Prudent Gynophobia

Acknowledging Intimidation Can Help to End It
(c) 2012, Davd

If you are an Australian man, and the proposed “gendered domestic violence legislation” has passed, making it a crime for you to displease any woman sharing your home; … if you are an “American” man, and the new definition of rape has become criminal as well as statistical normal, making it a crime for you to “make love”—even well short of intercourse—without detailed formal consent; and making it easy for a woman you never touched to get you falsely convicted the relevant question arises:

Is it rational to fear women, or not?

Perhaps an imperfect analogy will make that “f-word” easier to accept: Is it rational to fear the police? Most men do, to the extent that, for instance, we stop at STOP signs even when it is obvious that no other traffic is present and it would be utterly safe to “run” the stop sign at 10-20 mph [16-33 kph]. We know that our eyes inform us better than the Law can, because our eyes are right-there and can see “here-and-now” conditions, which the Law cannot. Still, because the police have been given abundant coercive powers, and directions to enforce the Law—not reason and good sense—we fear them, and we STOP.

Fear is not always cowardice; sometimes it is prudent. Obeying Laws is a handy subject area in which to find examples of that. The proposed laws named in the first paragraphs, as written, give women arbitrary power to punish men—such as what happened to the sheriff-elect in San Francisco, California, under existing laws and procedures—a kind of power that was exclusive to police and prosecutors’ offices before Feminist lobbying brought in “no drop” prosecution and other such policies.

Is it rational to fear someone who can require you to do the impossible? with severe punishment at her beck-and-call, if you fail? Any law that enables women to turn displeasing-them into punishable offences, whether civil or criminal, gives women discretionary powers such as even carefully selected, carefully trained police have been known to abuse. A woman trained by the-Devil-Herself-knows-whom, granted such powers, and selected with the biases and distractions of eros involved, is not a promising bet for a life together, or even a few-years companionship, under such aegis. A woman trained by only-the-Devil-Herself-knows-whom, self-selected via Feminist ideology, can impose pain and suffering without any real provocation, as that Sheriff-elect found out.

Women are impossible to please-fully on any long term continuing basis. You may please one for a few minutes, imaginably a few hours, rarely as long as a few days; but eventually, something you do is going to displease her. (This works both ways: I don’t recall a woman going a week without doing at least one little thing that displeased me—back when i kept day-to-day company with women. I used to shrug and say to myself, “nobody’s perfect.” Under proposed legislation—some would say, under existing legislation and practices—it’s a crime not to be perfect in your relationship with a woman, if she wants it to be one—but in fact, nobody’s perfect. Feminist law demands the impossible—and more baldly with each passing year.)

Feminist law may also be demanding the impossible on a societal scale.

If Australia or the US enacted into law, its recently proposed additions to female privilege, and a majority of women were to take full advantage of their legal privileges existing and new, something else would prove to be impossible—in my sociologically and statistically educated guess—there wouldn’t be enough budget or staff to operate all the required prisons, bill collection, courts, tribunals, “re-socialization” and other programmes, against that many men.

“Society” in Australia, North America and much of Europe, very plausibly, continues to function only because so many women do not even half-exploit their privileges. “Not All Women Are[Act] Like That” has to be true, because if and when even most women act “Like That”—comes the collapse. So far, it seems, the numerically largest impacts of misandric laws have been first, increasingly-henpecked husbands; second, men not marrying, (both of these first two, because of Feminist intimidation); and third, the men and children who are victims of biased divorce. The first two cost rather little per person in ongoing “State expense”, and may pay more tax than they “cost”—but less on average than “well motivated” husbands in intact families. The third category is inclined to be costly, especially if the men are imprisoned for failure to pay court-imposed burdens and when the children reach their teens.

Three major influences threaten to trigger the collapse. First, children raised by mother-only are much more likely to become “social problems” than children raised by both parents. One reason the United States has such a high imprisonment rate, is that their social policy has supported single-motherhood for over a generation of time.

Second, as an old folk maxim said before misandric laws had even made much of a start, “Changing her mind is a woman’s privilege”. Women who were “Not Like That” can become “Like That”—and add themselves to the momentum toward collapse. Any woman can decide, any time,

• to exploit her privilege to accuse falsely a man and be believed,

• to divorce and turn a husband and father into a cash cow,

• to seek a restraining order against a man whose self-restraint is greater than her own.

No reliable technique has ever reached my attention, for predicting which women will “change their minds” from faithful to exploiter… nor for predicting what will be the outcome of a false accusation, a civil court action, or a busybody intervention (and another less-old folk maxim says, “Most fear is fear of the unknown.”)

Third, misandric laws are bases for the funding of bureaucracies that employ large numbers of [mostly women], at relatively high pay levels. Those “misandrocrats” have an immense vested interest in “growing their business” by persuading more women to accuse men of criminal sex and violence, to divorce, and to demand restraining orders and changes in the terms of post-divorce or post-conviction impositions. Some plausible amount of “growth in their business” could bankrupt the government; and any level of “misandrocracy” is too much. Reducing government expenditure is one area where men’s rights and economic conservatism have common cause.

(When the Nazis were coming to power, they had a vested interest in Jews and Communists doing wrong, to the extent that they set fire to the Reichstag building and blamed them. When the Ku Klux Klan was powerful, they had a vested interest in finding “uppity niggers” to punish, and horror stories to circulate. They even picked on Roman Catholics in many places, to have more reason to do their form of self-righteous evil. At one time some sociologists ironically called such vicious bigots “moral entrepreneurs”.)

Was it rational for Afro-Americans to fear the KKK in 1950? Was it rational for German Jews and Communists to fear the Nazis in 1935? Is it rational for men to fear women, at least a little, given the present “legal environment”? In 1960, calling a man gynophobic was an insult and, given the English language’s spin on “phobia”, an allegation that his mind was somewhat unsound. Today, in the original Greek sense, it’s an attribution of prudence.

I expect the word “fear” will be unpopular with many men, which is why the STOP-sign example is important: Everyday life contains abundant, rational, widespread, socially acceptable, prudent fear. We might be wise to have some prudent fear of violent bullying that doesn’t have women behind it: Ray Blumhorst writes in a NCFM post,

“If men aren’t afraid to walk alone at night, they should be, … implying males are privileged, because they have no fear to walk alone at night, appear[s] badly misinformed at the least.”

If you wouldn’t walk alone at night in a rough neighbourhood, if Carl Rowan was wise to fear racists in his younger days, then some fear of the arbitrary powers Feminism has assembled for women to exploit at their whim, is also in order.

Hiding a rational fear of women [more precisely, of their legal privileges and the many temptations they receive to exploit them, combined with their tendencies to use their feelings as their guides to conduct] is both dishonest, and disadvantageous:

• Some women are exploitative bullies.

• Present laws facilitate exploitation and bullying by women.

• Women change their minds, and Feminist laws and administration tend to reinforce anti-male changes while making pro-male changes less advantageous for them.

• Law enforcement practices are biased against men. (There are further references in the linked web-page, and in those linked above.)

It is not necessary to fear a woman’s personal strength or even her general attitude toward you, suffice to fear what harm she can possibly inflict on you in a moment of antipathy.

Fear of the police tends to find expression in conformity to laws, but also in avoidance of situations where the laws will do us more harm than good. We tend to avoid roads and streets with many STOP signs. Likewise, perhaps, we should avoid some women—perhaps we should even admit doing so because we are intimidated.

A tactic women have used on men, with much less logical reason than men now have to use it on women, is to proclaim, “Don’t come near me! I’m afraid of you.” One men’s-site comment reported an ex-wife saying that, with the analysis “She wasn’t afraid of me; this was her way of getting rid of me.”

It was near the beginning of this year, when it occurred to me that i should start telling others that i am afraid of a woman “to whom i have been properly introduced,” but with whom i have seldom spoken and do not recall even shaking hands. I was getting the kind of impression some superstitious men have about black cats: When she crossed my path, i had bad luck. This woman may be totally innocent, she may be as indifferent to me as i would be to her if laws weren’t biased against men—or she might have reason to wish me ill. I do not know. I do know that i feel more comfortable avoiding her.

Then i thought about a woman who invited me for a week’s visit in 2003. She talked about marriage, but her description better-fit the job of slave-tutor for her middle-school daughter.¹ I told her that. We didn’t visit again. Today, i would not feel safe visiting her, or any woman, the way i visited then.

One benefit of admitting your fear, is that you have a good reason for avoidance. Another is, that if some woman harasses you up-close after being told, “Don’t come near me! I’m afraid of you,” and you do shove or even hit her—you’re acting out of fear, you’ve made it plain you were intimidated, and these days, that looks like a better defense than any claim that she deserved it, including her striking you first. (Maybe, violating your fearful avoidance, is the one way a woman would “deserve it” in today’s warped legal context?)

When in doubt, fear her. Visibly, publicly if you are in public, not ostentatiously but clearly. Fear her as you would fear someone who is known to be involved in a rough biker club or Organized Crime, as Afro-Americans used to fear relatives of the Klan. As the prudent, fear those who have violent coercion at their beck-and-call.

It is time for the fact of Feminist intimidation, and the rational prudence of being fearful, to come out of the closet. Today’s men are not so much cowards nor wimps, as bullied. Going Our Own Ways is a prudent response, and going in groups is always a good strategy when the bullies might have abundant force to call on. Ending the intimidation won’t be instant and it won’t likely be easy; and meanwhile, acknowledging that we are fearful for valid but bad cause, is part of the process of removing the cause.

“The Real Answer”—the definitive answer[s]—to men’s predicament, will come in the form[s] of men’s social reformulations. Whether there is a “Collapse”, as the European debt crisis, the US debt plight, and the comments of many men on US websites, seem to portend; or whether there is a social reform short of collapse; the notion that we deserve to fear women this way—that women deserve to have coercive, bullying force at their beck-and-call—is absurd. It is not a foundation, nor part of a sound foundation, on which a long-lasting, humane society can be built.

Paradoxically, one especially promising milieu wherein to design a long-lasting, humane, man-friendly society, and to test out many of its elements and aspects, is the cloister!—and two others, wherein some of the same and several other elements and aspects of a long-lasting, humane society, can be designed and “test-piloted”, are small worker and housing co-operatives. All three of these well-known, long-tested, sustainable, humane, and satisfying modes of living; combine refuge for men against whom “the society of the moment” is biased, and a locus where-from the societies of a sustainable humane man-friendly future can be designed, tried-in-part, refined—and built.

Prudent fear is far from cowardice! We can make it the reminder which guides us toward the very opposite of cowardice —a daring reformulation to replace a broken social order.

Reference:

Rowan, Carl T., 1991. Breaking Barriers: A Memoir. Boston, Toronto, London: Little, Brown & co. ISBN 0-316-73977-3

Endnote: