Speaking of Pubes

In the past, and perhaps even in the present, men have tried to shut women up. Thus, feminists have insisted that women’s voices be heard.

If the first is true, the second follows.

Yet, when it comes to women’s issues, the feminist position seems to be that men should shut up. A man who does not echo the feminist party line will quickly be accused of sexism. His opinions will not merely be wrong, but, as Andrew Sullivan said, but will be taken as a sign of a mental disease or defect.

You might consider it a bluff. As posted yesterday, Sullivan has called it. Others need to do the same.

Also, when women express anger and rage about the way society treats them, we are expected to accept their overwrought condition as a just reaction to social injustice.

When men express anger and rage today about the radical changes feminism has introduced into the culture, they are told to shut up and mind their own business.

Young Laurie Penny feels great compassion for the men who are losing out, for males who are angry because they are no longer in charge. And yet, these same men might be angry because their views are being disrespected by triumphal feminists like Laurie Penny:

But I have infinite compassion for people who genuinely want to learn, people who have even the tiniest scrap of awareness of what needs to change in society and their own place in it. The weight of male pain and male rage out there is astonishing. It’s fascinating.  The world is changing incredibly fast. They’re dealing with not inheriting the world of privilege — a lot of which has nothing to do with women, but women are easy targets to blame. Confronting toxic masculinity and confronting gender privilege and sexual violence and social prejudice involves a sacrifice of social status and personal security which is not nothing. That doesn’t mean that people who don’t do it can be excused. You don’t get special cookies for doing this, but maybe some understanding. There’s incredible distress amongst men online, and it comes from a place of pain. I think a lot of people have the ability to understand that without condoning the behavior. Your right to swing your fists around stops at the end of my nose.

It is difficult to tell whether feminists really hate men. To do so would require that we look into the hearts and minds of feminists to discover how they really feel. The process itself feels intrusive and invasive… thus, to be avoided as unseemly.

And yet, feminists have garnered the reputation for being man-haters, so one imagines that the women who have rejected feminism on that ground are not merely suffering from a collective illusion.

In truth, Penny herself, in the passage quoted, drips contempt for men. She demeans and diminishes them, describes them as losers… and calls for them to get with the program, that is, with her version of jejune revolutionary activism.

And you were wondering why feminists are reputed to be at war with men... taken to be their born and sworn enemies?

One appreciates that young people thrill to the prospect of revolution. I have not read Penny’s book—extra points for me—but I suspect that she has given no thought to what utopian political revolutions did to the world and its peoples during the twentieth century.

Anyway, what many feminists really want to know about Laurie Penny is the state of her  … pubic hair. In her colloquy with a reporter from New York Magazine, Penny explains what really interests her editors:

You would not believe the amount of times — still — various magazines ask me to write pubic hair. Do you shave or not? Should you shave or not? For a long time, my decision not to write about pubic hair was a feminist position in itself. It matters to me a bit. We can have an interesting conversation it. But this endless collapse of the political into the personal … As somebody who cares about this issue but also cares about a lot of other things, too, it’s been a fight to carve out a position where gender and power are important and they stand in conversation with every other aspect of politics. 

Do you think for a minute that the editors of these magazines are male? Do you imagine that these editors are anything but true-believing feminists? Would any male editor ever imagine asking a female journalist to write about pubic hair? (OK, I grant that he might do so if he is a hard core feminist.)

Let’s understand that in the bad old days, when men were men and aspired to be gentlemen, such a conversation would never have taken place. Perhaps today’s modern men, their minds addled by feminist cant, happily ask women whether they shave “down there” but I hardly think that such disrespect, such an effort to diminish and demean women should be applauded.

Like it or not, the national conversation about the female body, the call for increased discussion about female bodily functions has been a staple of second-wave feminism.

Exposing the female genitalia to public view, writing and speaking about intimate matters, going to war against feminine modesty… these were not imposed by the patriarchy. They came from feminists themselves. The same radicals ought at least to take responsibility for what they have wrought.

On this score Penny’s instinct is correct. But she has also revealed one of the fundamental contradictions in second-wave feminism. People will not respect your mind or your intelligence, your professional accomplishments when you insist on filling the media with conversations about “The Vagina Monologues,” thigh gaps and pubic hair.

One suspects that the urge to expose the female genitalia derives from an anxiety over being recognized as female. But, then again, being a male... what do I know?