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Mate, Hate is Great! A Philosophical Defense of Misogyny

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misogyny

This is a guest post by John Saxon.

Well, that is what one client said to me, when we were going through strategies to take-down his ex-wife by getting a private investigator to investigate her drug activities. He suspected that his wife, whom he was separated from pending divorce, was selling ice/crystal meth for her new Muslim boyfriend. To really piss him off, she was using his car, which she still had, to transport the stuff around. After I suggested it, he paid one of his unemployed friends to stake out “his” house and track her movements. As he owned the car still and had a key, he put a GPS tracker in the car that he and his friend could monitor it from their cell phones. Eventually, we found a pattern in her movements, as she met with the exciting cultural diversity of the world in dark spots all over town to deliver the shit. It was possible after some months to get the police interested, and they managed to catch her with enough drugs to put her in prison, before the divorce and custody hearing. That really fucked up her case. This all took a lot of work, and only a man full of hate and hoping for revenge could have put up with the inconvenience of surveillance, the long painful hours of waiting and holding onto one’s piss.

It is a natural instinct to hate those that threaten you and hate itself has survival value. Even the politically correct hate too: don’t they hate racism, sexism, bigotry—in a word, us? So, what sense can be made of academic feminist claims that the Western philosophical tradition, for example, is based on “misogyny” and that a hatred of women is at the heart of the thoughts of the great philosophers? (See, for example, B. Clark [ed.], Misogyny in the Western Philosophical Tradition, [Macmillan, 1999].) The claim of misogyny is that the greatest philosophers have “denigrated the importance and status of women,” which assumes that women had importance and a status able to be denigrated in the first place, of course.

The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (B.C. 384-322) is hated by feminists for defining the essence of humanity as the capacity of reason, a capacity which he says makes women inferior to men. Plato (B.C. 428/427- 424/423), although liked by a few feminists for his supposedly egalitarian account of the sexes in The Republic, is hated by most feminists for his work Timaeus, which has a hierarchy of creation which places women closer to the animals than men are.

German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), in “On Women” (1851), and Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776), in “On Chastity and Modesty” in Treatise of Human Nature (1738-1740), both attacked the ideology of romantic reverence for women, seeing them as sensually insatiable and primarily at the mercy of their biology. We would today use the metaphor of tingling ‘ginas. Even the higher German intellect of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) had a division of masculine and feminine based on reason (man) versus nature (women). Kant, being a virgin, probably never even thought about women untangling their tingle, as he wrote before Deep Throat (1972) and internet porn.

Apart from the leading Western philosophers, Christian theologians were seething in their attacks upon women. Thus, Tertullian (C. 160-220 C.E.) identified women with Eve, and blamed her, not unreasonably, for every fuckin’ problem in the universe; that is, for original sin. Women were thus “the devil’s gateway” in a theological sense. St. Augustine (354-430 CE) and Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) both believed in the natural subordination of women, although women were spiritually equal to men. This view of women as innately inferior is thought by feminists to have fuelled witch hunts, which allegedly arose from a misogynist perspective on female sexuality, as illustrated by books such as Heinrich Kramer and James Springer’s Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches) (1486). Kramer and Springer based most of their case upon quotations from classical sources as well as the Old and New Testaments, as did later classic misogynist texts, such as John Knox, The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558), and Joseph Swetnam, The Arraigment of Lewd, Idle, Froward, and Unconstant Women or the Vanity of Them, Choose You Whether, with a Commendation of Wise, Virtuous, and Honest Women, Pleasant for Married Men, Profitable for Young Men, and Hurtful to None (1615). Thus, if misogyny is a problem, conventional Christianity must go.

Albert Einstein himself got into trouble in July 1921 (as reported in The New York Times, July 8, 1921, p. 9), when he expressed the view—controversial even for that time—that American men had already become the slaves of women:

Above all things there are women who, as a literal fact dominate the entire life in America. The men take an interest in absolutely nothing at all. They work and work, the like of which I have never seen anywhere yet. For the rest they are the toy dogs of the women, who spend the money in a most unmeasurable, illimitable way and wrap themselves in a fog of extravagance. They do everything which is the vogue and now quite by chance they have thrown themselves on the Einstein fashion.

What has changed?

Thus, in the West, both secular and Christian authorities have proposed positions contrary to feminism and women’s rights, based upon a philosophical anthropology which sees women as not only innately inferior to men, but having dangerous propensities if left uncontrolled. The same viewpoint is expressed in more modern works such as Esther Vilar’s The Manipulated Man (Abelard-Schuman, 1972), and Rev. Lawrence Shannon, The Predatory Female, (Banner Books, Reno, 1985). If we ignore the medieval witchcraft stuff and put that down as a socio-historical construction, these two works are far more critical than any of the classical philosophers, including Schopenhauer. For example, Vilar, a woman, offers us many choice misogynist quotes from her book: “Men have been trained and conditioned by women, not unlike the way Pavlov conditioned his dogs, into becoming their slaves. As compensation for their labours, men are given periodic use of a woman’s vagina.” As well: “her stupidity makes women divine,” “women have no feelings,” “the average woman may be a whore, but she’s a dishonest whore,” “[a] woman’s vagina holds the whip hand, and a man has no choice but to bow his head in submission if he wants to enjoy even a minimal sex life.” This all paints women negatively, but that does not mean that the portrayal is false. That must be decided—as they say in law—by the tribunal of fact and experience.

These sources all date from before the Internet era, probably before most readers here were born, and long before The Matrix (1999) and the red pill metaphor. As a lawyer, one evaluates claims by taking evidence as a whole. The greatest thinkers from antiquity to the modern day have seen that there is a very dark side to women, that if ignored because of socially constructed bullshit such as romantic love and a misplaced reverence for women, would lead to individual men and society coming undone. Feminists say that this constitutes misogyny and therefore is unjustified and immoral. Reason and experience counts against that. In legal terms, the burden of proof—onus probandi—is upon them. I have yet to see this burden discharged and no doubt such a feminist discharge would be frightening.

Negative assessments of a subject do not in itself logically justify one in concluding that the assessment is immoral, for the obvious reason that the assessment could be true. Truth is not a concept of use to those dwelling in the sociological sewers that feminists inhabit, along with other rodents of the cultural studies species. Yet I believe that the balance of reason should be put on the great philosophers rather than the politically correct critics, if only because if a position is widely supported over vast periods of time, by people in different cultures, then it is more likely to be true than the diarrhea served up by the modern regime.

Therefore, even if a position does constitute misogyny, insofar as it expresses a position of a strong dislike of women, or makes harsh criticisms, the position cannot be merely dismissed for that reason alone. It still could be true, and probably is. Just ask yourself: what would Aristotle think?

John Saxon is a retired lawyer, who has practiced family law and civil litigation since the early 1980’s, primarily defending men in a feminist legal system. He is divorced with seven grown-up children, three grandchildren and an insane ex-wife, described by her own mother as a “drug taking whore.” He became “red-pilled” the hard way, before the Internet and neomasculinity. His articles are based on his own experiences and that of an older generation of men, gleamed from his legal practice, from beatings on the anvil of life. In his final years, he hopes to help young men with grandfatherly red pill advice of the old school.

Read Next: Defining Misogyny Downward

The post Mate, Hate is Great! A Philosophical Defense of Misogyny appeared first on Matt Forney.


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