on fearing the feminine

on outrage content, victorian genders, and the masculine modus operandi

I’m working on half a dozen different pieces right now but none of them are good yet, so let’s have a little junk-food interlude where I try to complain about some garbage I saw online this month without doing mean dunks on the people who made it. In honor of the death of 4Chan, let’s talk about outrage content, why people do it and what it means for ~gender and feminism.~

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OUTRAGE FACTORY

I have been trying to write something about what I’ve started calling Feminist Outrage Content, sort of the other side of the coin to the “crazy feminist gets destroyed!!!!” commentary slop that’s clogged up social media for the last decade or so. And it’s just— it’s so complicated and so difficult to explain what I think is happening there, especially without being a dick about it. I feel like my brain is melting out my ears. Let me try and condense it into something coherent.

Social media rewards outrage, with both status and literal money, to the point that I think a lot of people have come to subconsciously correlate outrage with truth. Feminism has a historical reputation for being outrageous— we love Dworkin not just because she makes men mad and it’s fun to be bad, but because she did it by dishing harsh truths— which makes it perfect fuel for people whose job as a Professional Harsh Truth-Teller is to go on the internet, post some dubiously-sarcastic hot take, and then watch their metrics explode as people bicker about it in the comments. It fits neatly into the internet’s circle of life.

The result is a strange ideological phenomenon that I guess I would call “radical liberal” feminism, where radical feminist sentiments about reproductive justice and violence-against-women are regurgitated entirely without bones, all in service of boosting some professional-class individual’s ability to Compete In The Market. “Radical” comes to mean “offensive” rather than implying a practiced dedication to drastically changing the systems which govern our lives or the way we relate to each other.

At the same time, we have collapsed the distance between “content” and the people who make it; the medium, the message, the ad for it, and the creator are now all one thing we call “a brand.” The Outrage Factory is perfectly happy to employ people like me— people with marginalized identities who can easily frame criticism of their ideas as criticism of their identity, or as a targeted attempt to damage their livelihood/reputation.

just because bugs bunny shit doesn’t work doesn’t stop us from trying!

I find all of this pretty distressing to navigate, and trying to even explain what I think has gone wrong is downright crazymaking. I would like to give actual examples of the #content I’m talking about, but that would just feed attention to people whose paycheck grows with every view, and it would lay blame for a fucked-up system onto individuals who really aren’t at fault. They didn’t build the Outrage Factory, and even if they quit tomorrow, the factory would remain.

All this in mind, I can’t really tell the difference anymore between women on the internet selling “male tears” mugs and Steven Crowder selling “god hates figs” t-shirts, and I am pretty tired of hearing that this can be dismissed as “venting” or “girls being mean online.” The problem with Steven Crowder isn’t that his jokes are trashy and mean-spirited, it’s that he really does hate women and gay people and really doesn’t want to face any consequences when he treats them like shit.

Worse, I think this sort of thing— the cynical deployment of progressive sentiments as little more than marketing buzzwords, slapped onto media-products that are ideologically empty and often smugly insulting— is no small part of what America’s growing cohort of reactionary misogynists are, uh, reacting about.¹ When online rage-bait is the bulk of “feminist theory” an average guy is exposed to, I really can’t blame him for thinking that all feminism is for is to degrade and insult him. So let’s do something differently.

The best solution would be to completely restructure or dismantle the systems that monetize outrage (y’know, all of social media), but let’s be real— that’s not happening, it’s probably too late, and there’s nothing I can do to change that. What I can do is talk about the ideological content of this, uh, content, and try to offer some kind of alternative.

FEAR OF THE FEMININE

Feminist Outrage Content seems to have a common thesis: women’s problems with men are caused by men’s fear and hatred of women and femininity. They are playing an ideological game of Six Degrees Of Separation, where just about any problem a woman or queer person could have (especially problems in dating, the most evergreen topic for any kiki) is traced back to men’s disgust, insecurity, and overall poor character.

To be clear, when I say “content,” I am definitely talking about TikTok and YouTube videos, but also Substack essays and actual published books. I can’t stomach the writing of Talia Bhatt or Jude Doyle or even Whipping Girl, where Julia Serano repeatedly advocates that hatred of femininity is the primary source of trans women’s social and psychological problems, and that “empowering the feminine” is the bedrock of trans liberation. This book is such an important pillar of the modern Trans Canon that this thesis— that society hates women and femininity— seems nearly universal among trans people I meet, and most of our armchair theorizing and rationalizing of our day-to-day complaints follows from it. As much as I like Julia Serano as a writer and a thinker, I haven’t been able to make myself read it beyond excerpts because, I mean— that’s just not true.

“Femininity” is not a stable or singular concept.² Our American cultural idea of the “ideal woman” has expanded into so many possibilities that just about anything a woman does (including being “unfeminine”) can be a point of pride. A Texan mama bear, a butch trucker-bitch, a high-powered New York finance girlboss, an influencer girlie and a feminist killjoy can all be considered a kind of “empowered womanhood” depending on where you are in America and who you hang out with. The exact same features and behavior can even be conceptualized as masculine or feminine in different contexts— personally, cis men tend to see me as mincingly effete, while other trans people tend to see me as intimidatingly masc. So I don’t think we can have a serious conversation about gender or its trappings if we try to pluck it from the context which gives it shape.³

Gendered connotations certainly affect the way that we judge peoples’ behavior as good or bad, but I think right now this has put men into a horrible catch-22. Usually when people say that men “hate and fear the feminine,” what they actually mean is that men are disturbed by their own emotions and have a pathological need to never show weakness. Personally, I am a pretty ~sensitive & emotional~ guy (as in, I have a diagnosed personality disorder and a family history of bipolar) and the ideologies of both chads and girlbosses tend to frame this as a failure of either my character or my nature. I am at all times either a feminine hysteric who is failing to perform masculine stoicism and self-control, or I am an entitled man burdening women with my needs like some kind of baby. Maybe it’s because of my uterus, or maybe it’s my identity or my socialization, maybe it’s Maybelline, etc. My “emotional” male self remains a liability in every case, even among people who drink Respect Women juice with breakfast every morning.

me & my sexism merch

We have reversed the cause-and-effect of men’s psychology, here. I am not resistant to expressing my emotions because I’m simply immature and fretful about what other people will think of me; I know how people treat me and think of me when I show weakness, and that shit makes me super insecure. I’m well aware that when I openly express the level of despair and confusion and frustration and fear that I feel most days, people I like stop hanging out with me. I am not ideologically invested in some bullshit about how feelings are feminine and femininity is weak or whatever. I’m just trying to be pragmatic, do what I have to do to avoid pissing off everyone I meet, even if it means contorting my personality and behavior so far away from what feels natural that I never really relax. The self that I have was not built to thrive in this ecosystem, and that’s sort of just too bad for me. Maybe, to some degree, repression is just what Being A Person requires.

This is just one example of the ways that I think we have set men up to fail by demanding that they change their behavior, but without changing the circumstances that make their behavior predictable, let alone making change desirable or worth the effort to attempt. If everything wrong with a person can be sourced back to their poor character— whether we’re talking about awkward dates or hostile gamers or domestic abusers or addicts or criminals or etc— then we don’t have to think about what else might need to change before their change is even realistically possible. So we doggedly fail to understand what actually motivates our ideological enemies (or how we might offer them an out from whatever problem they are trying to solve) in favor of feeling like we are simply better than them.

BREAKING THE BINARY

So it’s systems of power, not sentiments, that are really mucking things up. I don’t think our culture is one that “fears and hates” women or femininity. I would say the opposite— men clearly love women and are desperate to be loved by them, to the point that we will eagerly destroy ourselves to prove that we are worthy.

I’m not just talking about sex or romance, either. I’m gay, and I have less-than-zero interest in dating or fucking women— but I have known a lot of women who are extremely smart, interesting, charming, etc. I like having them around, and I want very badly for them to like me enough to stick around. Women’s approval carries a weight of moral authority— I couldn’t care less what most men think of me, but if any woman on earth calls me a scumbag, I’m going to worry that she’s right. When it comes to judging whether I am a good man or a shitty one, women are the ones whose opinions matter.

I don’t think this is unique to the vaguely leftist/feminist culture that I run in, though. Women— certain kinds of women, anyway— have been treated as superior moral authorities and important arbiters of our social values for well over a century. In the Victorian era, society thought of each woman as belonging to one of two categories: “ladies” and “fallen women.” Women’s “bad behavior” (mostly being disobedient, horny, brown, and/or poor) was seen as an expression of a feminine nature, but not the only feminine nature. They considered particular women— those who were willing to obey and support local cultural values— to be paragons of a unique feminine virtue, even during a time when women’s legal right to own property or live independently was nearly nonexistant.

“Ladies” were generally middle-to-upper-class women trained in the manners of polite society, and women who successfully met this ideal of purity, piety, obedience, and domesticity⁴ were afforded some modicum of power over the domestic domain (which could include overseeing a lavish home staffed by half a dozen or more servants— or, in America, a plantation staffed by slaves). I think we could describe a similar situation for men, too— a dichotomy of “citizens” vs “deviants,” where men’s “bad behavior” (addiction, instability, lecherousness, debt) were an expression of an inferior kind of male nature.⁵

Personally, I don’t think it makes sense to call this a gender binary, where “male” and “female” represent a single, consistent paradigm where one is good while the other is bad. There is certainly some correlation between cultural esteem and social status or legal empowerment, but it plays out in practice is complicated, and in many ways contradictory.

We could go further back to the Puritan settlers, even, and see how notions about the ideal woman changed in response to changes in location and religious upheaval. In the late 300s CE, around the time the books of the Bible were canonized, the Roman Empire granted church leaders judicial authority (on top of their existing religious authority) in order to help maintain social order as the Empire began to decline. Early settlers of America had rejected the authority of the Catholic church and moved an ocean away from its moving cathedrals and punishing councils, so their social order had to come from somewhere else.

The Protestant Reformation had already explicitly rejected veneration of the Virgin Mary, and shifted away from the idea of sacred virtue to behavioral virtue— you are a good person not by being holy, but by behaving yourself according to the Bible. Rather than expressing the feminine virtue of piety by becoming a nun in an ancient convent, each home was a church and each mother was its preacher. The small communities and difficult conditions of frontier living made reputation and cohesion extremely important for survival, and made women’s support of male leadership essential— if a woman thought her husband was intensely abusive or a public drunkard, she could testify in a Puritan court, and he could be censured or excommunicated. Order within the home was viewed as the backbone of social order outside of it, and even non-religious American conservatives still believe this today.

Forgive me for clumsily summarizing several hundreds of years of history, and for trying to situate gender in the context of fucking Catholicism, but it seems relevant to me because the evangelical church I was raised in was by far the most explicitly patriarchal culture I have ever seen, but I don’t think I would call it misogynist.⁶ The women in the church were important to the community for their work in support of it, whether through the labor of cooking and organizing events or through personal intercessory prayers on behalf of peoples’ problems. The church not only promoted an admirable feminine ideal, but tried to create the circumstances in which it would be genuinely rewarding to achieve.

So the story of American patriarchy is not so much a story of women’s categorical degradation and total powerlessness, but a complicated process of maintaining power through invocations of genuine and pragmatic values. Part of what made bombastic “society hates women” retoric so powerful in the last century is that, well, it’s pretty fucking hard to explain to those who have lived in this system and made it work for them that the patriarchal trade-off— women must submit to their husbands and, in exchange, men must provide for their wives’ needs— actually fucking sucks shit. But it’s also hard to convince a man who feels great pride and purpose in trying to steward his power resonsibly that he doesn’t really respect women, and this rhetoric has been repeated so often for so long that it just bounces off them more often than not.

The throughline in all of this isn’t hatred, it’s power. Culture will readily move the goalposts kind of wherever it has to in order to justify and enforce the notion that the people with power and authority should keep it, and the people without it don’t deserve it. Our cultural ideas of what it means to be “masculine” or “feminine” are inconsistent and contradictory because they are oriented around maintaining this core idea by any means necessary— which includes offering flattery and esteem in place of agency over our own lives.

PATRIARCHAL IDEOLOGY

Another throughline I’ve noticed with a lot of Feminist Outrage Content is comparing men to children. Men are immature and entitled in the same way that toddlers are, and they throw tantrums to match, except they’re big now, so this makes them dangerous, etc. This sticks out to me because “women are just large children” was part of what justified male authority in the Victorian era— a “true woman” literally treated her husband like he was her daddy, encouraged to demonstrate an explicitly childlike deference and obedience.

There is not much conceptual distance between being immature and being uncivilized, and distrust towards authority is perhaps the fastest way to find yourself labeled “childish” (rather than seeing this distrust as part of our civic duty, as is proposed in, say, the Declaration of Independence). It seems like most forms of power (especially once we move past things like the Divine Right of Kings) justify themselves on the assertion that the people being governed are too immature to be trusted with responsibility and agency over themselves. We see this today in politics around trans healthcare and abortion— women and trans people cannot be trusted with agency over their own bodies or the path of their own lives, and so must be saved from themselves by the law, etc.

So I wind up finding this kind of content disturbing (and not just annoying or mean) because the people who create it are basically doing as the patriarchs do with a new coat of paint. The structure of social media rewards assholes for being assholes, sure, but I don’t think producers of Feminist Outrage Content are grifters or 4Chan-style trolls, saying the most outrageous thing they can think of with zero investment in what they are actually saying. Feminist Outrage creators and fans really do think of themselves as the vanguard of radical change, and fully don’t realize they are running with a patriarchal playbook.

We are still trying to deal with ~problematic~ (uncivilized) people by trying to dominate, punish, and control them. We are still prescribed a limited number of ways-of-living, with little actual support for creating the circumstances that would allow us to choose differently.

MODUS OPERANDI

I know I said all that shit up there about how “femininity” isn’t a stable concept, but I think Jessa Crispin’s Feminist Manifesto works with a really strong definition for “masculine” and “feminine.” Under patriarchy’s rule, the systems which govern our lives have a consistent way of doing things: We reward excellence, and cultivate it through competition. We locate “the good” by proving our superiority, and proliferate the good by enforcing our dominance. We value productivity, and we deal with problems by trying to control them.

We can reasonably call this method “masculine” because it is what has resulted from centuries of men’s leadership, but at the same time, individual men and the cultural concept of masculinity are also in tension with it. The ideology of patriarchy says that “men are the stabilizing force in society, and so responsibility and resources are to be embedded within men, and denied to women under the law”— but men fail at being stabilizing patriarchs all the goddamn time, and over the last several generations, American culture has largely abandoned this vision of the ideal man being a responsible and stable steward of power.

So patriarchal control is a problem because it has both caused mass-scale suffering among women (and men, frankly), and because the ubiquity of this mode of competition and supremacy has effectively deprived the world of any alternative way-to-be. Regardless of your gender, if you straight-up just don’t want to live this way, well, that’s just too fucking bad. You don’t have a choice. It’s the scaffold of our social and economic infrastructure and most of our institutions. If you would prefer to take a “feminine” modus operandi— building systems and infrastructure as if we value cooperation, negotiation, and generosity— then you can fully go fuck yourself. It’s far too late to build something that different from scratch, and you will not be rewarded for trying.

You want social media that doesn’t bombard you with ads and turn the heart button into a popularity contest? Too bad! Cohost starved to death, and ads are the only way for most “free” sites to keep the lights on. You want to live independently but don’t want to marry a man? Good fucking luck, gurl, we’re not building beguinages anymore, and even they would have kicked you out if you wanted to have kids. You wanna be the kind of man who knows he can’t change whole systems alone, but still tries to parlay with women instead of trying to dominate and control them? That’s cute, but it looks like the girlies are just gonna step on your face on their way up the ladder, then call you a pussy for flinching.

But that’s not because they’re bad people or because of some Jordan Peterson-esque “feminine dragon of chaos” nonsense— it’s because changing systems or living differently is really fucking hard. When some asshole online says something fucked up about something you care deeply about, it’s almost impossible not to feel outraged, and it feels like betraying your values if you don’t try to shut that shit down. Choosing not to ~compete in the marketplace~ of money, status, sex, or ideas doesn’t change the system— it just makes you poor, which makes it harder to live, let alone get anything done. And every time a woman decides to try and take some high road, she feels like a little bit of a sucker for hoping that maybe this time, he’ll respond in kind.

If that is the “feminine” we fear— that we must try to get our needs met by relinquishing our control, to negotiate with others knowing that we will probably not get everything we want, to do the hard work of caring for them even when they don’t act the way we would like them to— then yeah. Sure. Everyone is fucking terrified.

BUMMER! WELL, WHAT ARE WE SUPPOSED TO DO?

Bitch, I don’t know!!!! I’m a random dude on the internet, some cringe tryhard carefag!!!! My politics mostly drill down to The Golden Rule, Democracy Is Good, and “figure out what people need and then give it to them; everything else is logistics.” I research my shit with google like any other red-blooded, industrious prole. I’m more-or-less a ““““content creator”””” (ugh) because I flunked out of doing anything else, and I suck equally at ~creating content~ too, so, y’know. Indulge my takes at your own peril, hefty grain of salt, etc.

I write here to try and understand what the fuck is going on and speculate about what we might do differently, but improving the world has to be a group effort. I am not the boss of you, and I am not your daddy. I just think that people tend to do and believe things for pragmatic reasons—because it fulfills some need, because it is a path-of-least-resistance trying to fit the round peg of their personality into the square hole of the circumstances they are born into. Finding out how to provide for those needs in a different way is a more effective way to change the world than by trying to control them or hassling them to just Be Better. So just… do justice, love mercy, and walk your fucking talk.

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I wish I could have included something in there about “parental estrangement” content, but this is already long enough. I feel like one of the few areas of American society where power dynamics are seeing drastic change is between parents and adult children, in that millennials-and-younger-adults are trying to form relationships with their parents build on mutual cooperation and responsibility, and will end the relationship if the parents just refuse to reciprocate. Naturally, a lot of parents are very upset by this, and are struggling to understand the shifting paradigm: we are no longer willing to believe that, at least when it comes to children, providing the helpless with what they need to thrive entitles us to control them, or to demand repayment for what they could not provide for themselves. That probably sucks if you thought your kid would owe you something, since raising kids is such a hard job, but it’s the same ideological lineage of power as that which teaches a man that his societal reward for toiling in the workplace is a wife who will never leave him and never say no.

In the middle of writing this, I ran across a lovely post by Michelle Saya about the full moon in Libra that really spoke to the conclusion I was trying to circle around— choosing to see our contrasts as complementary, but also to notice the conditions which allow or prevent us from approaching life with a cooperative, mutual-give-and-take kind of vibe. Also, I really need someone to start writing or posting better contemporary feminist theory so that I can stop citing Jessa Crispin seventeen times in every single thing I post.

1. Kind of a bummer to look back at the pioneers of rage-bait content— nerd dudes practically foaming at the mouth about ladies in Marvel movies— and realize that maybe they had a point, y’know? And maybe if we had not spent so much time calling them a bunch of dipshit babies and unfuckable neckbeards, maybe temperatures would not have reached the boiling point they are at today. I mean, is there anyone left out there looking at things like the Snow White remake or the Blue Origin flight or whatever else the corporate world passes off as “feminist” or “pro-women” like, “yes, this is good actually”?

2. In fairness to Serano, she knows this and says so often, and you should definitely not blame her for my vague assessment of a book I haven’t read in full. I like a lot of her essays, and I have probably cited her here on TAOG more than once. My frustration is more that her writing is so foundational to contemporary trans-feminism that the nuances of her work often get lost in the wider culture’s game of telephone, which— I mean, name an influential feminist writer that this hasn’t happened to, right?

3. I’m kind of just rephrasing the concept of “intersectionality” here. Kimberlé Crenshaw taught us back in the 90s that power is highly contextual— and she even went out of her way to explain that acknowledging this fact isn’t in conflict with the radical feminist analysis of people like Catharine MacKinnon.

4. Check out “the cult of true womanhood” if you’re curious. This is the culture that gave us The Angel In The House by Coventry Patmore, a Wife Guy if ever there was one. I also think of Natalie Wynn’s video essay on heterosexuality and erotica (timestamped), where she talks about romance author Barbara Cartland describing women as “something perfect, slightly sacred,” and the weird Victorian ontology of “ladies” vs “fallen women.”

5. You start to see why so much of the feminist theory of the 1900s was bent on refuting this idea, that one’s character can be traced back to some kind of gendered, inborn essence.

6. I mentioned this before in that little unhinged misandry manifesto I wrote a month or so ago.