Pedestalization and Misogyny

So the other day, while my girlfriend was in the shower, I stumbled upon the following video.  I couldn’t resist playing it for her while she towelled off.

Now don’t get me wrong – her happiness matters to me, and I wouldn’t normally subject her to something like this, but we’d just spent the past three days performing a callisthenic marathon, and I figured she was sated.  Any shrivelling effects would, at worst, allow her to concentrate at work the next day, or, at best, act as a needed balm for her gentler bits.

So a quick warning, then: any women out there who are planning a date this evening, you should probably skip this video for now.  Watch it when you have a math final to study for, or something.  And by the way, this goes for all you lesbians out there, too – this thing’s potent enough that it could have kept the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park park from breeding.

Without further ado, I present ‘Dear Woman’ by the Conscious Men project.

Gods… just give me a second here, folks, I think that video might have given me diarrhoea…

Ahem.

Let’s begin.

Now there’s ad hominems, and then there’s ad hominems; if Joe says the sky is blue, and you point out that Joe is a serial rapist, that doesn’t change the sky to green. If, on the other hand, Joe is offering advice on What Women Want… well, in that case you might want a second opinion.

As for the Conscious ‘men’, it should be perfectly evident to anyone who’s ever watched a Clint Eastwood movie that there’s something deeply wrong with them. The first thing you’ll notice is the perverse religious gleam in their eyes:

It’s the sort of look you see in vegetarians and masochists; a fully-functioning human being should never look like this. These poor bastards have generated a feedback loop in their brains, transmuting evidence against their ideology into evidence for it, changing pain into pleasure, failure into success –

There’s some sort of vicious memeplex at play here.

The second thing you’ll notice is how they all have an uncanny-valley-esque relation to sexy masculinity. Just check out Fabio here:

On the surface everything seems like it should work – clean haircut, solid jaw line, earthy leather pendant, unbuttoned shirt revealing a decent musculature… that should be sexy, right? So why the hell is he so repulsive?

This video has a Fabio, a Dr Phil, an Aragorn, a Peter Parker, a Dante Hicks, a George Clooney – and every single one of them looks like an AI’s nascent attempts at mastering facial expressions; and those are just the attractive ones, mind you; the ugly ones (who make up the bulk of the video) look like the sorts who belong on skid row.

The reason for all this discomfort becomes evident when you begin to examine the specifics of what they’re saying.

As men our relationship to the feminine has often been unconscious. I feel sorrow that women and feminine energy have for so long been subjugated and oppressed.

Thought experiment: take the above, replace gender with race, and have whitey use it to apologize to a black man. Does hilarity ensue?

Throughout history men have raped and abused you – burned you at the stake – bought and sold your bodies for sexual pleasure – barred you from religious and political office relegated you to subservient chores.

Way to engage in selection bias. Yes, history sucked for most women. You know what? It sucked for most men, as well. They’re attempting to force a heuristic of ‘History as Gender War’. This is just as idiotic as insisting History be analysed as Class War, Race War, Culture War, et cetera – whenever you catch somebody attempting to rewrite History the question isn’t “How accurate is this?” but rather, “Qui bono – What do they hope to gain?”

Force you to hide your faces and even cut off your organs of sexual pleasure.

First of all: not my fucking ancestors. Second of all: it’s currently women who are the primary enforcers of those standards. [A proper critique of these practices, and why they are not Patriarchal, would be a post all of its own.]

I may not have done these things myself but I am aware of the forces of the unconscious masculine psyche that feel threatened by, and then seek to dominate the feminine. Many of the men who have oppressed and abused you are no longer alive. Among the living many men may not be able to apologize because they remain shackled in a prison of anger, fear, and shame.

These guys are completely divorced from human nature. Are we going to get to the point soon?

On behalf of my gender I apologize to you because of my unconscious actions when we were angry scared and in the grip of destructive forces in our psyche.

There it is! That’s what’s gets these freaks going! They’re like Mother Theresa, raking in millions of dollars for the Catholic Church, while taking pleasure in watching people die (slowly and painfully) from preventable causes in one of her hospices.

These perverts can only get it up for a rape victim.

This is why they catalogue all of mankind’s sins. It’s not some form of legitimate guilt that motivates them; if that were the case, it would be simple enough to say “Woman, I know I done ya’ wrong – let’s try and move forward from here.” But these… these men insist on reliving every ugly wrong (real or imagined) that’s ever been performed. They say they want an ‘equal feminine energy’ but nothing is further from the truth. They want an oppressed, broken, damaged, and weak little foundling to minister to like a paedophiliac priest.

‘Munchausen by Proxy’ is a mental disorder where a parent insists that their child is ill, because this guarantees that they have a role as caregiver. These ‘men’ need a broken woman, to guarantee their status as White Knight. They don’t have the minerals to stand by a female who’s smart, sexy, strong, and confidant.

Speaking of which, there’s one more quote that really set off my old lady:

I commit to listening to the intuitive sense you have of how to heal our planet and how to make it thrive. I honour your intuition and your profound capacity for feeling. As men we have often devalued feeling of intuition in favour of a view dominated by data and logic.

She’d just like to point out that, as a practising biologist, data and logic comes in pretty handy for her (shit, some women can do math – who knew?).

If these pathetic excuses for men lived a hundred years ago in China, they’d be sucking on crushed feet like there were no tomorrow. Here in the 21st Century West, they become feminists.

I guess this is what empowerment looks like.