The Reality Blog

The critical response to my article on Anglo Feminism, which suggested that feminism is nastier in Anglo societies than Scandinavia, was pleasantly instructive. Although I was aware that there was some dissent against the state feminism of Northern Europe, I did not know that it was so strongly felt. More importantly, I didn’t realize that feminism was such a crucial component of state ideology.
The picture that is emerging is one of a bureaucratically-entrenched soft totalitarianism in Scandinavia, as compared to a more lawless, rapacious and violent form of feminism in Anglo countries. Perhaps this is because in Scandinavia the state has been more successful in efforts to socialize feminism, thereby drawing support from society at large, whereas in the Anglosphere the burden falls most heavily on individual men who have exposed themselves to the risk of marriage or cohabitation.
Whatever the reasons, according to Henry Laasanen and other Finnish commenters, with a few exceptions, dissent against feminism is notably absent from the mainstream Scandinavian discourse.
Henry Laasanen:

In the USA you may grind teeth with radical “feminazi” writings. We have no feminazis (maybe one or two), which is – paradoxically – a catastrophe for the Finnish MRM: there are no critical discussions of equlity in the media, only feminist propaganda.
[...]
There are no feminist blogs (one inactive) or feminist columnists (other than official propaganda) in Finland. In the British newspapers Guardian and Daily Mail there are gender debates every week – we have no gender debates, because feminism holds the absolute “truth”.

Vortac:

…I think Finland is one of the world’s hardest countries to talk about men’s rights. In USA, it seems to be much easier, because there are so many more people, which means there are so many more MRA’s, and there is so much variance with all kinds of different states, different environments from mountainy places to plains and many things inbetween, that even men’s rights can be discussed seriously. Even when there is the expected ridicule, there are more people to rise against the ridicules, and challenge their viewpoints. In the little Finland, it’s a very difficult thing to do, and the consequences are less challenged – especially in the ‘real life’.

Finndistan, an (American?) expat living in Finland:

As a foreigner in Finland, following the finnish news in english, the media attack is impossible to avoid.
Articles on how the recession forces women back into the kitchen, articles on comparing all women and all men’s salaries not divided by occupation etc, articles on how men have more free time when the data clearly showed that men work more (from a survey spanning the ages 10-65), the president saying that the real victims of war and conflict are women and children, etc… In a small country, in the main news outlet, when these kinds of articles appear multiple times a week, its can get overwhelming, and with what Henri says, the consensus politics, it is impossible to show people that “Look, the survey showed men worked more. It is in the data”. Talking to a brick wall gets more response.

The atmosphere described in the above comments sounds like what one might find in an American gender studies classroom, but nowhere else. Family court may be hell for men in the US, but for the most part people have stopped cooking up ideological justifications to defend the strong-arm robbery that passes for “justice” in our courthouses. Instead, they simply say something like “bend over and take it like a man.” However, this is recent development, so perhaps Scandinavia is simply a few steps behind in this regard.
Because Scandinavia has traditionally been the testing ground for progressive policies, its societies have had a disproportionate impact on the Western world’s political discourse. This suggests that if men’s rights advocates gain some political traction in the Nordic nations, it could significantly raise the profile of the movement throughout the West.
Despite the awful political climate for MRAs in Finland, it looks as though there’s actually a lot of potential there. The frustration is palpable, and the thing about a consensus, we humans being what we are, is that it is made to be broken. Paradoxically, one of the advantages we Americans have in regards to speaking out about these issues is that so many of us men have very little to lose. When you’ve already been destroyed by your ex, denounced as an “abuser” or “monster,” and had your children and property seized, what more can they do?
Although it may not be that bad in Finland now, if the feminists continue to get their way, it will get worse. If I were a Finn, this is something I’d tell my fellow men. Point out how American law metastasized in the 90s with the passage of VAWA and the unholy feminist/conservative alliance. Stress the need to fight feminism before it takes things that far. I’m sure plenty of Anglo men would be willing to tell their own personal horror stories to Finnish MRAs, who could use them as an example of what feminism has the potential to do.
Given the remarkably strong position feminism has in Scandinavia, it looks like the perfect place to take a stand against the ideology which, despite its claims, is supremacist rather than egalitarian. In fact, this may be the single best argument for the egalitarian Scandinavians: feminism ultimately leads to a society that is anything but just and equal. Through its pursuit of radical equality of outcome, it undermines legal equality, and eventually will replace rule of law with rule by law, which would erase the distinction between Scandinavia and its eastern neighbors, and thereby destroy the distinct civilization of the North.

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Selwyn Duke postulates the theory–misandry leads to authoritarianism–thusly:

[W]hat would you do if you wanted to grow government? I think you would try to remove any hope in women’s minds that they could find security through a husband. You do this by destroying the man. You need to make him look weak, ineffectual, feckless, and buffoonish.
Here is how you would proceed: Portray men in sitcoms, movies, and commercials as inept, foolish, and pusillanimous. Make sure these overgrown Hollywood boys are always outshone by the female characters. Also ensure that there are at least as many female characters in action roles as men — and don’t neglect to make them as hard and as tough, if not more so, than the fellows. And definitely show them beating men up as much as possible. Then men certainly won’t seem very strong.
This perception is far easier to instill if you can actually bring men and boys down. To this end, make sure you feminize the curricula and atmosphere in schools so that boys receive neither the stimulation nor the discipline they need to succeed. And when these little outside-the-box male creatures’ (boys are more likely to be revolutionary-minded, for good or for ill) energies are misdirected due to this lack of discipline, you can pickle their wills in psychotropic drugs such as Ritalin. The idea here is to lower boys’ grades and college-graduation rates so that they’re less capable of being a family’s breadwinner. And then they certainly won’t seem very intelligent.
There must also be institutionalized discrimination against the lads. So be sure to have affirmative action, quotas, and set-asides for women. For instance, you can have government aid for female-owned businesses but not male-owned ones; if this is done right, a situation might even arise in which women start four times as many new businesses as men do [Ed: they already start twice as many]. The idea is to, as much as possible, work towards a point where men aren’t very wealthy or powerful.
By sexualizing everything in society and presenting girls as objects of pleasure, we can instead make the boys more predatory. Then they will leave a trail of broken hearts in their wake, ensuring that girls’ hopes of bonding with a man are crushed; this causes women to harden their hearts to avoid being similarly hurt again, which reduces the chances that they will ever truly bond with a man.
The result of all this will be men who seem weak, powerless, and unintelligent, and who are poor. Women must feel that the only reliable source of security and resources in their lives, the only strong man, is Uncle Sam.

In other words, misandry is functionally the same as hating freedom. If you love freedom, then you fight misandry wherever you find it. If you love liberty, then you labor tirelessly to restore and protect the position of men as fathers and as patriarchs of their families. If you crave independence, then you work to foster durable marriage and ensure interdependence between husbands and wives.
On the other hand, if you welcome the yoke, if you want your sons and daughters to be serfs, if you enjoy the boot heel of authoritarian rule pressing against your neck, go ahead and suppress men, masculinity, and dispose of patriarchal marriage and family.
I’ve argued before that while women are the center of gravity of a civilization, it is individual men operating within a framework of other men who transmit the technology of civilization from one generation to the next. Reading Mr. Duke’s line of reasoning, it seems I need to extend my argument a bit and claim that it is the male-led family structure that enables freedom and liberty and that the female-led family drives a society toward tyranny and serfdom. A society based upon the female-headed family fails to bring men into the fold of marriage and family, fails to secure their investment into their children, and fails to direct men’s surplus energies toward socially productive ends sans the use of government force.
It is this failure to capture male investment that makes Mr. Duke’s observation about sexually predatory boys and hard-hearted girls especially salient. For our society is increasingly failing to efficiently capture male investment while at the same time establishing a moral ecology wherein evo psych and game theory justify the despoiling of the womenfolk…making them progressively poorer candidates for marriage with each happy roguring.
Speaking of marriage, Mr. Duke also had this interesting observation about how the marriage calculus has been stood on its head by all this man-hatin’ going on:

[W]omen have been sacrificing liberty for security for thousands of years — in an appropriate context. This context was marriage, when a woman would accept a man’s protection and his headship (with today’s hen-pecked Western man, it’s different; upon getting married, he sacrifices liberty for insecurity) [Emphasis mine].

So on top of the postulate that misandry leads to tyranny, we see, through several degrees of separation, that all this bustin’ on the guys has had the effect of negating the marriage contract for men. It still brings a (temporary) security for women while failing to secure for men what it used to. But it’s worse than that, for it is not only a lack of security, men who marry face an insecurity, a negative security…they risk more by marrying than by not. And by not marrying, they feed into Kay Hymowitz’ SYM stereotype, which in turn begets more misandry and so forth.
Thus does misandry circle back around in a self-sustaining spiral down into chains. The message is clear: a free society that makes a habit of disrespecting and suppressing and repressing its men won’t remain free for too much longer.

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About the author: EW is a well-trained monkey charged with operating heavier-than-air machinery. His interests outside of being an opinionated rabble-rouser are hunting, working out, motorcycling, spending time with his family, and flying. He is a father to three, a husband to one, and is a sometime contributor here at Spearhead. More of his intolerable drivel is available at the blog The Elusive Wapiti. The Spearhead is a reader-supported site, so if you enjoy our content please consider a donation to keep us online now and in the future. Thank you, your support is appreciated.

Pamela Haag, writing for the Huffington Post, reminisces about the glory days of feminism back in the 1970s, when, as she puts it, “feminism was the muse of the liberal conscience writ large.”
If my vague and hazy memories of that time are accurate, she was right. The 1970s and early 1980s were distinctly pro-feminist, and much of the popular sentiment at the time reflected this. Although traditional culture, which has largely vanished today, still existed back then, the liberals and hip cultural icons were all self-declared feminists. I remember most men openly called themselves feminists in those days. It was fashionable and the “right thing to be.” As a little boy, I didn’t really understand the implications of this, so I simply kept my mouth shut and assumed it was one of those grown-up things, then buried myself in classical literature and natural science books in which the term didn’t exist.
As Haag, writes, one gets the sense that she feels as though feminists have been dumped:

The tactical purging of the feminine in pursuit of liberal muscularity has diminished the place of feminism along with it. The skirmish in October, 2009 over President Obama’s all-male basketball games and all-male golf outings seemed a relatively trivial intimation of the larger and more consequential trend that Suskind’s work is now describing: it illustrated visually that liberalism and feminism aren’t as close as they once were.
Maybe, as with any other long-term relationship, feminism and liberalism simply grew to take each other for granted. Maybe we feminists got lulled into a false sense of security that liberals are our natural, stalwart and obvious allies, and wouldn’t display misogyny or old boys’ tendencies. It’s understandable, but a gravely simplifying loyalty and trust, if so, because misogyny is something that all of us can struggle with or exhibit — whether male or female (women engage in women-hating, self-loathing, and sexuality-hating behaviors, too), and whether liberal or conservative.

Then, she brings up one of the more damning contradictions of feminism as though it is a good thing:

It’s all sadly ironic, this quest for Democratic toughness, because second wave feminism was a very muscular thing. It’s one of the most successful anti-feminist gambits of the last three decades that it gets associated today with a sensibility of victims and not with the feisty, sexy heroism of the Gloria Steinem generation.
The opposite of victims, second wave feminists audaciously did something and, in the frontier spirit of American self-reliance, claimed responsibility for their own lives and happiness. A feminist story of heroic strength has gotten re-written into a sensibility of weakness — as if to be a feminist is to be a whiner, buffeted passively by circumstance and mean men that we dully condemn and vilify at every chance.
Somehow the feminist rallying cry of the 1970s, “I am Woman, Hear Me Roar” has slipped into the misperception, “I am Woman, Hear Me Whimper.”
The new generation of self-respecting young female liberals don’t want to appear flaccid any more than newly-muscularized liberal males. Who would? Two very disparate sources — one a woman in her mid-20s, and the other a liberal man in his 50s — explained feminism’s diminished urgency among liberal women in almost exactly the same terms to me: young women want to show that “they can take it” instead.

If feminists were not victims, then why did everyone treat them as such, and why did they so eagerly use victim status to advance their agenda? This is what is at the root of the political decline of feminism — people don’t like a self-pitying tyrant. If the left wants to preserve any support amongst people who don’t occupy any official victim class, then certain concessions must be made, and it looks like feminism is one of them.
Finally, we’re starting to see the movement that went from victory to victory over the last 40 years run into a few obstacles, and now it’s major proponents can do little more than whine that they are not being invited to the party.
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