The Counter-feminist Express will feature short (or short-ish) entries and, in accordance with internet wisdom, will be updated frequently. The material will be consistent with a Strict Anti-Feminist (SAF) political mandate:
http://counterfem2.blogspot.com/p/saf-manifesto.html
This is not a venue for the men's rights movement. We think it is futile to chase more than one rabbit at a time, and that is why we take a narrow, specialized approach. The rabbit in our sights is feminism. Just feminism.
We wish to encourage a disestablishment of the feminist worldview, followed by a general collapse of the feminist power structure across society. Clearly, this will encompass a range of operations, but in the end we wish to make feminism just another faceless competitor in the marketplace of ideas.
Feminists will learn to mind their manners, and peddle their literature door to door like Jehovah's Witnesses. If they wish to repair their public image, they must do some redemptive brown-nosing.
We have another blog called The Counter-feminist 2 (CF2) which serves as a repository for weighty articles on key topics. We encourage you to study that material if you want to be conversant with the material on the present blog. We will often link to CF2 in order to contextualize what is posted here:
http://counterfem2.blogspot.com
This post is future-dated, to pin it on top of the stack. The most recent post follows this one, after which they proceed in reverse chronological order.
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Thursday, June 1, 2017
Saturday, January 16, 2016
Revoking Feminism's Power of Self-Definition
Why should feminism have the sole privilege to tell the non-feminist world what feminism is? Don't we have eyes? Can't we SEE what feminism is?
Vote your mind in the following Twitter poll, and when you are done, retweet it and share it through every channel you can find:
https://twitter.com/fidelbogen/status/688391220075220993
As of posting time, this poll runs for another 17 hours - so get over there and vote while the getting is good.
Friday, January 15, 2016
Feminism is not a Membership List
We have all heard the feminist expression "not all feminists are like that", typically abbreviated as "NAFALT". When somebody is speaking harshly about the behavior of many feminists, this piece of wisdom is likely to issue from a feminist sympathizer in the room.
There is a problem with this: it pulls the conversation away from the topic of feminism as a whole, by reducing "feminism" to the sum of its participants. In this way, we are led to overlook feminism as a holistic thing, a thing with direction and purpose, a thing embedded in a web of relations.
The question we must entertain is not "what are feminists like?", but "what is feminism like?".
We are apt to wonder why it is even significant, that not all feminists are a certain way. What does it matter? Some feminists are a certain way, other feminists are another way, but they are all feminists, and we must assume that they all contribute, for better or worse, to feminism's aggregate effect upon the world.
It is this aggregate effect which ought to hold our interest. Feminism as a whole is greater than the sum of its parts. There is more to feminism than feminists, and when a feminist sympathizer says "not all feminists are like that", that person is passing the buck.
As NON-feminists we enjoy a very special advantage, because "non" feminism signifies nothing more than lack of feminism - just as atheism signifies lack of theism. Hence, non-feminism is not a position or "stance" that requires justification. It is simply the default state of the world: unlike feminism, it adds nothing new to the world. It does not innovate.
So, as non-feminists, we are quite entitled to say "not all non-feminists are like that" with no imputation of passing the buck, because in our case, there is simply no buck to be passed.
Feminists have good reason to envy us, in this regard.
---------
Feel free to link to this article, in order to make the point in certain conversations you might be having.
There is a problem with this: it pulls the conversation away from the topic of feminism as a whole, by reducing "feminism" to the sum of its participants. In this way, we are led to overlook feminism as a holistic thing, a thing with direction and purpose, a thing embedded in a web of relations.
The question we must entertain is not "what are feminists like?", but "what is feminism like?".
We are apt to wonder why it is even significant, that not all feminists are a certain way. What does it matter? Some feminists are a certain way, other feminists are another way, but they are all feminists, and we must assume that they all contribute, for better or worse, to feminism's aggregate effect upon the world.
It is this aggregate effect which ought to hold our interest. Feminism as a whole is greater than the sum of its parts. There is more to feminism than feminists, and when a feminist sympathizer says "not all feminists are like that", that person is passing the buck.
As NON-feminists we enjoy a very special advantage, because "non" feminism signifies nothing more than lack of feminism - just as atheism signifies lack of theism. Hence, non-feminism is not a position or "stance" that requires justification. It is simply the default state of the world: unlike feminism, it adds nothing new to the world. It does not innovate.
So, as non-feminists, we are quite entitled to say "not all non-feminists are like that" with no imputation of passing the buck, because in our case, there is simply no buck to be passed.
Feminists have good reason to envy us, in this regard.
---------
Feel free to link to this article, in order to make the point in certain conversations you might be having.
Thursday, December 31, 2015
Timely Comment at "The Skeptic Feminists"
I left a rather long comment on The Skeptic Feminists YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8rlsT0C3BQ
The material is topical, timely and important, so I am sharing it here now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8rlsT0C3BQ
The material is topical, timely and important, so I am sharing it here now.
Wednesday, December 23, 2015
Intellectual Perestroika - a radical idea
In my wilder moments I dream of sweeping the board clean. I dream of demolishing most of the concepts, categories and nomenclatures we have built up over the years. I dream of building up from scratch, to gain a more politically efficient view of the struggle, and where we stand, and what is to be done.
In short, I dream of intellectual perestroika.
Our struggle - let's just call it "the resistance" - has been a chaotic affair. Yes, it has settled into an ordered system, but that system is constrained by the legacy of our early political ignorance, from a time when we were groping in the dark without a map. Hence, we are now operating under the burden of a flawed design which is properly no design at all. It just happened.
To begin: it was a mistake to label the resistance as a so-called "men's movement". This, admittedly, is insight by hindsight. How could we have known, way back then, what we know now? We couldn't have. We had to run the experiment and see what came out the other end - there was no other way.
But the point is, that now we know better - or at least we ought to know better. For example, in the earliest days we had not yet formulated gynocentrism as a concept. But with the benefit of this concept, we know that anything bearing the motif of men's rights or male issues is a political slow starter, an overloaded truck lumbering up a steep mountain road. Repeated observation has confirmed this.
A related idea, less talked about but equally important, is the androcentric narrative voice. Another name for this would be the "male clubhouse perspective". I am forever meeting men who bemoan the male condition from a subjectively male standpoint - as members of class male.
Mind you, this is not a bad thing. There is nothing morally amiss about it. My objection is that it's politically inefficient, meaning that there is something operatively amiss about it. To be an efficient political operator in the realm of public rhetoric, one should not speak from the male clubhouse, but as a reasoning voice on planet Earth - a universal philosopher of the human condition.
Feminism is, frankly, no good for anybody - and the good news is, that a lot of people are waking up to this. These are the people you must reach, and you won't do it by sitting in the male clubhouse lamenting the male condition, or whining about "the friend zone" and similar crap. This will only land you in the feminist dung-wrestling zone - but you've got to be way more clever than that! You've got to separate the personal from the political, and you've got to stay on-message.
If you make feminism's wrongs the focal point of your public rhetoric, and galvanize the world with a knowledge of those wrongs, men's rights can easily roll right along on the highway you are building.
Men's rights and men's issues will not be lost or forgotten. Intellectual perestroika will bundle them along with everything else, but the skin which wraps around the bundle will be something altogether different.
As for MRA, MRM, PUA, MGTOW, masculinist, manosphere and all the crumbling semantic stonework of the legacy discourse: why not swing a wrecking ball through the lot of it? From the rubble, we can pick the choice bits and incorporate them into something new, then sweep the rest of it over a cliff. . . .
In short, I dream of intellectual perestroika.
Our struggle - let's just call it "the resistance" - has been a chaotic affair. Yes, it has settled into an ordered system, but that system is constrained by the legacy of our early political ignorance, from a time when we were groping in the dark without a map. Hence, we are now operating under the burden of a flawed design which is properly no design at all. It just happened.
To begin: it was a mistake to label the resistance as a so-called "men's movement". This, admittedly, is insight by hindsight. How could we have known, way back then, what we know now? We couldn't have. We had to run the experiment and see what came out the other end - there was no other way.
But the point is, that now we know better - or at least we ought to know better. For example, in the earliest days we had not yet formulated gynocentrism as a concept. But with the benefit of this concept, we know that anything bearing the motif of men's rights or male issues is a political slow starter, an overloaded truck lumbering up a steep mountain road. Repeated observation has confirmed this.
A related idea, less talked about but equally important, is the androcentric narrative voice. Another name for this would be the "male clubhouse perspective". I am forever meeting men who bemoan the male condition from a subjectively male standpoint - as members of class male.
Mind you, this is not a bad thing. There is nothing morally amiss about it. My objection is that it's politically inefficient, meaning that there is something operatively amiss about it. To be an efficient political operator in the realm of public rhetoric, one should not speak from the male clubhouse, but as a reasoning voice on planet Earth - a universal philosopher of the human condition.
Feminism is, frankly, no good for anybody - and the good news is, that a lot of people are waking up to this. These are the people you must reach, and you won't do it by sitting in the male clubhouse lamenting the male condition, or whining about "the friend zone" and similar crap. This will only land you in the feminist dung-wrestling zone - but you've got to be way more clever than that! You've got to separate the personal from the political, and you've got to stay on-message.
If you make feminism's wrongs the focal point of your public rhetoric, and galvanize the world with a knowledge of those wrongs, men's rights can easily roll right along on the highway you are building.
Men's rights and men's issues will not be lost or forgotten. Intellectual perestroika will bundle them along with everything else, but the skin which wraps around the bundle will be something altogether different.
As for MRA, MRM, PUA, MGTOW, masculinist, manosphere and all the crumbling semantic stonework of the legacy discourse: why not swing a wrecking ball through the lot of it? From the rubble, we can pick the choice bits and incorporate them into something new, then sweep the rest of it over a cliff. . . .
Tuesday, December 22, 2015
A trend: Separating "men's rights" from "anti-feminism".
The feminists are trying to pound a wedge between "men's rights" and "anti-feminism." Let's dig into this.
They are chiefly motivated by fear of anti-feminism. They know they are in trouble because so many angry voices are talking against them, and what else to call that if not "anti-feminism"? If I were them, I too would be fearful.
They are attempting a balancing act. They are finally compelled to admit that yes, men really do have problems that must be taken seriously. At the same time, they don't want people to be discussing feminism's complicity in men's problems. Consequently, their effort is to steer the talk in a less menacing direction.
They want to rebrand themselves as "good guys" by insisting that they are not against "men's rights", and further insisting that feminism has all the answers. For good measure, they will even toss in that moldy old chestnut about "patriarchy hurts men too."
In short, now that a conversation about men's problems has become unavoidable, they are willing to let that conversation happen only on condition that they control it. In other words, they want the conversation about men's problems to be a feminist conversation.
That is why they don't want anti-feminism in the picture: because they know that anti-feminist conversation cannot end well for feminism - and this is equally true of a conversation which is merely non-feminist.
Accordingly, the feminists are looking for so-called "MRAs" who will politically geld themselves by divesting of their opposition to feminism. The oft-heard sentiment that "you don't really care about men, you're just anti-feminist" aims to produce exactly that effect. If all goes as planned, the anti-feminists will isolate themselves in a separate corner where they will make an easier target. Meanwhile, the more compliant "MRAs" can be easily pulled into a feminist conversation and assimilated to the feminist project.
We too want to isolate the anti-feminist element, but we have different reasons. Whereas the feminists want to do this in order to draw the heat away from feminism, we want to do it so as to concentrate that heat as much as possible.
We have understood that beaming attention upon feminism, in a narrow way, is like directing attention toward a person who wants to remain inconspicuous while doing something illicit. Such a person wants to slip through the crowd unremarked. They want to be "invisible". The last thing they want is to attract a general gaze for any reason whatsoever. That is called "putting them on Front street."
For this reason, we aim to establish strict anti-feminism as a voice separate from "men's rights" -- because we want to put feminism on Front street. The feminists think they can isolate anti-feminism in order to direct social artillery fire against it, but they little realize how quickly this could backfire. For when they isolate anti-feminism as a target of attention, they also isolate feminism as a target of attention - and this induces people to take a closer look.
Does feminism really want that kind of scrutiny? Does it really want to be on Front street? I think not, but that is what it will get.
They are chiefly motivated by fear of anti-feminism. They know they are in trouble because so many angry voices are talking against them, and what else to call that if not "anti-feminism"? If I were them, I too would be fearful.
They are attempting a balancing act. They are finally compelled to admit that yes, men really do have problems that must be taken seriously. At the same time, they don't want people to be discussing feminism's complicity in men's problems. Consequently, their effort is to steer the talk in a less menacing direction.
They want to rebrand themselves as "good guys" by insisting that they are not against "men's rights", and further insisting that feminism has all the answers. For good measure, they will even toss in that moldy old chestnut about "patriarchy hurts men too."
In short, now that a conversation about men's problems has become unavoidable, they are willing to let that conversation happen only on condition that they control it. In other words, they want the conversation about men's problems to be a feminist conversation.
That is why they don't want anti-feminism in the picture: because they know that anti-feminist conversation cannot end well for feminism - and this is equally true of a conversation which is merely non-feminist.
Accordingly, the feminists are looking for so-called "MRAs" who will politically geld themselves by divesting of their opposition to feminism. The oft-heard sentiment that "you don't really care about men, you're just anti-feminist" aims to produce exactly that effect. If all goes as planned, the anti-feminists will isolate themselves in a separate corner where they will make an easier target. Meanwhile, the more compliant "MRAs" can be easily pulled into a feminist conversation and assimilated to the feminist project.
We too want to isolate the anti-feminist element, but we have different reasons. Whereas the feminists want to do this in order to draw the heat away from feminism, we want to do it so as to concentrate that heat as much as possible.
We have understood that beaming attention upon feminism, in a narrow way, is like directing attention toward a person who wants to remain inconspicuous while doing something illicit. Such a person wants to slip through the crowd unremarked. They want to be "invisible". The last thing they want is to attract a general gaze for any reason whatsoever. That is called "putting them on Front street."
For this reason, we aim to establish strict anti-feminism as a voice separate from "men's rights" -- because we want to put feminism on Front street. The feminists think they can isolate anti-feminism in order to direct social artillery fire against it, but they little realize how quickly this could backfire. For when they isolate anti-feminism as a target of attention, they also isolate feminism as a target of attention - and this induces people to take a closer look.
Does feminism really want that kind of scrutiny? Does it really want to be on Front street? I think not, but that is what it will get.
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