The Anti-Romeos: Feminism’s Assault on Masculinity

American women should be outraged. Not because of their supposed oppression over the years, but because American women have been starved of one of the greatest values available to them while living life on earth: masculine men.

This is not to say that masculine men don’t exist—they do, by the millions! But, culturally, they are suffocated.

Before the malicious feminist revolution, women could enjoy not just men, but masculine men. Popular actors included the masculine Paul Newman, the gentlemanly Clark Gable, the cool and confident Sean Connery. Women could line up at military bases to watch their favorite men in uniform. Up until just before the women’s liberation movement, women used to faint after seeing their favorite men in concert. In my lifetime, I have yet to see such a health concern at a concert—unless the raped, dehydrated, and mud-covered women of the 1999 Woodstock count.

For the past 30 years, the dirtiest, most politically incorrect concept to talk about has been masculinity. It has been pushed under the rug, twisted, turned, and manipulated. In our newly feminized nation, few want to talk about it or define it. Let us now define it.

Masculinity, like men, is simple. (I say this affectionately.) Masculinity is efficacy. I hasten to add that man’s source of efficacy is reason. While strength and athletic ability are not unimportant in defining masculinity, the primary source of efficacy and masculinity is reason.

However, man is not a ghost. Man learns, understands, and imagines, and then his creations must be materialized in the world. True efficacy is reason materialized into concrete existence. And it is this particular area, the construction of those things that man’s mind created (chopping wood, building skyscrapers, flying airplanes, etc.), in which men, by nature, outperform women, which is the genuine source of female-to-male admiration.

Fatherhood is also an attribute of masculinity. And the primary purpose of fatherhood is for the father to teach his young son how to be a man. A young boy looks up to his father in hero worship.

Today, it is popular to look at policemen, soldiers, and firemen as the ultimate symbols of masculinity. But this presents a problem: one can only admire masculinity when there is crime, war, and fires. While policemen, soldiers, and firemen are certainly masculine figures to be admired (and are driven by reason), many other men in different professions demonstrate rational masculinity including businessmen, engineers, skilled labor, and many others.

Masculinity, i.e., a strong, heroic, efficacious man, is the primary source of erotica for a heterosexual woman. Without it, a heterosexual woman is lost.

Young women are constantly being ripped from such erotica. They are being taught that masculinity is not to be looked at in admiration, but in fear.

This is, in short, all feminists’ fault.

Masculinity is never associated with anything positive by feminists. They consistently equate masculinity with violence.

Gloria Steinem gave several speeches in 2002, preaching school shootings, Nazism, and terrorism were a product of “male dominance.” She says: “The cult of masculinity is the basis of every violent, fascist regime. [. . .] We need to raise our sons more like our daughters, with empathy, flexibility, patience, and compassion.”

Anyone with the slightest knowledge of these events knows the reasons behind them are not as simplistic and sexist as Gloria Steinem makes them out to be. However, according to feminist theory, her analysis is impeccable. Masculinity is not identified with the men who stopped the Nazis or the men who built the skyscrapers, but the men who sprayed their fellow classmates with bullets, killed six million Jews, and flew into buildings with civilian planes.

Men notoriously fall on the extreme ends of most scales. For instance, on an intelligence scale, men will rank on both the very high end and the very low end. If you cover up one of the ends, you can paint a very glowing or damning picture of men. Feminists always present the lower end. An article in the US News and World Report boasted that boys now succeed in areas such as low grades and frequent disciplinary problems. There is no compassion for the boys, just a broad statement that they are mostly delinquents. The very title of the article is derogatory: “Are Boys the Weaker Sex? Science Says Yes but Society is Trying to Deal with Male Handicaps” (Mulrine).

In fact, the only time that the physically stronger nature of men is acknowledged by feminists, or even popular culture anymore, is in regards to domestic violence. Both men and women may hit each other, but men can do more damage. This is the only activity feminists seem to admit where men are stronger than women. All other physical things they seem to think women can do equally well.

Indeed, violence imposed on society by men is one thing, but is nothing compared to the violence men impose on women. The worst thing a woman can do, in feminist eyes, is enter a relationship with a man, or at least one who has not been effectively emasculated. Feminists do not make their stance on heterosexual relationships a mystery: inherently violent, masculine males will only serve to abuse women.

In their activism, feminists were quick to pounce on the issue of domestic violence. They were also quick to show that violence upon women was not a product of random, individual cases of violence, but rather something that was institutionalized in society. This message is captured in the haunting title of an article written by feminist Liz Kelly: “’It’s Everywhere’: Sexual Violence as a Continuum” (Emphasis mine).

In their effort to show men as always the abuser and women as always the abused, feminists produced studies, which unfortunately gained widespread popularity, claiming such things as one in four women will be raped in their lifetime (Warshaw 2). The author of this study, Mary Koss, admits herself that 73 percent of supposed rape victims did not themselves believe they were actually raped.

Alternatively, if all men are not violent, feminists can always project on to all men the trait of violence. At a popular feminist event, Take Back the Night, held yearly on most college campuses, a group of women parade around campus chanting: “No Means No; Yes Means Yes; Wherever We Go; However We Dress,” targeted at all men.

I spoke to a head of a women’s shelter once, and asked her why they targeted all men on campus with their chanting. I was told, like all feminists will tell you, that because the one continuing theme among all rapes is that the attacker is male and, “men need to be held responsible for their actions.”

Well, it is true that most rapists are men. But this does not mean all men are rapists. Imagine that a study found that most thieves were black, and therefore a group of white people paraded in black communities, chanting slogans, pinning this crime on the blackness of a person. The racism in this is obvious, and anyone who did so would be trying to incite a groundless hatred of black people. The method of the feminists is no different. They are taking the base behavior of a few men, and projecting it on to the male gender at large, furthering the message of institutionalized male-on-female violence.

Common flirtation is not being defined as fun, but increasingly as “harassment.” If you think sexual harassment laws were an innocent measure to protect unwarranted abuse of women, consider that the woman who successfully enacted sexual harassment laws in the United States, Catharine MacKinnon, is an admitted Marxist who believes all sex between men and women is exploitative of the woman. She argues that just as the capitalist exploits his workers in search of profit, so men exploit women in search of pleasure. She argues in her article, “Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State: An Agenda for Theory”: “Sexuality is to feminism what work is to Marxism: that which is most one’s own, yet most taken away” (182). She is a malicious man hater, and she championed current sexual harassment laws in the United States.

The message is always that masculinity is nothing but violence, but the argument is specifically that men have an uncontrollable desire to hurt women (which is slightly different from their argument about the “exploitive” nature of, say, the capitalist-worker relationship). In feminist theory, women are always portrayed as the trembling victim, who are the victim of not only abuse, but also abuse directed at their femaleness. When women are murdered or abused, in feminist theory it is never seen as the product of irrational greed, coercion, or an overinflated sense of self (common reasons for abuse and murder), but rather as an institutionalized desire of men to control and hurt women. It is epitomized by feminists’ popular, but unsupported claim that rape is about control, i.e., a man’s desire to hurt a woman, as opposed to sex, i.e., a man’s desire for sexual gratification, which is a highly doubtful claim at best. (For further research against this feminist claim, and an honest inquiry into the reasons for domestic violence, I enthusiastically refer you to Violence and Gender Reexamined by Richard Felson.)

Everything a woman might enjoy about a man: strength, flirtation, a relationship with him, etc., is not seen as erotica, but a source of fear. Even the male genitalia is not presented as a source of pleasure but violence. Luce Irigaray in “This Sex Which is Not One,” describes, “Autoeroticism is disrupted by a violent break-in: the brutal separation of the two lips by a violating penis” (80). Violent, brutal, violating: these are the words used to describe intercourse.

At Harvard, after a crew team built a giant snow penis as a joke, some females at that school tore it down in outrage. A Harvard Women’s Studies professor summarizes the girls’ actions: “The ice sculpture was erected in a public space, one that should be free from menacing reminders of women’s sexual vulnerability” (qtd. in Alberts). These were not radical 1970s activists but girls at an elite college in 2003.

Probably the most laughable example is feminist architects who make it their goal to build buildings that look like the female genitalia, to counter the vast number of buildings that look like the “violating” male penis, such as skyscrapers, which are simply buildings that were built based on reason to maximize space with a minimal footprint.

Feminists are insistent on the message that the male-female relationship is marked by violence—by oppressors and the oppressed. This is not a dead radical feminist philosophy, either. To this day, modern campuses and theatres nationwide present The Vagina Monologues on Valentine’s Day. Their new term for this day is “V-day,” which stands for, among other things, violence. Valentine’s Day, a day meant to celebrate male-female romantic love, is now being turned into a “consciousness-raising” day about how men allegedly beat women up. This is done in similar fashion to the way some have tried to change the meaning of Columbus Day, where Americans are told they should not celebrate the founding of the greatest civilization ever, but instead must remember white violence upon Native Americans.

The very title of The Vagina Monologues shows they want women to turn from the “violating” penis and towards the soft vagina—either in autoeroticism (masturbation) or in lesbianism. (The author of The Monologues, Eve Ensler, is herself a lesbian.)

Feminists do their best to show that it is inherent in men to be violent. They do not argue that to eradicate violence one should eradicate violence, but rather masculinity itself instead. As the conclusion to an article written by Deborah Cameron and Elizabeth Frazer entitled, “The Murderer as Misogynist?” begs us: “It [the solution to male-on-female violence] also involves, as we have already hinted, a struggle to once and for all overthrow the structures of male power and masculinity” (215).

What may (or may not) surprise most people is that none of what feminists propagandize was based on fact. Men are not being throttled, silenced, and bullied on a daily basis anymore because they are genuinely violent. Men are being throttled, silenced, and bullied on a daily basis because they are men, i.e., they are strong.

Disgruntled that their economic policies failed, many Marxists were quick to dig their knives and scalpels into the male-female relationship. Leninists believe that America and Israel, by the sin of being “economically and militarily stronger,” are thus, by definition, always wrong, and Palestine and those that are weaker are always right. Similarly, feminists decided that men, by the sin of being stronger, are always wrong, and women, by virtue of being weaker, are always right. And this, the fact that men are the metaphysically dominant sex, is the reason why, as Ayn Rand says, feminists were capable of obtaining compassion for their movement (“Age of Envy” 149); i.e., it is the reason why people believe that domestic violence is always a product of violent, abusive men and saintly, victimized women.

And just as Leninists are not interested in the facts, for their bizarre theories already dictated to them the conclusions, so feminists are not interested in the facts of domestic violence. If you ever wanted to see the results of Kantian, a priori reasoning, in pure, ugly form, this is it. No facts ever supported what feminists had to say about domestic violence; they merely believe by definition that men are always wrong and women always right. As an example, Ann Oakley in an article entitled “Sexuality” says: “Women are psychologically, no less than anatomically, incapable of rape” (36). Yet, when a more honest sex researcher surveyed men, they found that men are just as, if not more, likely to have sex when they don’t want to or feel coerced by women into sex (Fillion 201-2). By feminist definition, this would be date rape.

If feminists did investigate the issue of domestic violence honestly, which they did not, feminist findings would have looked more like Erin Pizzey’s work. Pizzey was the first person to start a domestic violence shelter for women.

Pizzey was the entrepreneur of domestic violence shelters, yet today she is denied access on all current domestic violence websites and shouted down when she speaks. Why? It has to do with the fact that she said women could be violent also, and that many victims of violence were “addicted to pain,” i.e., they actively sought out violent situations based on their troubled childhood. Her solution to domestic violence included advocating strong families, encouraging women to realize their role in solving their own situation, and even allowing men into shelters to teach women that not all men are violent. As such, she is suffocated and silenced by modern feminists.

Pizzey documents in her work the Marxist takeover of domestic violence shelters, including attending organizational meetings run by radical feminists that had posters of Mao on the walls (“From the Personal to the Political”). Feminists used domestic violence, primarily, as a tool to spread Marxism.

A friend of mine received an email once about a young woman doing a study on people’s perception of domestic violence. Why would one do a study on people’s perception of anything? Why wouldn’t the study be targeted at perpetrators of domestic violence, their victims, and understanding the problem so as to find a solution? The reason is because the issue is being used as propaganda to influence the public a certain way—not to find solutions to the problem.

Indeed, feminists are not, and have never been, interested in helping unfortunate victims of domestic violence. They are interested in using the issue as a method of class warfare—to make women a protected class: the victim class of the male oppressor class. That was made painfully obvious when feminists failed to condemn OJ Simpson, a man who beat his wife for 10 years and eventually murdered her. The feminist reaction to this case is well documented in Tammy Bruce’s The New Thought Police: Inside the Left’s Assault on Free Speech and Free Minds. In this case, feminists did not come to Nicole Brown Simpson’s defense because protecting a class, in this case a class that they give higher priority to—race—was more important than protecting the victim of assault/murder. (And Nicole Brown Simpson was guilty of something that feminists could never forgive: she was a beautiful woman.)

Read any honest research on domestic violence and you will find men and women abuse each other at roughly the same rate for roughly the same reasons. Feminists’ belief that rampant male-on-female violence is throughout our culture everywhere, with men always the abuser and women always the victim, is a blatant lie.

This lie of masculinity equated to violence has created a false dichotomy, as Objectivist Robert Garmong pointed out in a speech at Penn State in 2002: the jerk versus the wimp. If masculinity is defined as violence, either a man embraces his masculinity and abuses women or he becomes the nice guy and allows women to abuse him.

This is a myth that feminists have a vested interest in perpetuating. Indeed, there are countless feminist speakers and thinkers who go around describing masculinity as violence, and then beg men, “please, please, please don’t be afraid to lose your masculinity for fear of being ‘sissy.’”

Men do not have to be the jerk or the wimp; they can be men. Masculinity doesn’t need to be eradicated, but managed. A far more rational solution than begging men to completely lose their sexuality would be to work with a man’s masculinity to turn him away from violence, i.e., making it manly to respect women.

Begging men to become the “wimp” may serve something else. By demanding men become feminized, does this not make men even more likely to rebel and thus become violent? In the movie The Fight Club, effeminated men rebelled against all aspects of society and started an underground consensual fight club. Masculinity cannot be suffocated. By telling men to abandon their masculinity altogether, otherwise they will be violent, creates the self-fulfilling prophecy. Rebellious men become violent, which perhaps is exactly what the feminists want. For proof, observe that most feminists seem happy, not sad, when evidence shows increased levels of rape and/or sexual/domestic abuse of women.

Masculinity is not tied up in violence or abuse. Masculinity can and should be strength, efficacy, competence, ability. The concretes of efficacy might change, but strength, efficacy, ability, etc., are always the standard. As an example, in Ancient Greece, which was frequently under threat of military attack, masculinity was primarily tied up in those with military ability. Whatever is the most needed trait for any particular region’s prosperity will always be eroticized.

Many say they want to redefine masculinity (and they always say they want to redefine masculinity for the self-righteous reason of protecting women from abusive men). As an example of those trying to “redefine masculinity,” at Penn State University, there was an art exhibit on display for six weeks in 2003 called In the Company of Men. It boasted itself as “revisiting masculinity” after 30 years of feminism. A newspaper article said the photographer visited military bases and wrestling practices to capture shots of men. When visiting this art exhibit, one would expect shots of heroic men, winning wrestling matches, preparing for war, etc. What was at this exhibit was far from that. The photographs included primarily men (most looked no older than 18) standing around bored; standing in line staring mindlessly at the cafeteria; on the sidelines lost in thought at wrestling practice; at the Prom looking bored. Many of the pictures had men in homoerotic positions, which was easy to do at wrestling practice. Worst of all, though, was a picture of a man, who looked to be in his twenties, and a 7- or 8-year-old boy in what appears to be an erotic mouth-to-mouth kiss.

Most shocking is the fact that Susan Faludi, the woman who re-popularized feminism in the early 1990s and wrote the book, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (where she sneakily suggests she supports men), endorsed this art exhibit, in the artist’s statement, of pedophilia and homoeroticism.

The only real and unfortunate result of feminism has been the division of the sexes. The women’s “liberation” movement had only one intention: to “liberate” women from men. Did you ever wonder what women were supposed to be liberated from—in the freest, most liberated nation on earth?

Women today often fail to appreciate masculinity anymore. They are not too sure what it is about a man that is particularly exciting. That probably comes from the feminist belief that sexual desire is entirely socially constructed, and they have done their best to confuse it as much as possible.

Well, let me tell women what makes men desirable. What turns women on to men is their masculinity. Normal heterosexual women do not see a man’s sexual initiative as harassment but flirtation. Men’s strength is not a source of violence but admiration. And a man’s genitalia is not invasive but pleasurable. And if women’s sexual desire is socially constructed, then let’s do the logical thing and socialize them into heterosexuality.

And if feminists want to put female vaginal orgasms on trial, let me be the first on the witness stand.

Feminists consider romantic love to be a mere choice at best, as a sign of fraternizing with the enemy at worst. A woman’s desire for a man is considered passé. Feminists can be considered the anti-Romeos. You certainly will not read any feminist literature that affirms charming, long-lasting relationships between a man and a woman. From “The Murderer as Misogynist?”: “No feminist would dream of saying that women’s desire for heterosexual romantic love was natural and valid” (213 Emphasis original). Tell that to the literally thousands of lonely girls out there, denied male affection because of the gender division over the last 40 years.

Feminists will say I am a woman who is “eroticizing her own oppression,” which is feminist speak for re-eroticizing heterosexual sex—what they really want to eradicate for various reasons. If women admire masculine men, it does not make them weak, dependent, or stupid. Masculine men have always excited women. By removing our culture of masculine men, feminists have not caused women to rework a new sexuality. Women just become bitter and sexless, as so many of them are today.

Feminists’ constant portrayal as the female as victim hasn’t empowered women; it has turned them into ultra-fragile, ultra-sensitive, emotionally vulnerable wimps. They are literally afraid of the dark.

However, there will be a new era. It will be hard for feminists to continue the lies they started in the 1970s. They cry in their literature about man-on-girl pedophilia, but the most visible form of pedophilia today is man-on-boy. They cry about the lack of justice for female rape victims, but the most visible cases of injustice with rape today are women falsely accusing men of it, such as the Duke Lacrosse mess. During the Duke Lacrosse scandal, a woman falsely accused three men of rape. The men were nearly convicted by the media before the trial, but it came out they were all completely innocent. And feminism will not remain as popular, because unlike Nazis and Jews, or terrorists and Western civilization, men and women fraternize far too much.

This is not the hippy world of our mothers. This is not the time of radical liberalism but rather a post 9-11 world. The feminist generation is the generation that dodged Vietnam. We are the generation that will go down in history as eradicating Islamic terrorism. Old feminist hags will soon hit their graves, and it will be an opportunity for young women, my generation, to define what we want, not what they handed to us. And I can assure you, part of that new vision will definitely embrace not just men but undeniably masculine men.

My advice to men is to not to talk to women about it; just do it—just be masculine. If you talk to them, many women will reject masculinity on a conscious level. But when you just do it, her inner woman comes out. Give them a glimpse of what they have been missing this whole time.

Women have been starved of genuine erotica for far too long. Women line up at events such as The Vagina Monologues in the hope of capturing erotica that has in fact been swept from under their feet. But things such as The Vagina Monologues do more damage than good, turning them away from a woman’s genuine source of erotica: a masculine man.

Masculinity is not tied to violence. It is tied to strength, and it should be seen as erotica, not fear.

Let it go on record that my favorite type of building is the skyscraper.

Amber Pawlik