Check Your Monosexual Privilege!

Posted on | April 2, 2016 | 51 Comments

Birds of weird feathers flock together, and when Melissa Fabello decided to engage in a Twitter colloquy with me (of course I mean, not me), she accidentally introduced me to her friend, Australian freelance writer Catherine Bouris, who has degrees from the University of Sydney and UCLA. Tempted as I am to snark about this ridiculous level of overcredentialization — you don’t need a master’s degree to be a freelance writer — that would be an irrelevant digression. Ms. Bouris made a remark about Ms. Fabello’s boyfriend, who is a secularized Muslim SJW (not a Hitachi Magic Wand), but that is also irrelevant.

My point is that Melissa Fabello’s relentless promotion of LGBTQIA sexuality at Everyday Feminism attracts to the site (surprise!) a lot of LGBTQIA feminists. What dopeheads are at a Grateful Dead concert or fat people at an all-you-can-eat buffet, weirdo women are at Everyday Feminism. (Miriam Mogilevsky’s latest: “5 Ways to Maintain Your Queer Identity in a Relationship People Read as Straight.”) There are women who claim to be both heterosexual and feminist, but good luck finding one among young devotees of Third Wave feminism, which is “inclusive” of everything except being normal. Meanwhile, in Australia . . .

 

Catherine Bouris wants the world to know she is bisexual:

It’s taken me quite a while to get to the point where I’m comfortable writing and being open about something like this. For a long time, I had tricked myself into believing I wasn’t really bisexual, because there’s so much literature out there that reinforces the notion that it’s ‘just a phase’ or ‘just hormones’ or simply ‘not real’.
It’s so exhausting existing in a world that repeatedly tells you your identity is invalid, or a phase, or a front to attract heterosexual men. . . .

(Oh, the protestations of reluctance to disclose her bisexuality! Oh, victim of a cruel world that won’t stop invalidating her identity!)

As one queer friend said, “there’s definitely a cultural thing around not being Gay Enough” that monosexual people — that is, those who are attracted to only one gender — reinforce within queer circles, to the detriment of bi- and pansexual folks. Some are convinced you’re merely going through a phase, just experimenting, and you’ll use them and abandon them once you’ve realised you’re Really Heterosexual. . . .

(“No matter how many times I tell people I’m a permanently perverted, they continue to insist I might yet turn out to be normal.”)

Some argue that because you occasionally enter into opposite-sex relationships . . .

(How often is “occasionally”? And what do you mean by “relationships”? The answers to these questions might be important. But never mind.)

. . . you benefit from ‘straight-passing privilege’, in that you aren’t in a visibly queer relationship, and therefore won’t have to deal with homophobia from wider society. While this is true, a friend of mine pointed out a downside to this, and that is that ‘passing as straight’ comes at the cost of your identity. I’m not arguing that passing under homophobes’ radar is worse than blatant homophobia, but when you know that entering into an opposite-sex relationship may damage your reputation within the LGBTI community, it can weigh heavily on you.

OK, let’s stop here to contemplate what Ms. Bouris is saying. Why should she care that her “reputation” will suffer “damage” in the “community”?

Exactly where does this “community” exist, and what authority does it wield, that Ms. Bouris worries they’re talking about her behind her back?

“Did you hear about Catherine?” she imagines one lesbian whispering to another. “She betrayed the LGBTI community! Saturday night, I saw her at the movies with a cishet male! She was even holding hands with him!”

To this bit of gossip, the other lesbian replies sadly, “They’re probably having PIV. You know how those bisexual women are.”

“Yeah,” sighs the gossipy lesbian. “They’re all like that.”

Since when did this “community” acquire the small-town pharisaical self-righteousness of the Harper Valley PTA? Would any sane person care about losing their “identity” because of “straight-passing privilege”?

By the way, how finely tuned is the “radar” of homophobia that Ms. Bouris attributes to “the wider society”? How paranoid do you have to be, to spend so much time worrying about other people’s opinions? And since we’re asking questions that no Third Wave feminist ever seems to ask, exactly what is the point of proclaiming your bisexuality to the world?

Never mind. Please continue, Ms. Bouris:

It’s the little things that add up and become too much to deal with. Other queer people describing you as ‘not completely straight’ in a dismissive tone. People of all sexualities telling you you’re either gay or straight and in denial, or insisting bisexuality simply isn’t real. Heterosexual men insinuating you’re only in a same-sex relationship for their attention. . . .
This type of rigid, binary thinking isn’t necessarily shocking when expressed by society at large, but it definitely should not have a place in the LGBTI community.

The Commissar has spoken! Down with kulaks and saboteurs! We must rid The People’s Democratic Republic of LGBTI of “rigid binary thinking”!

When I tell you Feminism Is a Totalitarian Movement to Destroy Civilization as We Know It, do you see what I’m talking about? This kind of dictatorial insistence that everyone must have Correct Opinions — which is what Catherine Bouris is really saying — is characteristic of all varieties of 21st-century identity politics, and the echo of Marxist-Leninist ideology and rhetoric in contemporary feminism is no accident.

How many times must I recommend to readers Eric Hoffer’s 1951 classic The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements? Speaking of the “successful techniques of conversion” used by such movements, Hoffer explained that “a proselytizing mass movement deliberately fosters in its adherents a frustrated state of mind.” This tactic of inciting resentment and frustration has a magnetic appeal to certain types of personalities, whom Hoffer describes in Part 2 of The True Believer, particularly in chapters VI (“Misfits”) through XI (“The Sinners”). Once you understand this, everything we see in contemporary feminism becomes familiar. The feminist — by which I mean a woman for whom allegiance to the movement defines her worldview — is different from other women in ways that are non-random. There is a definite pattern discernible in the movement’s core membership. Feminists lament negative “stereotypes” about their movement, but exactly who is to blame?

“Women are a degraded and terrorized people. Women are degraded and terrorized by men. … Women’s bodies are possessed by men. … Women are an enslaved population. … Women are an occupied people.”
— Andrea Dworkin, 1977 speech at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, in Letters from a War Zone (1993)

“Women’s heterosexual orientation perpetuates their social, economic, emotional, and sexual dependence on and accessibility by men. Heterosexuality is thus a system of male ownership of women . . .”
— Cheshire Calhoun, “Separating Lesbian Theory From Feminist Theory” (1994) in Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives, edited by Carole R. McCann and Seung-Kyung Kim, 2002)

“Heterosexism is maintained by the illusion that heterosexuality is the norm.”
— Susan M. Shaw and Janet Lee, Women’s Voices, Feminist Visions (fifth edition, 2012)

“All women are prisoners and hostages to men’s world. Men’s world is like a vast prison or concentration camp for women. This isn’t a metaphor, it’s reality. Each man is a threat. We can’t escape men.”
— Radical Wind, August 2013

“So radical feminism saw heterosexuality under patriarchy as massively problematic, because it benefited men and it disadvantaged women. . . . I hope heterosexuality doesn’t survive, actually. . . . And I am sick of hearing from individual women that their men are all right. Those men have been shored up by the advantages of patriarchy. . . . I would love to see a women’s liberation that results in women turning away from men.”
— Julie Bindel, 2015

What part of the phrase “anti-male hate propaganda” does anyone need me to explain here? Yet no matter how many examples of such hateful rhetoric I cite, no matter how famous or obscure the source, no matter whether the quote is from the 1970s or the 1990s or this week, from a blogger or from a Women’s Studies textbook assigned in university classrooms across the country, feminists will continue to blame their enemies for the negative “stereotype” of feminists as man-haters.

Do you see how the feminist movement “deliberately fosters in its adherents a frustrated state of mind,” as Hoffer said?

If a woman declares herself a feminist, she must certainly feel frustrated to realize how far the “wider society” is from the movement’s ideal of “equality.” She will feel frustrated that most of her friends and family “just don’t get it.” She will feel frustrated by “stereotypes” of what a feminist is. Her feelings of frustration, however, serve only to increase her commitment to The Cause. She must fight harder! Once the movement has triumphed over “rigid, binary thinking,” she tells herself, her courageous fight for equality will be recognized and rewarded.

Men are the feminist movement’s enemy — “the agents of our oppression” — and thus anti-male rhetoric becomes a virtue-signaling gesture among feminists. It is considered a marker of “courage” among feminists to express their thorough contempt of men. Behold how Melissa Fabello delights in insulting men as intellectually inferior:

 

You are a “troll” if you disagree with Melissa Fabello. You are an uneducated idiot, incapable of logic, ignorant, hard to talk to because you’re always wrong, your opinions are not needed, and you lack the mental acuity to debate her. But don’t you dare say she hates men.

The purpose of this rhetorical tactic is transparent:

Being constantly insulted by feminists — “Heterosexuality Is the Structure That Keeps Sexist Oppression in Place” — is something men are expected never to notice. Any man who objects to feminism’s anti-male hate propaganda will be instantly branded a misogynist. This is “Kafkatrapping,” whereby the denial of guilt is cited as proof of guilt.
No feminist ever wants to hear a word any man has to say, because men are always wrong about everything, and the only “right” a man now has is his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent.

Feminism confers on its adherents an unlimited entitlement to monopolize the conversation, to exclude from consideration any possibility of error, and especially to prohibit any male from contradicting them. Disagreement is proof that you are a sexist, and therefore one marvels at the existence of that misbegotten latter-day chimera, The Male Feminist, the Bicycle a Fish Doesn’t Need.

Any serious student of feminism understands that the only two things a man can do to please a feminist is (a) shut up and (b) go away. Nevertheless, some men want to be “allies” of the feminist movement. Here we have testimony from the bisexual feminist Catherine Bouris:

I’m close to entering the workforce, and I’m dreading it, but not because I’m scared of adulthood and responsibilities (although I’ll admit that is part of it). I’m scared of having to deal with boys’ clubs. If you’ve ever even remotely been involved in any sort of activism, either on or offline, you will have encountered the brogressives who grow up to establish these workplace gangs.
What is a ‘brogressive’, exactly? It’s the guy with ‘feminist’ in his Twitter bio. It’s the guy who clicks ‘like’ every single selfie he sees and pretends he’s supportive and not just extremely thirsty. It’s the guy who thinks feminists are too hard on Julian Assange. It’s the guy who uses misogynistic slurs like ‘bitch’ or ‘whore’ to describe things or people he dislikes, only to get offended when you ask that he not. It’s the guy who talks over women in every single conversation, sharing ‘insights’ that he believes the world cannot go without hearing.
It’s the kind of guy who will bide his time, gaining your trust, only to send you an unsolicited d–k pic and ask for your nudes in return in ‘celebration of the human body’. It’s the kind of guy who resents the ‘brogressive’ label, because he is not a bro, thank you very much, he is a Nice Guy Who Respects Women.
In activist circles, brogressives dominate discussions, insert themselves into autonomous spaces and demand recognition. Their mere presence in these spaces means people are less likely to listen to anyone besides them, because society tells us every single day that white cisgender men are to be respected above all others. Brogressives know this. They rely on this.

Beware of any man who puts “feminist” in his Twitter bio. Better yet, beware of any man who, the minute a woman says she’s a feminist, doesn’t have the good sense and common decency to shut up and go away.

In June 2011, the Right Online conference and the left-wing Netroots Nation were both in Minneapolis, and there was some kind of “confrontation” involving Andrew Breitbart. Arriving belatedly at the scene of the “incident,” I was talking to Dave Weigel and some other blogger types about what happened when I looked up and noticed, about 150 feet away, a familiar-looking woman walking toward us.

“Is that who I think it is?” I said to Dave.

“Amanda Marcotte? Yeah.”

“See you later,” I said, and exited in the opposite direction.

The proximity of evil is something I try to avoid.

“Ye shall be as gods” (Genesis 3:5) was the false promise of Satan’s original lie … https://t.co/C7xNUR51oc #tcot pic.twitter.com/Rr6tQeqdUG

— FreeStacy (@Not_RSMcCain) April 1, 2016

 

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