Returns From the Returns

The following arrived by way of what I quaintly call the 'alpha channel'. All right, non-public communication space, to translate for those outside the loop. ;) The orange highlightings are my own stylistic addition for the purpose of, well . . . highlighting!

"As your last post concerned the inattention paid to certain arcane theories as of late, I thought I would add something in that vein. Call it MANY REGRESSIVE RETURNS II.

"Feminism is a theory of gender that has no sympathy for the male gender, that has no knowledge of men's experience, that does not give men their due. In it, men are only partly human creatures—to be messed over in accordance with feminist complaints. That Intellectuals like Richard Rorty side with feminists is a small disappointment. Men have other intellectual benefactors. I'm thinking of the late Norman Mailer. His was a world of prose and poetry that reveled in human experience including the hearts of men—something the sterile world of academia cannot do. That is why men like Rorty, sitting in their ivory towers, have no truck with their own gender but can more readily identify with other pallid intellects like Catharine MacKinnon, a woman so obviously hateful of men. It is why Rorty can applaud as an "insight" the completely alien notions of Jacques Derrida in which "he explicitly argues that fundamental philosophical questions cannot be separated from the thinking of sexual difference." "Indeed", Rorty says, "I should go further and say that Derrida's most original and important contribution to philosophy is his weaving together of Freud and Heidegger, his association of "ontological difference" with gender difference." This weaving together enables us to see for the first time the connection between the philosophers' quest for purity, the view that women are somehow impure, the subordination of women, and "virile homosexuality" (the kind of male homosexuality that Eve Sedgwick calls "homo-homosexuality", epitomized in Jean Genet's claim that "the man who fucks another man is twice a man").

"Huh?

"I can imagine Genet recoiling in horror at Derrida's and Rorty's deliberate misinterpretation! Shall we send him a copy of Norman Mailer's The Prisoner of Sex? 'If a bugger is a man, if he is indeed twice a man — a man who fucks a male is a double male,' says Darling in Our Lady of the Flowers — it is because there is no humiliation more profound in prison than to be at the bottom of the order, to be helpless without a protector, and usable as a female by every other convict. Over and over in Genet we are treated to the spectacle of males turning into females. After a few years, Darling, the double male, is as much female as his mistress Divine, and Adrien Ballon who begins as a stud ends a queen, ends in fact as Our Lady of the Flowers."

"I suppose it takes a great writer of prose to understand another great writer of the same. Male feminists cannot be trusted with the delicate logic of male experience in or outside of prison. As we might expect, one can draw differing conclusions when comparing life on the inside of prison to life on the outside. In Derrida's interpretation, women are at the bottom of the order as men in prison. In Mailer's interpretation, men become the prisoners of sex, and in close proximity to women become like them without the distance "social constructs" provide. Naturally, sloppy analysis of either interpretation may say it all comes to the same thing. Women end being the lesser of men. Or as Tennyson put it in Locksley Hall, 'Woman is the lesser man, and all thy passions, matched with mine, are as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine.'

"The difference is found in what I said to begin with. Derrida's and Rorty's interpretations lack that very quality feminists are always talking about — empathy. In this case it's empathy for men that's voided. They want to break down the social constructs that distance men and women by pointing to the fact that they are, indeed, social constructs. Mailer has all the respect in the world for these constructs as his sympathies rest with his own gender. And like a Nietzschean protector, Mailer, far from endorsing the naturalness of male control, presents the sexes as engaged in a power struggle that the male is by no means assured of winning.

"I suppose the moral here is: Don't expect feminists to play fair, especially with the coercive powers of the State on their side. After all, if women can accuse men of endless bias in their own favor, how the hell are we to trust that women are any different? Among many feminists, the notion of equality between the sexes has recently morphed from one where double standards were officially rejected to one in which they are tacitly endorsed. Why? Because you can't impose a single standard on two dissimilar creatures and expect similar results. With one gender being dissed as the sexual oppressors and the other coddled as the sexually oppressed, policy regarding how they should be apportioned prerogatives or dealt with for the same offense is not likely to work on the same presumptions nor show them equal consideration.

"Surely one definition of equality is finding as much fault in ourselves as we do in others. Fortunately, there are a few "feminists" like Patricia Pearson, author of When She Was Bad: How And Why Women Get Away With Murder, who have men's backs. Nevertheless, Pearson's book is not widely accepted by her womanist sisters nor is it likely to find a place on Oprah's "inspirational books" list. Opinions regarding sexual politics mirror the fact that we live in a feminist culture. Feminism is no longer a form of what Foucault termed "subjugated knowledges." Rather, the reverse is true. The critical analysis of feminist thinking, now found mainly on the internet, is closer to currently "repressed" knowledge.

"With that said, I give all the credit in the world to Angry Harry, Mensnewsdaily, www.mediaRADAR.org (respecting accuracy in domestic abuse reporting),The Counter-Feminist, and other places of solace for men on the internet."

Well! It's an honor to be shelved among such luminaries. I'll keep doing what I can, to be a pipeline for subjugated knowledge. . . :)