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Feminism is a sexual orientation, explains wannabe Men’s Rights philosopher with his head up his ass

Be careful, men — because feminists want your banana

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 Robertshaw
Alan Robertshaw
2 years ago

comment image

Well, I read your bits anyway.

But blimey, Bletchley Park would have trouble deciphering that screed.

Full Metal Ox
Full Metal Ox
2 years ago

Hey, Mr. Blair, why you ranting ‘bout bananas?
Sundown come and me want go home!

Last edited 2 years ago by Full Metal Ox
Robert Haynie
Robert Haynie
2 years ago

Kumquat.

I read through it, but damn if I can follow it…

Jazzlet
Jazzlet
2 years ago

Sausages, you know they make more sense than that feast of appalling writing. And I thought Tony Blair spouted a lot of rubbish (WMD? Yeah right).

Kat, ambassador, feminist revolution (in exile)
Kat, ambassador, feminist revolution (in exile)
2 years ago

Day-O! Day-o, day-o, day-o.

Let me see if I understand: Feminism has nothing to do with equal pay, reproductive rights, or safety in my own body. No, the truth is that I’m dissatisfied with the patriarchy because I think men look great, which makes me hate men because I don’t have their great looks.

So would the reverse of this theory apply to men who batter and rape women? Do they commit these crimes because they want our smooth skin and curves? I’m sure this scholar has thought this through.

.45
.45
2 years ago

Banananananananana

“Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to feminism.” -Master Misyodanist

Mish of the Catlady Ascendancy

it sounds like Blair accidentally swallowed one of those early 20th century antifeminist screeds (or plagiarised from one, as his expression switches around quite a lot…)

Snowberry
Snowberry
2 years ago

Banana?

Best sense that I can make of it, he’s misunderstanding multiple concepts. For him, all of LGBTQIA+ are sexual orientations in some fashion, despite that the T/I and some of the A/Q/+ is about gender identity, not sexual orientation. Sure, sexual orientation and gender identity are to some extent linked, but they’re not the same thing.

And then we have gender performance, which is not strictly tied to actual gender. And then we have some schools of second-wave feminism which believed that physical sex was superficial and that gender was purely performance… which is not clearly stated to have been the basis of his hypothesis (at least not above), but I can’t imagine what else might have influenced this, unless he just completely made up what feminists are like and sort of hit on something vaguely correct in the historical sense.

And then his mentions of Freud about some women being envious of men’s traits, literally and metaphorically… combined with gender essentialism…

I think the chain of logic goes something like, certain women possess inherently male psychological traits, which is a form of trans-psyche (My term for his apparent concept, not his), which due to being gender-related is a form of transgender, which is a form of LGBTQIA+, which is sexual orientation. Even if every link in this chain was valid (they’re not, all of them are a bit off), this would still be like that silly argument I make occasionally to “prove” that birds are a type of fish.

And then he basically uses this to argue that the small “core” of feminism is a bunch of sort-of-male women trying to get all women socially treated as if they were men despite that it’s only beneficial for them and not for most other women, because most women are fundamentally different from men.

Dalillama
Dalillama
2 years ago

It is perhaps worth noting here that Freud was lying about the penis envy thing. Not mistaken, not misinformed, lying. He initially said, accurately, that sexual abuse was rampant among his upper-class clients, but the upper-class men doing the abusing started throwing lawyers at him and he recanted.

Buttercup Q. Skullpants

Ban. I only made it halfway through that bulldozer heap of word rubble before my eyes glazed over. How did he arrive at the conclusion that women who want equal pay for equal work secretly wish they had a hairy chest?

Last edited 2 years ago by Buttercup Q. Skullpants
Battering Lamb
Battering Lamb
2 years ago

@Dalilama: Do you have a source for that? I’m genuinely interested. Penis envy is one of his most objectionable claims, and while there is a lot wrong with his theories, I do find his work interesting (though I prefer his earlier work. Crystal-principle era was way more interesting than his ‘the Oedipus process is everything’ era).

Dalillama
Dalillama
2 years ago

@Buttercup

Here‘s a quick synopsis, there’s more details available elsewhere

Prith
Prith
2 years ago

The idea of penis envy has been around since at least 1486 when the Malleus Maleficarum told harrowing tales of penis-stealing witches.

“Sometimes [witches] collect male organs in great numbers, as many as twenty or thirty members together, and put them in a bird’s nest, or shut them up in a box, where they move themselves like living members, and eat oats and corn, as has been seen by many and is a matter of common report.”

(emphasis added because it’s hilarious, except for all the murder it incited)
https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/witchcraft-penis-snatchers-history (RIP Bitch, alas)

Maybe what we should be focusing on is clit-envy. Hell, men ought to be jealous of “the Devil’s teat” – it’s amazing!
https://www.haaretz.com/science-and-health/.premium.MAGAZINE-the-devil-s-teat-a-brief-history-of-the-clitoris-1.6462676

Fred B-C
2 years ago

I very frequently point out that there has never been a major international movement to ban straight people from getting married.

I wonder if our esteemed philosopher would be all right with penalizing straight bigots.

Crip Dyke
2 years ago

Is it possible that Blair has fallen for the banana in the tailpipe trick?

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occasional reader
occasional reader
2 years ago

Generally-speaking, women have breasts

So have all mammals -which include men – ? That is not really a point of distinction…

Banana nana nana nana Bananatman !

Malitia
Malitia
2 years ago

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Trying
Trying
2 years ago

I’ve read a lot of poorly written shit but dang. That is impossible to parse out.

Yltra
Yltra
2 years ago

Time and time again I’ve seen some dude claim to have some grand insight on Why Feminism Is Bad, and each time it’s an argument posed against women’s rights as far back as the suffragettes. Would it kill them to research the movement they’re so obsessed with? At least a little bit?
Also the people who make this whole “men should be men and women should be women!” argument always seem to define womanhood and femininity as either a) passivity, submissiveness and maybe motherhood, or b) whatever they -personally- find sexually attractive. And then they’re surprised women don’t want anything to do with their notion of what it means to be a woman. Ugh.

(Also, sounds like this guy probably believes autogynephilia is a thing. Double ugh.)

Last edited 2 years ago by Yltra
GAZZA
GAZZA
2 years ago

I tried, but no power in the ‘verse can make me read all of that.Sorry David, but you must suffer alone on this one.

Malintzin
Malintzin
2 years ago

I’m unclear on how the right to vote, to own property, and to receive equal pay for the same work (just to name a few things) equates to “wanting to be like men”.

Victorious Parasol
Victorious Parasol
2 years ago

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iR4BUWf6y3M

The guy’s got a way to go before he reaches time cube levels of internet prose fame.

Kat, ambassador, feminist revolution (in exile)
Kat, ambassador, feminist revolution (in exile)
2 years ago

@ Yitra

Would it kill them to research the movement they’re so obsessed with?

Yes. Yes, it would kill them. Apparently.

oncewasmagnificent
oncewasmagnificent
2 years ago

victorious parasol

time cube” !!! I’d completely failed to notice that no one ever cites tc any more.
Always good for a refreshing laughed-like-a-drain moment in a busy or frustrating day.

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