A Dream of Fecunda

This is a chapter from the new book, The Vast and the Spurious. A full description of the book is here http://bit.ly/VastAmAu (Australia) and here http://bit.ly/VastAmazonUS  (USA).

A Dream of Fecunda

How long have we had feminism? It seems like eternity but it’s only about fifty years since it really fired up. In those fifty years, there have been thousands of books, talks, and courses on the subject, but we’re still no closer to gender Utopia. I reckon it’s time to seize the moment and quit while we’re behind. We must rise as one people and many genders and say Enough! After all this talk, after all this trash, it’s time to give Fecunda a go.

And what is Fecunda? It is a magical land; a country never darkened by evil or sin. It is a holy realm without pay gaps, privilege, or rape culture. Fecunda is a land populated only by women.

Sounds pretty good, huh? But is Fecunda a real place, or one known only in legend? Well, if it ain’t real, it ought to be. Women have suffered too long at the hands of men. As one feminist said, it’s only down to their ‘immense compassion or immense foolishness’ that they continue to co-exist with men at all. Yet we can’t expect women’s love to be boundless. It’s time for the Dear John letter; time to go our separate ways. Women deserve a homeland. They deserve Fecunda.

The idea of Fecunda came to me in a dream. It was right after I saw Black Panther, that documentary about the awesome country of Wakanda in Africa. Wakanda is a really cool place with advanced technology they developed on their own far from Western civilisation. Yet as we know, Wakanda is an ethnostate, only for Africans. Because of that, Wakanda has never had the problem of racism. It stands to reason there’s no racism in an ethnostate. In the same way, an all-female Fecunda will solve the problem of sexism. That means no more domestic violence, no more man-splaining or man-spreading. In fact, no more problems at all.

Sure, there’s the matter of reproduction, for without children, how can Fecunda endure? Should they take a few men as breeding slaves in a sort of reverse Handmaid’s Tale? Better not. No hint of toxic masculinity should ever taint the holy land of Fecunda. I guess the Fecundan scientists can figure out some kind of cloning system. But that is mere detail. The immediate need is to get Fecunda up and running. Men have held women back for too long. Women have earned the right to live under matriarchy, with all-female companies, universities, and families. Let them lead the way and show us how civilisation can be done.

The Case for Fecunda

Now, Fecunda is not for all women. It’s for those who have made it clear they’ve had enough of men. In other words, feminists.

It’s for Boston academic, Suzanna Danuta Walters, who wrote a famous article called ‘Why Can’t We Hate Men?’ Some people say feminism’s a hate movement. According to Walters, it has every right to be. Fecunda is also for Laurie Penny, who’s fed up with women doing all the work in relationships. It’s for Roxane Gay who says that in the age of Me Too, it’s time for men to confess their part in creating rape culture. It’s for all the authors ripping off Margaret Atwood and putting out their own versions of The Handmaid’s Tale. Really, it’s for everyone who thinks patriarchy has them in its vice-like, invisible grip. Men are the problem? Fecunda is the solution.

It’s time to give Fecunda a go. Just think of all the problems getting rid of men would instantly solve. Like I said – no gender pay gap, no rape culture, no male privilege. Fecunda would have 100% female CEOs, a complete lack of sexism, and the Me Too movement would be about as necessary as those bicycles that fish don’t ride.

If you want to do the thing properly, you could even wind the clock back to Year Zero. It’s a grave injustice women in history were denied the chance to make all the great inventions and discoveries. A Stone Age Fecunda would give girls the chance to shine. Let the female Newtons and Darwins emerge as they will.

Or perhaps that is a bridge too far. Fecunda may be a social Utopia, but if it is to compete with other nations, let it have access to the knowledge male privilege has produced. Let Fecunda begin on an equal footing with everyone else. Then, it may shine as the model of what human potential can achieve once patriarchy is vanquished once and for all.

Trouble in Paradise?

In theory, Fecunda should be exactly what feminists want. Let them keep all the advantages of modern life, but remove the one blight on their lives: men and the patriarchy. They could build their own society from the ground up. What could possibly go wrong? Well, maybe a couple of things.

The first problem would be finding women to do all the hard, nasty, or dangerous jobs normally done by men. The garbage collection, building, manual labour, and so on. There’d be no more men to do all that stuff. There’d also be no more men at the top running, inventing, or achieving things from which all others benefit. Still, there’s no reason women can’t step up and start doing all this. That’s what they want, isn’t it?

The second problem would be mental. Being human and living a happy life is difficult. All this time feminists have told themselves their problems are caused by men and the patriarchy. After living in that whole Excuse Culture, what are they going to do when the Great Excuse is removed?

Having played the blame game so long, they’ll find it extremely hard to change – which is one reason they’ll never leave. But imagine if they did. In Fecunda, there’d be no more blaming men for everything and thanking them for nothing. No more the eternal cop out. No more thinking ‘I could be anything but for the cursed patriarchy!’

When your whole mindset is one of grievance, this mode of thinking isn’t easy to give up. If a whole country was formed with people who think like this, it would be only a matter of time before a new scapegoat was found. Some new form of privilege or systemic unfairness would soon be discovered.

You can see this in the recent backlash against white feminists from women of colour. It is almost a matter of schadenfraude to see white feminists being chastised over their privilege, power, and even – Heaven forbid – the pay gap between black and white women. Still, we’d better not have any of that mean old schadenfraude stuff around here. It might lead to fantasies about what happens when people who do nothing but complain are forced to live with each other.

The Skeptics’ Attack on Fecunda

I’m not the first to dream of Fecunda. Of course, there were the lesbian separatists in the 1970s, but as recently as 2018 – at the height of the Brett Kavanaugh furore – some visionary on Twitter said, ‘Ladies, fuck it. Let’s start our own goddamn country.’

This set off a storm of replies. The most succinct of these was, ‘And yet you’re still here.’

Some insinuated an all-female country might not be a place of peace and harmony. ‘The weekly civil wars would be draining,’ said one. ‘Y’all would hate each other in 4 days,’ said another. A less optimistic forecast was ‘I’d give your country about 2 hours before it burns to the ground.’ One woman tweeted ‘A country with only feminists in it? I think I’ve heard of that one. It’s called Hell. But please go.’

Some men were in favour of an all-female country, albeit for different reasons. ‘You can take the blame for a while,’ said one guy. Another echoed the sentiment. ‘Do it. There will be no way you can blame men for your problems!’ Another said ‘For the love of GOD, please do. Take all the Feminists and the Soy-boy fruitcake men. Let me know where to donate. It’ll take you less than a year to have your own civil war when you realize that men AREN’T your problem YOU are.’

This was all terribly unfair. As one girl protested, ‘It’s funny how men think women can’t run their own country because omg “women hate women,” like they didn’t create the systemic internalised misogyny to begin with.’ So it looks like in Fecunda, men can still take the blame when things go wrong, even if they’re not there.

Then again, some women were keen to try it. ‘I’m in!’ one tweeted. ‘I offer super mad admin, commercial and legal skills … as well as being a homemaker.’ Now, while it’s true those skills are useful in any modern economy, several replies showed a concern that other jobs might be harder to fill:

I’m curious about this proposal. I’m interested to see if you’ll find enough workforce to construct the building, the roads, bridges, the power plants. Then there’s the sewage plants, the plumbing, the mining, et al. This would be fascinating & educational.

Go ahead. Some things to ponder. 1. What’s your constitution look like? 2. Who collects the resources? How are they distributed? 3. What’s your medium of exchange? 4. How do you protect yourselves? 5. Have a draft? Mandatory military service? I’ve got more when you’re done.

Who collects the garbage? Who climbs the cell phone towers? Who pumps your oil? Who frames your houses? Who defends your freedom? Hint: It’s not feminist ink spillers with ZERO job skills.

Perceptive readers will pick up a hint of skepticism at the idea a women-only country could work. Still, pioneers have always been mocked for having the guts to try something new. They laughed at Columbus when he set off for the new world. They laughed at Julius Caesar when he tried to conquer Ancient Britain. They laughed at Jimmy Jones when he took his People’s Temple to the tropical paradise of Guyana.

Don’t laugh. Goddamn it, let’s give Fecunda a try! Feminists have been saying for years women can do anything men can. Perhaps they’re right. Yet until the experiment is tried, it’s all hypothetical – and talk is cheap. That’s why Fecunda is the perfect chance for women to finally achieve their full potential away from the shackles of patriarchy and the soul-crushing privilege of men. All together now – Give Fecunda a Go!

As for who would rule, there’s no shortage of high profile leaders who could step up as Fecunda’s first president: Angela Merkel, Julia Gillard, or Justin Trudeau, just to name a few. Hillary might even step into the breach if she’s got nothing better to do. Maybe whoever it is could make some terrible empathy-based decisions like having open borders or something. Then again, that would defeat the point, wouldn’t it? Fecunda is all about keeping the right ones in and the wrong ones out.

Envy 10, Empathy 0

This chapter has been facetious in tone so far, but has a more serious intent. It’s a response to what seems to be a systematic resentment of men by feminists.

Contrary to feminist belief, most Western men are not princes, lords, or playboys. We do not have lives of astonishing ease, free of troubles and sorrow.

Men are getting pretty tired of the Envy 10, Empathy 0 view of them. We’re sick of being blamed for everything and thanked for nothing. We’re sick of being a ‘we’ at all. Men are individuals, not part of a team that can be blamed for every problem, real or imagined, women think they have. We are not a gestalt entity to be blamed for the crimes of our worst members.

But if feminists really think men are the problem, Fecunda is the solution. They should leave and establish their own society. Let’s see if it leads to any kind of Utopia.

Perhaps it will. Inga Muscio seems keen on the thought of an all-female space. In her magnum opus, Cunt: A Declaration of Independence, she describes the life changing experience of attending the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, where it’s not only the music that’s female. The gatekeepers, bus drivers, and every other role is taken by women. Indeed the only men allowed to enter the site are there to empty the porta-loos.

Muscio contrasts this with regular life, where she cannot leave her home without being immersed in a male-created world. The cars, streets, and buildings are the result of men’s labour and design. Even the songs on the radio, or the movies she sees advertised, have been made by men.

This is quintessential feminist discontent. Instead of seeing our civilisation as something to be proud of or grateful for, it’s a source of annoyance. The whole damn thing is a tiresome imposition on women. To be fair, Muscio’s point is the frustration that women haven’t had more of a hand in creating it – and Cunt certainly is a good book. Yet in this section (from pages 206-07) the antagonism to men is so strong that maybe it’s time to trial some kind of gender apartheid. Why not? Why not trial an all female country where women can run the show? It’s time to replace the complaining with action. Fecunda would be like the Michigan Womyn’s Festival, but all the time. The only problem is the Fecundans will have to empty their own porta-loos.

Is feminism a hate movement? The official answer is no, but it does seem to be angrier than ever the last few years. My city’s main newspaper runs anti-male stories daily. One journalist used it to proclaim the Me Too movement a revolt against aeons of oppression. Another, writing after the murder of a young woman, raged against men as a class and said it was an act of folly for women to keep partnering with them at all.

In her infamous ‘Why Can’t We Hate Men?’ essay, Suzanna Danuta Walters argues that hate is justified. She says that right around the world, women suffer at the hands of men, just as they have through  history. Men are responsible for centuries of woe and the only way they can make amends is to get out of the way. She calls on men to give up all leadership positions and hand power to women to make up for all the damage they’ve caused.

Some expressions of hate are even more direct. During the Brett Kavanaugh affair, a lady I’ll call Amelia was outraged by all the men defending Kavanaugh on social media. She tweeted that they all deserved horrible deaths and feminists would ‘laugh as they take their last gasps,’ before castrating their corpses and feeding them to pigs.

As an aside, Amelia recently defended free speech on Twitter. I tweeted a reply: ‘For once I agree with you, Amelia.’ ‘You might agree with me on a few other things too,’ she answered. Not sure how to take this, I tweeted, ‘You may be right,’ before returning to meditate on my hopes for Fecunda.

So, let’s repeat: Men are the problem. Fecunda is the solution. If Danuta Walters wants women to rule, she could keep slogging away in the countries clogged up with men, but why not just move to Fecunda? Imagine how much women can achieve once their main problem is removed once and for all. I mean, on Christmas Day, 2018, someone called ‘Feminist Next Door’ sent out a special festive tweet on the same topic. The gist of it was to imagine that men vanished from the world for 24 hours. Mind you, they would not be harmed, just absent.

The day men vanished need not be Christmas Day itself. It could be any day. But it would be just like Christmas for people like ‘Feminist Next Door.’ The idea was for women to imagine what they could do on that joyful day, and given the nobility of the sentiment, let’s forgive FND for ripping off Andrea Dworkin. A couple of months later she answered a male heckler who said something rude about International Women’s Day. She said the other 364 days of the year were all International Men’s Day, so the heckler should shut up and let women have their one special day.

The trouble is ‘Feminist Next Door’ is way too modest in her demands. 24 hours? What can you do in 24 hours? You need at least 24 years to see what women can really achieve. It’s just possible that after 24 years, Fecunda might be the greatest country in the entire world, a superpower to rival Wakanda itself. In Fecunda, it will be International Women’s Day 365 days a year.

Rape Culture and Collective Guilt

As mentioned, this chapter has been rather flippant so far, but will now turn to a serious topic – the question of whether men as a class are responsible for individual crimes against women, and whether this entitles women to hate them. It is after such crimes, at least in my country, Australia, that feminist vitriol against men reaches peak intensity.

In June, 2018, a young woman named Eurydice Dixon was raped and murdered in a Melbourne park. This awful event stirred up a lot of anger. TV host, Lisa Wilkinson, invoked The Handmaid’s Tale in a tearful speech. Clementine Ford wrote a scathing newspaper column lacerating men for their collective sins.

This may seem odd, given that men as a class did not murder Eurydice Dixon. In fact, she was killed by a 19 year old autistic man named Jaymes Todd. But by some interpretations of feminist theory, men as a class did murder Eurydice, at least indirectly. She was a victim of ‘rape culture’ and systematic misogyny. Thus, if men as a whole are part of creating rape culture, some feminists hold them accountable.

Soon after the murder, a police chief spoke out urging women to take precautions – being careful where they walked at night, for instance. This drew an angry response: Why should women change their behaviour? Men are the ones who should change their behaviour. Stop raping women!

The feminists who said this weren’t just talking to rapists, but to men as a class. The idea of ‘rape culture’ is that we live in a misogynistic society where rape becomes normalised through various attitudes toward women and sex.

There’s a well known triangular diagram used to give an overview of rape culture. It lists twenty-one type of behaviour, at four levels. On level one are rape jokes and ‘locker room banter,’ for instance (although a different version includes ‘unequal pay’ and ‘sexist attitudes.’) Level two has cat-calling, stalking, and ‘revenge porn.’ Level three includes groping and sexual coercion, while actual rape and violence are up the top on level four.

The idea is that any act, no matter how trivial, is part of a spectrum in a general climate of misogyny. This makes rape more likely to happen, or allows its perpetrators to get away with it. That means any man committing the lower level sins – even on level one – is part of creating rape culture, so is to some degree complicit in rape itself.

Strangely, plenty of non-raping men don’t like this idea, and ‘not-all-men-are-rapists’ is a common refrain. Such protests don’t impress feminist, Clementine Ford. After the Dixon murder, Ford wrote, ‘I am increasingly disagreeing with the view that not all men are part of the problem, and it’s because I truly think most of them don’t understand that the problem is theirs to solve.’

Her column went on to harangue men over what they do to stand up for women. Do they challenge sexist comments and misogyny from their male friends? Do they stop their colleagues harassing women? She also asked if they do their share of housework and parenting, so perhaps failure to vacuum or do the dishes is part of rape culture too.

As for who is really to blame for the murder of Eurydice Dixon, the correct answer is Jaymes Todd, the young man who actually did it. But as the theory of rape culture tries to blame a whole class of people for the acts of individuals, it is worth pointing out some problems with the idea.

To do this, I’ll make two analogies. The first is to do with our treatment of farm animals. If there is one class of beings with a genuine claim to being victims, it is the animals we raise and kill for food. The morality of killing animals is a separate argument that I won’t go into here, but for the sake of the analogy, let’s say it is wrong. If so, then all people who eat meat are complicit in this and share whatever guilt is involved.

I’ve recently gone towards vegetarianism, but as I still sometimes eat meat, I share in the guilt. On the other hand, you can’t say vegetarians and vegans share that guilt, for the obvious reason that they don’t eat meat and actively avoid doing so.

So, going back to the murder of poor Eurydice Dixon, a feminist glaring at men and snarling you’re part of the problem is like someone scolding a group of vegans and vegetarians for their part in killing animals. Most men do not rape, and trying to smear them with some kind of collective guilt for the crimes of rogue individuals is not just unfair but absurd.

In terms of the analogy, a feminist might say being a vegan isn’t enough. You have to become a PETA activist and stop people eating meat. You can’t, for example, stand around at a BBQ while other people are eating sausages. You have to call them out on it or you’re enabling ‘carnivore culture.’ But no, individuals are only responsible for their own acts. Carnivores are guilty of eating meat; vegetarians are not. Rapists are guilty of rape; non-rapists are not.

The second analogy I’ll make is with Muslims as a whole being blamed for acts of terrorism. After terror acts by Muslim extremists, some people have tried to blame all Muslims, or Islam itself. It’s a good parallel for feminist attempts to blame all men for individual crimes against women.

Suppose there are two types of Muslims – moderates and extremists. You can’t blame the moderates for acts of terror committed by extremists. The moderates would have had no idea the atrocities were being planned, let alone executed.

You could argue there’s a systemic hostility behind such acts. If – as some claim – the ideology of Islam is anti-Western, you could say the ideology is partly to blame for extremists’ acts of terror. Yet even if that were true, you still can’t blame moderate Muslims for what extremists do.

You might theorise that there’s a ‘terror culture’ made up of anti-Western attitudes. This could be a four level spectrum like the one for rape culture. On level one are trivial acts like making anti-Western jokes or disapproving comments about Western morals. Level two might be refusing to serve Westerners in Muslim shops, or forming cultural enclaves. Actual terrorists acts would be at the top on level four. By this logic, using rape culture as a parallel, moderate Muslims who make anti-Western jokes are also guilty of acts of terror. But that is absurd.

It is true systemic hostility can lead to individual crimes, as anti-Semitism in 1930s Germany led to crimes against Jews. However, there are problems with trying to push this sort of collective guilt. First, a low level offence isn’t the same as one at a high level. A Muslim tut-tutting about ‘Western morality’ isn’t as bad as one who blows up a Balinese nightclub, as happened in 2002.

Second, you could say that if ‘terror culture’ helps normalise acts of terror, then those who refrain from such acts are actually more moral than they would otherwise be. If terror is normal, it is more virtuous than usual to refrain. Likewise, if ‘rape culture’ normalises rape, those who live in a rape culture and don’t rape are more moral than those who live in a non-rape culture and don’t rape.

Suppose there’s a culture where it’s legal to take child brides, for instance. Men who could take child brides but don’t are more moral than men who can’t take them and don’t. Obviously, cultures where child marriage is legal don’t see it as immoral, but for the sake of argument let’s say there are two men who believe taking child brides is morally dubious. One of them lives in Australia, the other in Pakistan. In Australia, it is illegal and socially unacceptable to take child brides. In Pakistan it is both legal and relatively normal. If both these men find the practice morally dubious, the man from Pakistan is the more moral for refusing to do it – because he actually could, but doesn’t.

To go back to the animal analogy, it’s both legal and acceptable to eat meat. There is no moral censure for doing it, no consequences at all. As a result, the decision to abstain, by vegans and vegetarians, is admirable because they are making a moral choice in the absence of any social pressure to do so.

Therefore, if we live in this so called ‘rape culture,’ where sexual assault is somehow endorsed and enabled by misogyny, men who live in it and don’t rape it are more moral than they would be if they didn’t live in a rape culture.

It’s a strange and fairly absurd argument to make, but that’s what you get when a young woman’s death is used as an excuse to shame all men for their supposed complicity.

Misogyny?

But why should we believe in rape culture in the first place? Taking the phrase literally for a moment, there’s not, to my knowledge, any modern Western country where rape is permitted. Taking it more broadly, there are reasons to doubt Western culture is deeply misogynistic, as some feminists believe.

First, there’s been a big push in recent times to promote women’s interests, in a number of ways. Why would that happen if society was misogynistic? Feminists may reply that this is all the result of their fight for justice, but if society really was misogynistic, those reforms wouldn’t get through at all.

At the same time, there’s been a lot of recent anti-male sentiment. Never mind men being the butt of jokes in sitcoms, or the steady stream of anti-male ad campaigns. You actually have in our universities, the systematic denigration of men, and especially white men, as being somehow to blame for all the world’s problems. Society is misogynistic? If anything, it’s increasingly misandric.

Just look at the main newspaper in my city. On any given day, you’ll find several pro-female and anti-male articles. It’s surely only a matter of time before the Sydney Morning Herald renames itself the Sydney Morning Feminist.

If we believe some theorists, the murder of Eurydice Dixon is the end result of systemic misogyny. ‘Rape culture’ is a spectrum of inter-connected behaviour, and any man who engages in a sexist act at the low level is also contributing to rape. So if we could just reform men and get rid of rape culture as a whole, acts of rape and murder will also cease.

Call me a skeptic, but if you really think calling out sexist jokes at the office Christmas party is going to stop some psychopath murdering a random woman in a city park, well, good luck with that.

Do rapist-murderers do it because they hate women? No doubt some do, but others won’t have thought it through that far. Obviously, some are immoral, acting from pure malice. Others are amoral in that they don’t care about the ethics of their actions, or the effect on others. They’re indifferent to moral questions. A third type are probably just stupid, with poor impulse control and no understanding of consequences. A fourth type are mentally ill and disturbed. The idea that all these men commit their crimes due to society-wide misogyny seems like a one-size-fits-all theory.

The real explanation of why some sick or evil men rape may be more prosaic. To put it in coldly clinical terms, rape may be a side effect of a system where supply and demand is heavily out of balance. That is, when it comes to sex, one gender can get it when they don’t want it and the other can’t get it when they do. Under those conditions, rape will sometimes occur from a minority of men who are evil, ill, or have poor impulse control. Of course, none of that is any justification for rape. But it seems a simpler, more likely reason for rape than the catch all theory of ‘misogyny.’

Those who think rape culture is the problem think stopping misogyny is the solution. This seems over idealistic. If you really want to address the threat of rape, better to acknowledge that, in those coldly clinical terms, sexual supply and demand are way out of balance. As a result, there will always be a small minority of ill or evil men who are a threat to women. That’s the reality of it. What you can do about it is a separate question.

There’s a great YouTube talk by a feminist and rape survivor, Wendy McElroy, on the fallacy of rape culture. She makes the point that if people are serious about stopping rape, it can only happen by addressing its real causes. Pushing an ideology about ‘respecting women’ is a different issue, worthy in its own right, but may not have much to do with stopping rape, at least in the Western world.

McElroy agrees there are rape cultures in some parts of the world. Cultures which permit, for example, child brides, rape within marriage, mistreatment of low caste women, and so on. You could make a case that those sort of rape cultures are tied up in misogynistic views of women in general. In comparison, claims about rape culture in the West look trivial. They insult not just Western men, but those women around the world who have a genuine claim to be living in a rape culture. At least, that is the opinion of Wendy McElroy.

Let’s Make Murder Illegal

Some feminists have said it is the responsibility of men as a class to stop rape and murder. It is ‘their problem to solve.’ How could men actually do this? Here’s a thought to get the ball rolling – why not make murder illegal?

After the Eurydice Dixon murder, men did try one thing. The Australian Senate proposed that women carry tasers, pepper spray and mace to defend themselves. That sounds like a good, proactive strategy, but it was rejected. A leading feminist was part of  a senate majority who opposed the motion. They had a better idea: teach men not to assault women.

It’s pretty hard to believe an immediate, practical step was turned down on the basis of ideology – an ideology that believes stopping rape culture will stop rape. Even if you accept that premise, it would still take decades to achieve. In the meantime, why not carry some pepper spray?

Some women are angry at being asked to take precautions, but any person should take steps to reduce risk. Compared to women, men are far more at risk of violence in public places, so they try not to put themselves in danger. They know, for example, not to go out in King’s Cross after 1am. In the days of football hooliganism in England, peaceful football fans knew to stay away from rival fan areas. Generally, there are certain bars, streets, or events you should avoid. The reality is some men are violent, and other men have to take whatever steps are needed: learn self defence, don’t hang out with thugs, avoid bad locations after midnight. This is all routine and commonsense advice.

As for sexual assault, men don’t face the same risks as women, but in the Me Too era some of them have adopted ‘Mike Pence Rules.’ US vice president Pence has a rule to never be alone in a room with any woman other than his wife. This is to lower the risk of a false sexual harassment allegation. High profile men would prefer the risk didn’t exist, but it does – so they take precautions.

In a YouTube talk called ‘Are Men Responsible for Ending Sexual Violence?’ Janice Fiamengo refutes the idea that men could do so even if they tried. She says the demand that men eliminate rape conflates the truth that men have the individual power and responsibility not to commit sexual assault with the false claim they can stop it in others. It’s a ‘sleight of hand’ indeed.

Fiamengo makes an analogy with parenting. There are some terrible parents out there, (a small minority) but it would be unfair to make parents-as-a-class bear responsibility for what the bad ones do, and useless to imply they have any power to stop it.

A Hidden Source of Misogyny

Remember that ‘rape culture’ is a set of misogynistic attitudes that makes offences against women more likely to occur. Let’s look at this idea from another angle.

To be fair, fostering an attitude of hate towards a class of people does have an effect – or rather, a number of effects. One is that you feel less sympathy for that group and their problems. Another is you may feel resentment towards them, even an element of ill will. A third is you might want to have nothing to do with them. This is true of various types of people that are antagonistic to other types.

But if it’s true a systematic dislike of one group for another has consequences, one might argue feminists are responsible for creating hostility not just towards men as a class, but towards women as a class. How so?

Not all feminists hate men, but enough do to have real world effects. The Me Too movement, for instance, began as a protest against sleazy Hollywood moguls then turned into a much wider campaign with the potential for abuse. As Fiamengo said, ‘all women have now acquired a deadly weapon … and a significant minority are willing or even eager to use it.’

No doubt some feminists are delighted to bring down as many powerful men as possible. Some of those men deserve it, others do not. Yet if some innocent men go down as collateral damage, these feminists will shrug their shoulders, talk about male tears, and see it as some kind of payback.

It’s one thing to incite resentment of men, but a side effect is you also incite resentment of women. It may seem to feminists that their efforts to help women can do nothing but good. Where their causes are just, they may be right.

They may also think they’re helping women when they lie about the gender pay gap, give a one sided view of domestic violence, or support a pro-female / anti-male agenda in the media and education. In the short term, these actions may help women, up to a point. What they also do is create a strong tide of resentment against women as a class.

Among the many fruits of this are the MGTOW movement, the refusal of some male bosses to mentor women in the wake of Me Too, less sympathy for women, strong antipathy to feminism as a cause, and less inclination to support pro-women reforms one might otherwise agree with.

Apparently, ‘rape culture’ is made of misogyny. But if misogyny means antagonism towards women, it’s possible third wave feminism has created more antagonism than anyone else ever could. Feminism at its worst is self-defeating because it doesn’t inspire either respect, or support for its causes – and feminism is at its worst all too often these days.

The movement may have begun as a just cause, but over the years it has evolved into a hate movement. ‘Why can’t we hate men?’ says Suzanna Danuta Walters. Well, sure, you can. Just do it somewhere else. In Fecunda, ideally.

What is feminism today? Rape culture. Me Too. The gender pay gap. Envy 10, Empathy 0. Men-bad-women-good. Blaming men for everything and thanking them for nothing. And let’s not forget that men as a class are complicit in the rape and murder of Eurydice Dixon, an event which could only appal any moral person.

Soon after Eurydice Dixon’s death, Clementine Ford wrote an angry newspaper column berating men. As it was written in the emotional aftermath of the murder, one might forgive some over-statement. Yet the passage below is from her book, published months later, with only minor changes from the original column.

It is a mark of either immense compassion or immense foolishness that women continue to throw ourselves into the act of loving men despite amassing a lifetime of experiences that tell us how dangerous this decision can be. I am increasingly disagreeing with the view that not all men are part of the problem, and it’s because I truly think most of them don’t understand that the problem is theirs to solve …

… Women don’t need to be told to look for the goodness in men, because we try our damnedest to find it every day. We work hard to nurture it, even as we’re told to be grateful for it. For our own survival, women must believe that not all men are the enemy.

I’ve read both Ford’s books and many of her columns and was surprised by her claims about looking for men’s goodness. Perhaps in her personal life she tries her damndest to find the goodness in men, but she sure doesn’t in her published work. On the contrary, she seems to try her damnedest to find the worst in them.

Clementine Ford is entitled to her views. She’s even entitled to broadcast them through books and newspaper columns. But if she really thinks women take their lives in their hands by partnering with men, perhaps it’s time to go our separate ways.

It’s time to give feminists the space and opportunity they need. Go, and may the Goddess go with you. Goodbye Suzanna. Goodbye Amelia. Goodbye to all the feminists convinced they live in The Handmaid’s Tale. Please go – with our blessings and good wishes. We wish you well in establishing the Republic of Fecunda and creating your dream country free from our eternal sabotage. Go in peace – and good luck.