In the midst of the warlock hunt for male sexual predators
most sensible voices have recommended that we avoid blaming all men for the
misbehavior, at time felonious, of a few bad men.
It makes perfectly good sense. Most of us avoid generalizing from a few
particulars. And yet, some few cannot wrap their minds around that level of complexity-- they tell us that all men are bad, and very, very bad indeed. After all, if five decades of intense feminist consciousness raising has produced Harvey Weinstein and Charley Rose and Brett Ratner... men must be worse than we all thought.
So say the simple-minded. Among them we must count someone named Stephen Marche. A Canadian essayist, a man whose background is in
literature, Marche has taken to the pages of the New York Times to indict the
male gender, for being as bad as Freud said it was.
When Marche speaks of the unexamined brutality of male libido he shows us that he has been living under a rock. For the past five decades we have been talking about nothing else.
Yes, indeed. You might think that Marche would have
mentioned Darwin, a man of science. Instead, he digs Freud up from his grave
and trots him out to indict the male gender. Men are all criminals. They just
want to copulate with their mothers. They will murder their fathers in order to
gain access to their mothers.
It is an idiotic idea, one that richly deserves the oblivion
to which history has consigned it. Not only is it idiotic. It is not even true.
As Stephen Pinker pointed out in his book How
the Mind Works, familiarity does not breed desire. It breeds disinterest.
Men do not lust after their mothers and sisters. Quite the contrary.
Better yet, Marche recommends that all men emulate someone
called Tucker Max and undertake a course of psychoanalytic treatment, the
better to become decent men. How naïve can you be? How ignorant can you be? If
psychoanalysis is designed to help men and women to get in touch with their
most depraved and degenerate desires, do you really believe that they will
always succeed in controlling their expression? Marche obviously knows nothing
about the history of psychoanalysis in places like France and South America. He
does not understand that the cultures where Freud has thrived have nothing to
do with the code of conduct that defines the British gentleman… or the British
lady.
And, he does not understand that the greatest analysts in
Romance language cultures did not believe in constant repression of incestuous
wishes. They, like Freud, believed that repression would always fail. Their goal
was to displace the desires and to make the world safe for adultery. It’s not quite incest, but it involves
violating a taboo.
If this is Marche’s solution, he should go back to
literature.
His idea, if we dare call it thus, is that after all these
decades of feminist enlightenment and equality—after all, Canada made Justin
Bieber its prime minister and has a feminist foreign policy—men are still just
as bad as they always were… only worse.
It never crosses his diminished intellectual capacity that
feminism might be the problem as much as the solution. He does not quite
understand that hostility against men—which has recently found a second or
third wind—might very well be the problem, not the solution. While feminists
like Marche are regaling us with their display of overt hostility against men
who can fail to notice that this might produce pushback? Why would anyone
imagine that men would take it all lying down? Why would anyone believe that
men would not fight back? Huh?
Marche has not
noticed that we have been conducting a national conversation about male sexual
abuse, male sexual harassment, male sexual molestation, and rape culture. We
have been filling peoples’ minds with images of men
doing horrific things to women and children. Which is, after all, what a good
Freudian would want us to do. Funnily enough, it has not produced an era of
comity or amity between the sexes. It has produced sexual deviants… most
especially among male feminists.
To examine his views a bit more closely, note that Marche
decides that it’s all about men… and all about all men.
He writes:
Through
sheer bulk, the string of revelations about men from Bill Cosby to Roger Ailes
to Harvey Weinstein to Louis C.K. to Al Franken and, this week, to Charlie Rose
and John Lasseter, have forced men to confront what they hate to think about
most: the nature of men in general. This time the accusations aren’t against
some freak geography teacher, some frat running amok in a Southern college
town. They’re against men of all different varieties, in different industries,
with different sensibilities, bound together, solely, by the grotesquerie of
their sexuality.
After telling us that male libido is “often ugly and dangerous”
he extols the appalling Andrea Dworkin as something of an
authority on male sexuality. From Dworkin Marche gains the idea that the only
good penis is a flaccid penis. In truth, Dworkin believed that sex with men was inevitably rape.
In
1976, the radical feminist and pornography opponent Andrea Dworkin said that
the only sex between a man and a woman that could be undertaken without
violence was sex with a flaccid penis: “I think that men will have to give up
their precious erections,” she wrote. In the third century A.D., it is widely
believed, the great Catholic theologian Origen, working on roughly the same
principle, castrated himself.
In truth, if Origen did in fact castrate himself—the point
has been doubted—it was not because he was a proto-feminist. Apparently, he took a passage from Matthew 19:12 a little too literally. In
case you have forgotten it, here is the text:
For
there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother's womb: and there
are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which
have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake.
Naturally, if you are consumed by righteous zeal, as is
Marche, you start getting things wrong. In his Times op-ed Marche ignores all
customary courtship behaviors, the kinds that were designed to make an
encounter between a young man and a young woman an orderly ritual, and not a
free-for-all. Thanks to feminism we have dispensed with all of the niceties of
courtship and we have found ourselves with a situation that is very bad indeed.
Marche does suggest correctly that romantic love is not a
man’s world. When romance is in question women have a home field advantage. Men
do not control love relationships and do not really want to do so. Marche
could have learned about this in any Darwinian study of male-female
relationships.
As for masculinity, boys develop it by joining sports teams,
military groups and even corporations. March seems to believe that men are
alone with their masculinity. Evidently, he is blind to reality.
In his words:
Very
often, when I interview men, it is the first time they have ever discussed
intimate questions seriously with another man....
There
is sex education for boys, but once you leave school the traditional demands on
masculinity return: show no vulnerability, solve your own problems. Men deal
with their nature alone, and apart. Ignorance and misprision are the norms.
As I said, to believe that men deal with their nature alone
and apart reaches a breathtaking level of ignorance.
For your edification I add a couple of pictures of Andrea Dworkin, who Marche takes to be an authority about male libido. Tell me now, doesn't the second picture look like a mug shot?
Posts
