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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@oncewasmagnificent
I’m an Old Cootessa who remembers the glory days of Time Cube discussions.
@David
My reaction to this can best be summed up with a phrase from one of my favorite baseball announcers: Big swing and a miss. I wouldn’t trust Henry Blair to give me the time of day, let alone define feminism. Henry can most accurately be described as what noted behavioral science expert Lucy Van Pelt would call “a blockhead”.
Ick. Parts of that remind me of, and were likely cribbed from, Blanchard’s garbage theory, but somehow made even more incoherent and nonsensical. That might explain why he keeps referring to sexual orientation, anyway, given that Blanchard (in short) classed all trans women as either just “homosexual” and seeking to attract men or as “autogynephilic” fetishists aroused by themselves. Anyone who failed to fit either category was dismissed out of hand as lying, because what’s the point of coming up with an elaborate theory to dehumanize people if you’re going to let reality get in the way?
@Parasol: Time Cube! Yay!
It has definitely been sad that the flavor of unusual Internet behavior has morphed from
that kind of thing to bitter misogyny.
@Kat: No, you see, Kat, those people either don’t really exist or they were justified because girls are b-words. Male motives, even when deeply, literally screamingly emotional, are reasonable and respectable (to these moral children).
@Dali: That… actually makes me respect Freud slightly more. He found the data that we know he would have, and was going to make good arguments, and then got hit by the lawyers and the social pressure and even the potential fear of being treated like Jung was later.
Of course, anyone who is citing Freud unironically these days is just screaming “I AM A PSEUDO-SCIENTIST”. So it barely matters, but I find it telling that even the original mythology was not data driven.
But even Freud and Jung, as deeply flawed as both could be, still absorbed ideas that held both men and women to account. For example, he did indeed create a parallel concept: castration anxiety.
@ fred b-c
People who cite Freud are just doing so because they see him as a surrogate father figure to make up for the one they rejected during their anal retentive phase because of their Electra complexes. But really they all just fancy their mums.
@Alan: Porque no los dos?
@ fred b-c
I’m such a hardcore vegan, I can’t even translate a sentence with porque in it.
@Fred B-C
It is sad, isn’t it? Back then whenever Time Cube came up in my circles, the conversation frequently went something like this:
“Dude. Have you heard about this weird Time Cube site?”
“No, what is it?”
“I can’t do it justice. Check it out for yourself.” (provides link)
“…”
“I know, right?”
“What is this guy ON?”
“No clue, and I don’t want him to share, ‘cos the world only needs ONE brain like that.”
@Victorious Parasol: People in the tabletop RPG sphere will remember RPG.Net reviewing Synnibarr and SenZar, and then reviewing FATAL, the RPG that has racist armors and extensive rules for rape, the RPG whose creators replied to the accusation that it is a date rape RPG by noting that no rules for dating are included. That produced this quote: “There’s an innocence to Synnibarr, a lack of subterfuge that makes it fun to think about, if not to read. If nothing else, it’s the only game that I’ve seen so far that has a Midnight Sunstone Bazooka in it. It’s a bad game, but it’s a bad game based on misguided enthusiasm rather than bitter misogyny”.
Regrettable that the trajectory of the Internet has followed that pathway.
@Fred B-C
It is indeed regrettable. Of course, I also remember the days when spam was so rare that if you got some, you could complain about it to your circle of net-friends and everybody would be outraged on your behalf.
*snore* *twitch* Sorry, I dozed off and had the weirdest dream about some fool who didn’t know what he was talking about and couldn’t put a coherent statement together to save his life.
@Malitia’s GIF describes how I felt trying to read this.
Plantain. I did try. Nothing I managed to look at had any activism, though.
@Vicky P: Oh, for those halcyon days when Time Cube was the worst you’d come across.
https://ca-times.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/354991f/2147483647/strip/true/crop/2048×1735+0+0/resize/840×712!/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcalifornia-times-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F2a%2F49%2F3ee60dd31a4e8804456dd8116194%2Fla-et-the-banana-splits-20190219
Continuing with the food metaphor: Blair’s post is what TV Tropes calls Word Salad Philosophy. However, it’s not the good, tasty kind of (word) salad; it’s the kind that’s covered with bacteria and gives you food poisoning. Of the mind. And now I’d better stop while I’m still making a little sense or I’ll end up writing like Blair.
P.S. How do I embed images?
@personal: At the risk of sounding like a neckbeard, the fact that word salad can effectively disguise hate by reducing its signifiers to just another part of the random word vomit (which I think is a more accurate term for the writing of people like this) is a good reason for us to care about people saying things coherently. Politics and the English Language and all that. You can see it in, say, how easy it is to transition from ancient astronaut theories (which can be harmless good fun) to vicious racist and colonialist ideology.
I’m reminded of MovieBob responding to the CinemaSins school of criticism, where he pointed out that reducing criticism to finding a series of supposedly objectively-present “errors” lets you hide one’s political agenda.
@Fred B-C
I’m afraid the ancient astronaut business is racism all the way down
@Dali: I don’t think that’s really fair. I see lots of people get interested in the ideas because they are cool and because they really are ignorant. And in theory one could imagine an ancient astronaut theory with no racist implications. If this is like Prometheus or the Celestials in Marvel or what not and we’re all the result of experimentation, then there’s no racial differentiation. If one were to point to more parts of European history and subject it to the same perspective, it wouldn’t be that way either. I could imagine someone thinking that some warlike alien race started pushing the Europeans toward a period of violent colonialism.
One could imagine, for example, that the reason why ancient aliens focused on cultures like the Egyptians or the Sumerians or the Mayans is because they were more advanced. Of course aliens would go to and help the places that already have civilization, right?! That’s the take that Eternals makes.
It’s that way in practice because of the people who advance it and the cultural wellspring the ideas come from, but I think ideas are more fungible and separable than they can sometimes appear. (And, yes, I know that many ancient astronauts went full mask-off racism and how deep racism runs in the movement, and how ugly it gets when people apply the ideas to modern reptilian conspiracies or to Jewish families or what not… but even then, a lot of that is more the result of backfill of woo onto existing ugly ideas that preceded that woo and an attempt to try to make a master explanation for every supposed piece of arcane knowledge).
I do think there are some problematic reasoning patterns that are common to even the most naive person in the movement. One thing I point out to, say, the Spirit Science types who talk about how Thoth was actually an ancient Atlantean god king is how much that’s really a failure to understand or respect ancient religious beliefs in their context. That kind of anachronism about the ancient sacred rubs me the wrong way. But even there, that can come from a sincere desire to synthesize ancient peoples’ views, respecting all of them. It can come from an abundance of tolerance, even if that’s accompanied with an unwillingness to actually listen to ancient people proclaim that they were wrong.
For example, I’m a long-time fan of the Palladium RPGs, and while they definitely do a lot of weird and problematic things, they use a lot of ancient astronaut and ley line and what not theories, but not in a way that reads (at least to me) as racist. Like their take on the Nazca lines is that the Nazca used the lines as massive magic energy symbols to summon huge energy mecha to beat the crap out of an alien species. That’s an ancient astronaut theory, and it fucking rules. (And it came from C.J. Carella, a person of Latin/x heritage, so I can’t even accuse it of cultural tourism as much as if Siembieda wrote it). Nor do I think Eternals is inherently racist either.
So… it’s racist, like, 95% of the way down? Maybe?
I’d just like to say “That’s not how any of this works”, and that movie quote about how we’re all dumber for having heard it.
@Dali and Fred: Von Daniken did it racistly, though, what with originally saying how the ancient aliens only came to uplift the brown people, because otherwise how could Egyptians and Mayans have had pyramids and writing. Ya know, when he wasn’t busy getting arrested for embezzlement. And “Chariots of the Gods” was completely rewritten by a guy who was a writer in 30s-40s Germany for the official paper of the ruling party.
However, if the Nazca people did have the know-how for mecha to blast aliens, it would have been neat. Makes more sense than this guy, too. Also, Cthulhu was before all this, and I’m really glad that word’s in spellcheck, because what if you got it wrong?
@ gss ex-noob
Britain was apparently visited by aliens from the planet of the 14 year old school boys…
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/05/24/the-mysterious-origins-of-the-cerne-abbas-giant
@Alan
As Terry Pratchett has written, a lot of early art was a way of saying, “I’ve got a great big tonker.”
@ Vicky P
The earliest art.
See also everything from Classical times to the middle ages and beyond. Hmm, this would be a good podcast topic. I love it here. This must be what a Paris salon was like.
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Lwyw0Gae4yE/VL9VPqF2H7I/AAAAAAAAhTQ/e2LNZ5ki_CU/s1600/lascaux_bird_headed_and_bison1.jpg
@Alan
Or the Chautauqua hall?
@GSS: Yes, I agree not only von Daniken but also a lot of others in the movement have done it racistly. But I’d need to see a pretty strong argument that, say, your average stoner wondering about the idea shares in that racism. I do agree that the problems of crank magnetism and conspiracy theory crowding do tend to lead the kind of people who would accept the idea down a path that is likely to get them thinking about reptoids and Jewish bloodlines (e.g. Spirit Science), but at this point so many people have some kind of UFO belief (however silly) that I don’t think it’s fair to say it’s racist all the way down.
But fuck von Daniken. And, of course, fuck Lovecraft. There’s a good old MovieBob episode about the Lost City pointing out how the trope there is derived from fundamentally racist assumptions, and a lot of Atlantis beliefs also end up recentering Europeans, and I suspect that that milieu which clearly influenced Lovecraft is the real cruft that infects ancient alien theories that way.
And, well, the idea is that it was all magic. Siembieda was into the parapsychology/ley line stuff, I suspect reasonably seriously, and so a lot of that floats around in Palladium. Atlantis’ collapse is blamed on reducing the level of magic in the world, for example. So the lines become these kind of mega-patterns that you use to summon energy constructs. Rifts: South America 2 is actually pretty wild.
@ Vicky P
I had to google that; but I found this video.
https://thefloridachannel.org/videos/historical-markers-chautauqua-hall-brotherhood/
I love things like this. I’m a big fan of public lectures. In London there’s still a few of the old public institutes left; or at least the physical buildings. But I have a weird nostalgia for that time. When anybody could just go along and hear some top thinker or historian or scientist or whatever; and then chat about it in the pub afterwards. But all that late C19th to 1930s zeitgeist for learning. And cheap mass produced book series making the classics available to the masses. OK Al, stop rambling. Go read an Orwell essay or something.
@ Vicky P
Of course, Jean-Pierre would also agree.
Great big tonkers probably appeared in Paris salons, but were not welcome at a Chautauqua. Certainly never saw any at the one I went to as a kid!