Through a New Toxic Brand of Feminism, Misogyny Rears its Ugly Head
By: Little One
Tags: Gender, Equality, Sexism, Misogyny, Sexuality

Through a New Toxic Brand of Feminism, Misogyny Rears its Ugly Head

As a female student navigating the postsecondary world of higher education, you tend to encounter a lot of men who call themselves feminists.

These guys are your peers, your classmates, your friends, your colleagues, your boyfriends.

And with the most cursory glance, they appear the way they present.

They can recite the abstract theories of feminist lore from memory. They can identify subtle examples of sexism in media, politics, and cinema. They can deliver the philosophical axioms of feminist canon with necessary accuracy and fervor to a female of sexual interest during the courting process.

And when they gaze into their mirrors, they see a hyper-intellectual, free-thinking, ultra “woke” modern feminist of the male persuasion.

But, upon closer examination, one can see that these men are not feminists at all.

In fact, they are the opposite of feminists.

They are misogynists.

Misogynists masquerading as feminists.

And they are everywhere.

These men fly easily under the radar — in social circles, academic settings, and university arenas alike. They are woke when they need to be. They have female friends. They have no problem interfacing with the opposite sex in most contexts and have little if any trouble acquiring intimate partners of the female persuasion.

But these are weak tests of feminism. Most men — even avowedly anti-feminist types — would pass them.

I am talking about the kind of misogynist that proclaims himself a free thinking feminist iconoclast while simultaneously doing the same old toxic things in the same old toxic ways without even questioning whether his behavior is hostile or sexist.

These are the fair-weather feminists that selectively conform to female-friendly practices if so doing effectively suits their needs or pleasures but who toxify on a dime the moment those ends have been realized.

They are the guys who post virtual shrines to their mothers, sisters, and girlfriends on social media, with loving pictures and captions galore, right alongside toxic “male only” style posts, the ones that glorify their single-sex getaways and activities free of any female presence, with all the relevant bro-code labels — like “no girls allowed” and “dudes only” — properly affixed.

They are the guys that call themselves feminists during the day and then play violent, hyper-sexualized video games at night where they can brutalize, rape, torture, and slaughter naked and bikini clad women for fun.

In the most recent installment of Grand Theft Auto, the most popular video game in the world, a player can pay a sex worker for every sexual act possible, have her perform those sex acts on him (in public), then promptly run her over with his car and reclaim the money she is owed him from her battered body.

It makes me wonder if, on some level deep down, the virtual hellscapes created by these games are the ideal fantasies that male users wish to somehow repossess or reclaim. Why else would they exist, if not to cater to a perverse orient of the male psyche that remains otherwise repressed by exogenous forces?

But I digress.

Like I said, these types are harder to identify because of the way they check certain boxes.

They support Hillary Clinton, in the primaries and in the general. They oppose President Trump. They like the appropriate posts on Instagram and social media.

They accept pro-feminist theory as a standard modality of higher pedagogical thought.

And so they fly under most people’s misogyny-screening radar, especially during the age of Trump where the focus of feminist thought has been (rightfully, understandably) pointed elsewhere.

But let me be clear: these men of which I speak are not Trump supporters — they are not Evangelical Christians or new wave social conservatives. They are not even the infamous fraternity pledges or D-1 all-American jocks that seem to corporealize the ultimate anti-feminist caricature.

They are hyper-sophisticated, ultra-liberal, college-educated, feminist-proclaiming male Millennials and Gen. Z’s, professing adherence to a movement they do not understand and an ideology they care nothing about. And what’s worse is that, in their wake, they have created a new phony brand of feminism — one in which sexism reifies and misogyny disguises as “woke”— to serve their male-coded aims — primarily: the extortion of sex from women in a variety of ways, the strategic deflection of attention away from their own hostile behaviors, the extraction of feminine-coded labors from their sources (the female body and mind), and the marginalization of women from men in almost every social context.

I’m particularly interested in how men use these tactics to police us, to control our behavior, to keep us in our designated lanes.

To be clear, hostile behavior from men is nothing new. Misogyny has always been the prevailing view of women among all sexes, both male and female alike. But what is new, what I have noticed, and what is happening within the college campus environment in particular, is male misogynists weaponizing feminism into a sword and shield to achieve their masculine-coded ends.

Put simply, these guys proclaim themselves feminists, use it to get what they want, proceed to engage in the same toxic behaviors they always have, then use their erstwhile of claims of feminism to fend off dead-on accusations of misogyny.

And rinse and repeat.

In this light, “woke” feminism is being harnessed as a cudgel, a masquerade mask, and an escape hatch, all at the same time, in revolving order.

I do not proclaim to be a feminist oracle, but it does not take being one to detect when the original elixir of the feminist metaphysic has been warped.

To emphasize, feminism is not just a label one simply slaps on their forehead. It’s not a high class status symbol or gooey branding vogue. It is a lifestyle, a worldview, and behavior system that must reify and translate throughout one’s most hallowed, intimate, and social spaces to be considered legitimate.

These men are not hard to spot if you know what to look for but easy to miss if you aren’t paying attention.

They reify as honest and sincere when they need to be, when it suits their purposes, when they stand to gain. They recognize that women are expendable in the sense that they can be consumed and discarded fairly easily without any fear of blowback or consequences from their peers, social network, or society at large. They sell women on the idea that they are hardcore feminists during the courting process so that when they eventually discard them and turn hostile in the future they can successfully deflect away any accusations of toxicity or misogyny.

And we — both men and women alike — rarely challenge this behavior because we have accepted the lukewarm tests of feminism that a patriarchal society has provided us.

The male word is very powerful, still. What they say is most often considered gospel, even and especially in the face of fact or truth, which makes identifying and contesting these behaviors quite difficult.

But it can be done.

The telltale signs of a closet misogynist are very subtle at first, but what often gives them away is a proclaimed devoutness to feminism or feminist values in the pursuit of something they want that they don’t already have.

In a lot of cases, I think these men do on some level actually believe they are feminists, even if they act nothing like them. But in fairness to the rest of us, there really isn’t any alternative. In this day and age and especially among the college educated, being anti-feminist isn’t really a viable option.

Because once they have carefully extracted — or inversely, failed to carefully extract (after being in some way rejected or denied) — that which they desperately wanted (from or regarding a woman), their true colors will emerge and they will fall from grace like clockwork.

And after, if necessary, they pull out their earlier claims of feminism as a shield to fend off allegations of toxicity. But most of the time, they don’t even have to pull it out — because their word is so powerful and the script they have created is so effective that most of us just fall in line and don’t contest. We accept, because the man’s earlier claims loom so large in the background they doesn’t seem right questioning.

We feel like we would be labeled as bitter, spiteful, nasty, or anti-male (all sexist social categories by the way) for bringing it up — so we don’t. Hence, through these tactics, men secure our silence through a kind of social gaslighting.

The way they are able to do this to us time after time, over and over again, in the same exact way, is that we as young coeds, both male and female alike, have bought into a patriarchal, normative worldview that is created and enforced by men. Within this framework, male-engineered social scripts and unwritten codes of conduct are very successful with regard to policing female behavior.

We have internalized gender norms that say it’s normal for men to stand behind their (male) friends when they have done something objectively wrong, that say we are “teasing” and “leading them on” if we don’t exchange nudes or service their sexual desires right away, that say we are being “clingy” or “crazy” if we ask them where they’ve been or who they’ve been with, that say if they don’t tell us they love us they can’t be held liable for cutting us off.

Men do all these things, engage in all these hostile behaviors, then shamelessly brandish their erstwhile claims to feminism and “woke-ness” as covers to rebuff spot-on accusations of misogyny.

And it’s dangerously common.

We all know who these men are.

They are the guys that call themselves feminists but use toxic labels to describe us— we’ve all heard them— the ones like the “tease”, the “clinger”, the “crazy bitch,” the “cool girlfriend,” the “stuck up sorority girl”, the “chill hookup partner”, the “ball breaker”, the “bossy know it all” and the like — which, for the record, aren’t valid measures of anything except of course the misogyny of the user.

They are the guys that call themselves “woke” but whose eyes flash from charm to hatred when we turn them down for a drink, but who demand nude photos from us and then circulate them amongst their friends like trophies, but who masturbate to violent rape pornography on a regular basis.

They are the guys that think themselves enlightened but yet can’t shut up in class because they love the sound of their voices so much they can’t help but interrupt every woman (including the female professor) when she tries to speak, buoyed by the intoxicating sense of maleness from which their claim to speech stems.

They are the vipers, the weasels, the rats, the double-crossers that go to great lengths to befriend a woman and earn her trust only to excise her from their lives when they are finished, much like a surgeon would a tumor with a ten blade, then have the audacity to continue claiming they respect women afterward.

It’s the snake that sells a prospective intimate partner, a woman, on the idea that he “cares” about her only to screw her a few times and then never speak to her again, not look at her, not talk to her, pretending like he doesn’t know her, justifying it based on the male-coded maxim somewhere in his mind that says since he never told her he loved her, he owes her nothing — no response, no explanation, no communication whatsoever, despite claiming to be her friend and confidant beforehand — having in his mind completed the high wire act of extracting exactly what he wanted from her without vocalizing the forbidden three word phrase his warped quasi feminist worldview says that not saying absolves him from any culpability for his actions — when in reality, he’s a snake either way.

They are the guys that proclaim themselves “different” from all the other men— who cheat, lie, emotionally abuse, mistreat, and cut off women — but yet still continue to be friends with those men and maintain deep fraternal relationships with them, thereby safeguarding their position in society and negating any negative social consequences they might face for their misogynist behaviors.

They are the guys who call themselves our allies but yet stand behind their (male) friends over us every time like clockwork, no matter what, even (and especially) when they have done something objectively wrong to us (like lie to us, cheat on us, assault us), because at the end of the day, bro-code reigns and when it comes down to it, men will always protect other men.

This is not feminism.

This is not “wokeness”.

This is misogyny.

It is the same beast just wearing a different face. We cannot allow men to use an illegitimate claim to feminism to deflect scrutiny away from their own toxic behavior. We cannot let them weaponize a genuine movement into a cudgel for their own ends. And we cannot step aside and stand idly by as they reverse engineer a new harmful brand of feminism in their wake.

These latest developments we are seeing are merely newfound manifestations of the selfsame patriarchal urge to police the female mind, body, sexuality, and spirituality through the wayward slant of the male gaze.

It is misogyny’s latest masquerade.

The spirit of an erstwhile era evidently still haunts the halls of our most progressive collegiate institutions, and a larger course-correction is thus in order before these entities can justify their claim to feminist utopia.

The fight to uplift the postsecondary coeducational experience from the gallows of misogyny hence continues, and its end remains to be seen.

For now, it’s time we all take a moment to assess whether some of the men at our most liberal universities are truly our allies in this quest or rather our adversaries masquerading as something similar.