything as a sexual orientation.”
Hey, I spent 20 minutes I won’t get back reading his post, so now you all can suffer a little bit of the pain I endured for your benefit.
The basic premise of his post is that hard-core (female) feminists basically have a bad case of penis envy; instead of wanting to get with men, they actually want to be more like them. Somehow in his mind this makes feminism a sexual orientation.
Let’s just dive into this little manifesto headlong, so you can get a better sense of his “argument.”
Generally-speaking, women have breasts, vaginas and softness and men have wide shoulders, penises and muscular physics [sic], and within heterosexuality men are attracted (innately) to the female sex-distinguishing qualities and women are attracted (innately) to the male sex-distinguishing qualities, and the same goes for sex-distinguishing qualities expressed as attitudes, mental style and psychological differences … .
But hardcore feminists aren’t attracted to men; they’re jealous of them.
[I]t seems that in a very small fraction of people, the “having” is personal, and is experienced as a drive to become the one with those qualities, and attraction is inverted into jealousy.
But not all of those who call themselves feminists are really feminists in Blair’s schema.
[A] distinction needs to be made between what might be defined as feminism-sympathizers (the two wider circles), and feminists (the core). It is quite evident that the wider two circles – feminism-sympathizers – are very different from feminists, that is, from this feminist core, and were led into following this core without realizing this difference.
It’s at this point that Blair decides to throw Freud, and his concept of penis envy, into the mix.
There is evidently a clear hostility in members of this [feminist] core toward men and manhood, which causes them to have difficulties in applying any universal perspective to men equally, thereby creating their anti-humanist position. Freud discussed what seems as expressions of a similiar conflict existing in a few women regarding manhood, which he called penis-envy. I could never quite comprehend his concept – are there really ordinary women who wish they had a penis? Why? This concept of Freud had always eluded me, and I never quite believed that such a phenomenon really exists. But recently and after observing the feminist core, I started to suspect that he might have referred to a more specific concept, which he attempted to describe with the terminology of penis-envy figuratively, not literally – jealousy in the sex-distinguishing qualities – those qualities that create the sex and sexuality differences between men and women, which normally generate within heterosexuality in each sex attraction to the other sex.
Sorry about all that; I’m trying to keep these quotes as short as possible.
Anyway, he goes on to argue that feminists don’t want to be men themselves, exactly; they just want men and women to be the same.
Feminists present their aspirations as centered around equality, but a closer look reveals that unlike humanism, which has been advancing sexes-equality since the mid-19th century, feminism consistently had little to do with equality and in fact passionately generates wide-spread discrimination and overtly advocates for inequality in opportunity, rights, human dignity and freedoms. … what motivated feminism, was a drive to homogenize the two sexes.
Generating wide-spread discrimination is my passion.
This focus on homogenization is dramatically expressed in the fact that unlike humanists of both sexes, feminists define equality as sameness. … This … becomes completely explained if feminists have articulated their perceptions through a wish to obtain the features that normally attract women, for themselves, thus arriving at their focus on sameness.
It’s all about jealousy, when you get right down to it.
It is … homogenization that concerns feminists, to obtain sameness, and not equality, and, so it seems, not because of any moral considerations as found in humanism, but out of a much simpler drive – jealousy.
And among the ladies, jealosy is all about hatred.
In women, jealousy is almost synonymous with hatred toward the target of jealousy. … Thus a conundrum that literally no man truly understands today nor many women – what is the reason, justification or source of the immense, overt, distilled hate of feminists toward men – immediately becomes explained when regarding the feminist core as expressing an emotional inversion in sexuality.
We’re almost to the sexual orientation bit; hang on just a little longer.
The overt hate-speech against men also creates an intense feminist pressure on women to denounce the male sex-distinguishing qualities in men, qualities toward which women feel attraction and love yet are required by feminists to conceal and suppress those feelings and instead to express resentment toward the male qualities, with which, when feminism is revealed as an emotional inversion, a competition would exist in the feminist, creating a drive to diminish male qualities in men (by recruiting the women to denounce male qualities in men and to demand of men to abolish them) for the gratification of being the one “having” them.
Wait, I thought the feminists wanted men and women to be alike, not for feminists take over all the male qualities for themselves.
Perhaps we will find an answer in the next blob of Blairspeak.
Feminists’ attitude toward womanhood with shame and suppression; their articulation of an aspiration for equality not as equal human rights and dignity but as “physical equality” – sameness of two sexes (along with a contradicting belief in a kind of “perpetual latent residual femaleness” despite said belief in fundamental sameness, that would grant women privileges, in contradiction to equality); their attitude toward manhood through jealousy that transforms into hate with yet the conflicting drive of showing that “women are better than men in being men” – of having the male sex-distinguishing qualities personally; all become explained if one only regards feminism – that is this core as opposed to feminism-sympathizers – as expressing an inversion within sexuality.
Er, sorry, I nodded off somewhere in the middle of that quote. What’s he on about now?
[F]eminism seems more than anything as the politicization of what is essentially a psychological inversion in sexuality, that transforms the drive to have the sex-distinguishing qualities as fulfillment of attraction, into a drive to possess them as one’s own traits. Such inversions in sexual processing, are commonly known as sexual orientations.
Uh, they are?
Just as a small number of men and women present with an inversion of the sexual processing from attraction to the other sex to attraction to their sex, women of the group commonly known as “feminism” seem to possess another type of inversion in sexual processing – Emotional Reversal of Attraction to Jealousy (which may be abbreviated as ERAJ).
So when feminists seem cranky it’s because they’re “on the eraj?”
Oh we have fun here don’t we.
Hence feminism in its essence, simply and plainly, can be regarded a sexual orientation like heterosexuality and homosexuality.
Dude, do you even know what sexual orientation is?
Such a tendency would be similar to that of a man who, when seeing a beautiful woman in a tight red dress with long soft hair, rather than wishing to start a conversation with her feels the urge to wear a tight red dress and grow long soft hair – to have the sex-distinguishing qualities not as fulfillment of attraction but as his own traits.
Yeah, that’s not a sexual orientation, dude.
In the 1970s this took a political form now termed feminism, when an extremely small faction of women started to organize as a political movement allegedly to achieve equality in rights (thus ignoring the action and results of over 100 years of universal humanism that by then had already created equality in the law and in almost all cultural respects, this continuing regardless of the advent of feminism until between the 1980s and the very early 1990s cultural equality was completely accomplished in the West), whereas in practice, they engaged primarily if not exclusively in activities that seem more than anything as an expressed drive to steer society, mostly forcefully, into homogenization of sexes, a drive which can be explained as generated strictly by a personal inverted sexuality. Since this is a minority orientation, we can safely add it to the famous letters, which become LGBTF – F for feminist.
Dude, I’m still not sensing that you actually know what a sexual orientation is.
Should the sexual orientation called feminism be acknowledged and respected as any sexual orientation, depends on the level to which their jealousy translates into hatred toward men, as men and boys do not have to be subjected to pan-cultural institutionalized hate and to attempts to annihilate their maleness or themselves, solely for the benefit of the sexual gratification of a sexual orientation generated by a reversal of female emotional response to men’s sex-distinguishing qualities from attraction to envy. Likewise, women should not be put under shaming, forced masculinization and pressure to denounce and alienate those whom they love and are attracted to.
None of this is happening outside of your own head, dude.
Every sexual orientation should be celebrated, so long as it is not harmful to others, but it is very obvious that the feminist sexual orientation has long reached a point of becoming extremely harmful to both men and women.
And so Blair suggests that feminists need to be forced into what is the equivalent of “conversion therapy.”
If the emotional reversal to jealousy reaches hate, specifically any social expression of hate and certainly hateful acts including and primarily racist-type social incitement to hatred with hate-speech meant to inflict pain, it needs to be addressed with therapy.
Somehow I suspect that Blair came to this conclusion before he came up with his theory, then reverse-engineered this whole clotted argument to justify it.
Somehow I also suspect that his philosophy of “lovism” isn’t worthy of its name.
If you made it all the way through this, post the word “banana” in the comments.
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@Alan
Weren’t they fascinating? Or “aren’t they,” I should say – it’s not like they’ve quite died out altogether.
@Fred B-C
You’re dramatically underestimating the average racism level of stoned navel-gazing hippies as well. In their defense, most of them are trying. Often very trying. Kevin Siembieda likewise, bless his heart; his approach to research has always been much like his approach to editing, which is to say that he never does enough of it and refuses to let anyone help him.
It’s not clear to me why you think that the whole idea being created by an open and blatant racist for racist reasons isn’t sufficient to declare it racist, nor frankly is it a good look. Since it’s still the case apparently, here’s a longer explanation than I can be arsed writing out.
@Dalilama: Because… I don’t believe in genetic fallacies? An idea isn’t racist because of who said it. An idea is racist because of its inevitable implications. Ancient astronaut theory is not inevitably racist. Like, do you think Siembieda is a racist? I agree, his editing and research could be way better (and I recently realized how cringeworthy it is that IQ is used for the intelligence stat even though he doesn’t really defend the pseudoscience of IQ anywhere I’ve seen), but… an overt bigot, even given the unfortunate cryptofascism of a lot of Coalition States fans (despite the negative comparison to Nazis being pretty core to the characterization of the CS?) Or Jack Kirby? Spirit Science?
These ideas have gotten very far into the culture, and the idea that all of these people are just closeted Nazis seems to be grossly uncharitable to me. I’m willing to be convinced, but I’d need to see more than “von Daniken is a racist” or “lots of Nazis use the theory” (since, you know, lots of Nazis use every theory to defend their ideas, they’re liars).
Banana. I think. Well, my head didn’t do a Scanners-style explosion, so I’ll count that as making it through.
Banana. Good lord. Banana.
@Fred B_C
Yes, Kevin Siembieda comes from a position of unexamined racism*. This is the default state of white Americans, including Kevin, hippies, and yourself (to a certain extent also me, see my comments on hippies earlier, I grew up with those fuckers, but I also grew up amidst the preservation of the Klamath language and with Déné cousins, plus many folks from various parts of SE Asia, which gives me a very different perspective to most white Americans). The great majority of racism is not the blatant KKK variety, as you really ought to know already before thinking you’re qualified to engage in discussion around here. The idea that aliens are responsible for ancient monuments built by non-whites is intrinsically and fundamentally racist**,
*”Sushi Vojimbo”, seriously. And if you don’t know what I’m referring to you also don’t know enough about Siembieda’s work to have this discussion
**I suppose you could argue that the Raelians and similar ilk aren’t racist in their positions, but they place the alien intervention before humans or any human accomplishments, all of which are attributed to the people who built them in that theology
Dali: Okay, but “unexamined racism” and outright neo-Nazi hate like Sitchin aren’t the same thing, and a person who has unexamined racism doesn’t produce 100% racist ideas. By that reasoning, we should say that *literally every idea produced in this society* is “racism all the day down”. No matter the implications, no matter the perspective.
So, yeah, back in 1985 in TMNT and Other Strangeness, when Siembieda was trying to emulate the kind of broad poppy Asian sentiment that one would see in things like Frank Miller, someone in a campaign gave themselves a *fake name* of Sushi Vojimbo. That’s silly and a lot unfortunate, but not malicious, not like von Daniken going full mask-off racist. And you pick an example from 1985, as if it’s emblematic of his entire work. There are good arguments that Rifts, which I am deeply familiar with (indeed, actually published a short story in the Rifter), does have a kind of cultural essentialist reductive souffle, but… well… this is all sort of common to RPGs from Shadowrun to D&D. It comes from trying to capture the parts of pop culture that you like and absorb. It should always be done with more sensitivity, and better research, but even that is a lot more forgivable in the pre-Internet age when if you wanted to do research you would find that even your library texts would get a lot wrong. Erick Wujcik, from what I can see, really tried to understand what he could about the Asian cultures he engaged with, including justifying his translation conventions, discussing quirks of language, etc. I definitely can’t think of much beyond when they tried to literally play from Frank Miller’s playbook in the 1980s that is that, and even that reads (to me at least, I get that others may have a different perspective) as cheesy, childish and ignorant, a groaner Dad joke more than anything remotely malicious.
As an adult, when I’ve gone to go check on ideas in Rifts books for my own edification, they actually hold up fairly well. They depict voodoo very sympathetically and basically accurately, even if it ultimately gets a little boring in their version as a result (basically just shamanism). If anything, things like the Altara Warrior Women and some of the background sexism is more egregious than the cultural tourism, but even that has pulled back some, as has his tendency to have lots of villains be evil gynocracies (which is itself actually sort of bizarrely progressive, and they did actually try to do a lot of work to make the Atorians more interesting but never published the book – you know, because he sucks at running a publishing company!) And characters like Erin Tarn are total badasses, and not sexualized at all.
So it seems like you’re being a bit reductive, while also changing the topic away from his ancient astronaut stuff actually being quite conspicuously not racist. Indeed, the Atlantean depictions in Rifts go out of their way to put Atlantis as a kind of proto-civilization and not just “white people did everything”, and the magic of other cultures is taken seriously as well. The Lemurians, for example, are coded Polynesian (and they always imagined Atlantis as a world-spanning culture), such that I looked up Hawaiian beach bum slang for my current Lemurian. If anything, in Rifts by default ancient aliens end up being conquering assholes who humans need to band together to put down, and every ancient culture is viewed as having had a deep and valid spirituality; it’s almost postmodern in perspective. I particularly like the fantasy (even if it, again, leads to some pan-Native American mythology, though they do take some care to differentiate between tribes in Spirit West in the flavor text but largely abandon this for the O.C.C.s which is a bit of a problem) of a small number of Native Americans being spirited into the spirit realm to survive colonialism.
So I looked into the ancient aliens background. The stories from the 1890s that established the initial idea don’t seem much more overtly racist. I found no evidence of Sitchin behing anything other than a fraud, a bad scholar and seemingly a bit of a jerk; he didn’t expose any views as odious as von Daniken. It’s just von Daniken, and the people around him who got that stank, from what I can see. Even the SPLC article only talks about the broad strokes of the movement; they do not say it’s “racism all the way down” as you did. There’s tons of Nazis who have glommed onto it, and Atlantis, but… they do that with everything. Psychometrics aren’t racist as a concept because Nazis obsess over IQ and race. Being concerned about birth rates in social planning isn’t racist, or even sexist, just because Nazis are.
Moreover, to quote the SPLC article, “Today’s far right is divided on Ancient Astronaut theory. On the one hand, it denies agency to brown-skinned peoples, and features Aryan-looking heroes, which they consider good things; but it also deprives ancient (human) Aryans of the accomplishments credited to them so lavishly in Atlantis and other theories. Consider the case of Patrick Chouinard, a prolific writer who operates the alt-history sites RenegadeTribune.com and ancientaryans.com. (The latter site’s symbol, the Norse rune, was also the logo of the Nazi Ahnenerbe.) Like the Nazis, the sites are dedicated to recapturing a lost, pure Aryan civilization — one respectful of, but not dependent on alien life. In September, Chouinard cast a critical eye on the upcoming tenth season of the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens, in an article titled “Are Ancient Aliens Theorists Selling Our People Short?”
So… if even the Nazis don’t like it… I doubt it’s racism all the way down.
Indeed, this very confluence of people are the same as the 2012 Mayan predictions. You know, the people who took Mayan astronomy so seriously (if Mayan culture so reductively) that they thought the world would end because they thought the Mayans said so!
So, yeah, you conflated neo-Nazi racism and standard non-bigoted, non-cruel ignorance that can be dispelled with a little education. I get that you can make an argument that they’re on a continuum, but what I actually said still holds up: Your average hippy “crystal healing” type is almost certainly going to be less racist than your average median member of the society, less likely to be Republican, etc. I’ve spent my life among these people, and by default if you talk about critical race theory or policing or what not you will get very standard liberal/left-wing perspectives. And yet ancient astronaut ideas float among them, and if you point out racist implications they will argue that they don’t think it was only non-white civilizations that needed the help.
Which. Isn’t. Racist. Literally exactly what I said. And I have friends who are Raelians/Pleidians, and definitely very socially aware hippy types. Subconsciously biased, inheriting racist mythology from society, etc.? Yes! I am sure! But not overt neo-Nazi racist! Which was… literally… my point.
(Though there is an offshoot of that school of thought that focuses on them as a kind of replacement for white people, but that’s not the mainstream, and most depictions I’ve seen are basically coded as blue-skinned Indians, which… isn’t great either, but certainly is not white supremacism).
Sorry to be a little exasperated, but when a disagreement on scope and type of racism earns the “bad look” assessment, I expect better than a later flat concession of my point, hidden behind a “I suppose”. No, you couldn’t “argue” that, it’s actually just obviously true. The ideology isn’t racist. You can argue that it’s anti-human, but not only does that not always necessarily follow, but it’s not the same, and what I spent some time to argue.
So, again, racism 95% of the way down?
One can also note that, under such a theory, a) humans passed the Alien U entrance exam, and b) it was mostly brown people who passed that entrance exam … indeed, I’d like to see how a bona fide racist ancient-aliens proponent reacts to that being pointed out.
@Surplus: It depends on how one imagines the specifics, of course, but yeah, thinking about it that does seem to really be the case.
The most anti-racist interpretation would be that aliens spent the most time trying to teach and help the groups they found the most interesting and most capable.
But even if the aliens came to the people they thought could do very little on their own, if the aliens are viewed as beneficent at all, it’s still pretty reasonable to assume that the aliens thought more of those people or liked them better.
Some such theories, like von Daniken’s, basically have dark-skinned people as lesser breeds made by the aliens, or have the aliens basically using those areas to build their own stuff, presumably among the primitive people. But unless one is also buying some Atlantis or Nordic supremacy nonsense (and that’s how the racist would answer that claim, by piling on the nonsense), one still has to admit that European peoples were also primitive at the time.
And the editorial stance of Ancient Aliens tends not to be that. The idea of the Egyptian temple with the lightbulbs, for example, is that Egyptians were trusted with this valuable technology. And if Pakal’s Sarcophagus depicts a rocket, well, that seems an admission that Mayans at least could pretty well describe a rocket’s shape and design.
It’s a little more fraught when we go to the whole “lots of these sculptures that seem to be of fish and stuff were actually airplanes” because that again imagines ancient people so foolishly trying to capture what aliens were doing above them, but even there the ancient astronaut theorists implicitly trust these people to have made something good enough that it would be a good rendition of what they saw, based off of their repeated surprise that aerodynamic/aquadynamic things can be decent airplanes if you add on landing gears and propellers.
Hell, I could see an Afrocentrist argue that the aliens gave all the tech to the True Source of Civilization (TM) and were humble and sustainable and intelligent about it, and then the evil Greeks and Europeans came along with their colonialism and arrogance and screwed it up and added rationalism and all sorts of things to the mix. That’s… actually basically Spirit Science’s worldview, nods to thirteen families and such aside.
It’s also worth mentioning that Chariots of Ezekiel theories imply that the ancient Jews also were so unable to understand aliens that they described aliens and spaceships poorly, and while that could point to latent anti-Semitism, it’s also pretty offensive to “Judeo-Christian” bigots.
So, yeah, the picture is complicated. As always, the racism among racists isn’t really because they’re being internally consistent. They’re bigots. They cherry-pick what they want. One can take their own ideas and make a different narrative. I think the racism that is inherent to a lot of the movement is not in the details but rather in the broad strokes: We now have an excuse to say that ancient non-white peoples really didn’t have any civilization, so any signs of civilization only begin in Europe. It doesn’t matter that the underlying theory in its details contradicts that picture.