it seems to me that what you're upset about has less to do with feminism per se as it does with a certain kind of "watchdog" activism that's really prominent on the internet. for example, i follow this blog called "racialicious," which is run (in part) by a black feminist journalist named latoya petersen. she's a pretty interesting and insightful person, but because the blog is well-trafficked and regularly updated, a lot of its content ends up being about prominent people misspeaking about race or gender or sexuality. and some of it gets redundant and irritating. for every insightful, informative entry about the u.s. prison system or islamophobia or the expectations faced by black women, there are three about insensitive lena dunham tweets or michelle bachmann speech atrocities or whatever. at their worst, the people writing about identity politics on the internet start to seem like outrage detectives, spending more time documenting unpleasant opinions and political gaffes than engaging with issues in a meaningful way.

some of that is the result of quantity over quality, i think. if you want your blog to be well-trafficked, you need to provide regularly updated content. and it's hard to be deep or brilliant on a daily basis, or a thrice daily basis, or whatever. and, as a reader, it's honestly more tempting to click on a sound-byte article than a long treatise.

i think the easy gratification of outrage produces what the woman in your (awesome!) blog link is talking about. once people identify something as superficially worthy of support, it becomes easy to assume that everyone on the left/in favor of women's rights/critical of putin/etc. thinks in unison, and that one culture's struggles are transferable to another's. which brings us to more troubling, implicit problems, because this kind of phoney solidarity is exactly the logic that makes the department of defense assume iraqi civilians will "greet us as liberators." everyone wants freedom and democracy = the church is the foreboding symbol of patriarchical tyranny, and so forth.

this easy-outrage logic also never gets around to less sexy, but equally pressing issues, like the eroding safety net or slow disappearance of job security. or the infinitely boring and diabolically complex universe of wall street villainy. but i don't think the pop feminists are necessarily the worst offenders (in fact, i think the jezebel folks have done wonders to dispel the chauvinistic assumption that "women aren't funny" or that feminists can't take a joke). i'll take your average gawker blogger any day over ed schultz or keith olbermann.

well, all right, you and I haven't talked about feminism per se -- or even defined it for purposes of our discussion -- so it's understandable for you to think that I'm not a de facto anti-feminist and that what I'm actually objecting to is watchdog-ism and general knee-jerkery. Fair enough

However, that assumption is actually th most common reaction of (American) feminists when I say I'm not a feminist. It's as if it simply doesn't compute. "Mario, you're a good guy, you're not dumb, surely you don't mean to say you don't believe in the radical notion that women are people!"

Instead of enumerating my beliefs in convenient bites, let me tell you a story, because that is th best way of practicing what I preached. My best friend is a girl. I have five best friends, but th #1 one is a girl, S., and she is th funniest one of th five. Five years ago I went on a trans-American road trip w/ her and one other girl (K., who is also one of th world's funniest people) and one of my other best friends (R., who is male and also funny, though generally not as funny as th two girls). Either none of us had ever gone to Cracker Barrel before, or @ least one of us had never gone to Cracker Barrel; one day for lunch, one of us insisted that we stop there and find out what Cracker Barrel was all about. We were all extremely hungry, and when th steaming gravy-covered biscuits came out, it was such a cathartic moment that K. reached her hand out to invite a high five from me. I had neglected to brief anyone before th trip that I do not high-five females, and, caught unprepared, I blurted,

"I don't do that."
"Don't do what?"
"High-five yr kind."

K., slightly embarrassed, w/drew her hand as I offered up some gay-ass apologies that served only to deepen everyone's embarrassment. She excused herself to th restroom, and our meal was eaten in near silence. Later in th car, S. gave me th what-for about th stupidity of it all, accusing me of willful neuroticism. I had no rational rejoinder and had to fall back on th one irreducible emotional truth of th matter: high-fiving girls "just doesn't feel right"

This character trait (character flaw to you, perhaps) has become something of a running joke to my female friends, who have made a point of high-fiving one another conspicuously in my face, or posting pictures of girls high-fiving in my comments section, or trying to catch me unawares w/ a trick high-five, etc. There was once even a Flickr group that one of them started that was devoted to female and mixed-gender high-fiving

Th truth has become apparent: th reason it doesn't "feel right" -- besides th fact that girls always do it wrong -- is that to me th high-five symbolically affirms th bond between men -- macho men who dunk basketballs, shoot deer, rate her tits on a scale of 1 to 10, and do their own car repairs. Which also explains why exchanging a high five w/ my less 'masculine' male friends also 'feels wrong'

Of course ultimately this is a trivial matter, but it ought be be enough proof to you that I don't view women and men as equal. It is proof to me, @ least, that even if I don't view women exclusively as sexual beings, that may well be how I view them first and foremost

If our conversation can remain cordial after this revelation, it will be a credit to you. However, as ever, flames aren't disallowed

--mza.

P.S. ah don't bother clicking on Gawker, Jezebel, or Olbermann anymore, and don't know who Schultz is. My counter-outrage is mainly directed @ my own FB friends & acquaintances, and indirectly th various media outlets who fuel them (which seems to be practically all popular media)

P.P.S. glad you liked that blog link. I'm curious to read more from her but am already overloaded w/ favourites

Th truth has become apparent: th reason it doesn't "feel right" -- besides th fact that girls always do it wrong -- is that to me th high-five symbolically affirms th bond between men -- macho men who dunk basketballs, shoot deer, rate her tits on a scale of 1 to 10, and do their own car repairs. Which also explains why exchanging a high five w/ my less 'masculine' male friends also 'feels wrong'

oh i get it now. you're telling me you're gay.

(wakka wakka)

seriously though, i don't see how this makes you a "de-facto anti-feminist." it seems more like you're aware that you've got a natural tendency to instinctively view women through the goggles of lust. which doesn't strike me as particularly unusual. i'm probably guilty of that as well (at least when introduced to women i find attractive - if there's anything chauvinist about your confession, it's that it implicitly aligns "women" with "attractive women," which only tells part of the story). this is kinda why i'm reluctant to refer to myself as a "male feminist" or whatever. whenever i hear a dude say "i'm a feminist too!", it always sounds like they're waiting for someone to applaud them and throw a herring into their mouth. it's like calling yourself "post-racial" - the assumption that you've overcome a prejudice is the proof that you haven't.

but all our caveman instincts are only the starting point of interacting with people, right? if all we wanted was to fuck women and run off to our bros for a game of fantasy football, we'd be a lot less needy, possessive, neurotic and emo. gender shit is messy by definition. and obviously, you've managed to still maintain friendships with the downtrodden high-five-less ladies of your inner circle... and you haven't signed up for pick-up-courses with mystery yet, so i'm not sure that "macho men who dunk basketballs, shoot deer, rate her tits on a scale of 1 to 10, and do their own car repairs" are necessarily your only homiez left. i mean, you're discussing this with ME for christ's sake.

BTW, ed schultz is the newest liberal MSNBC windbag. don't google him, he's a douche.

dan Schank, I haven't got another story ready, you'll just have to trust for now that my RL sexism has little to do w/ conflating attractive and unattractive women. They're all non-high-fiveable to me, yes, but th rules of interaction otherwise are so different that they might as well be separate species. Oddly enough, though, success w/ attractive women (by chauvinist male standards) absolutely depends on being able to trick yr own brain into seeing attractive women as unattractive or @ least plain. It makes that instinctual nervousness go away, which lets you talk and act like a normal human being instead of being that shifty, stuttering, hard-trying Michael Cera type who scores w/ hot chicks in movies only through liberal application of male fantasy. And yes, I did learn that from Mystery -- never took a course, but that Neil Strauss book was full of insights of that nature

Yes caveman stuff is only th bones, and th meat we put on them is what makes culture powerful and interesting. Every day of th human world can be visualized as billions of skeletons negotiating w/ one another as to what meat goes where. But just as bones don't allow our knees to bend both forwards and backwards (w/o serious crippling injury), so caveman stuff is negotiable only so far before something breaks and there's a push-back. Look @ China, where they love male babbies so much that they let sex-selective abortion get out of control. Now they've got 20 million lonely, backed-up Chinamen w/ nowhere to put their meat. That's a lot of misery created through purely cultural means

Don't get me wrong. There's no "invisible hand" of th sexual market that will auto-correct for cultural excesses. Humans are v. talented @ adapting to shitty circumstances via technology & general resourcefulness. China might perfect th sexbot in th near future, out of necessity; or (more likely in my mind) Japan will perfect th sexbot and export it en masse to China. And den sexbots will be th new cultural excess that threatens th stability of th sexual market. Failing all else, we're also quite talented @ being & staying miserable, and not resisting all th shit culture crams down our throats. As Adam Curtis so eloquently argued in All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (echoing Herzog's offhand comments in Burden of Dreams), in ecological systems it could be that there's no fucking equilibrium, just CHAOS followed by more CHAOS

I've made peace w/ chaos easily -- it's a strength & weakness of my breed. But we flippies are also fatal optimists, and for me this means I will always favor th kind of chaos that makes me & th people around me happiest, even if that means erring on th side of a caveman worldview

--mza.

P.S. right now my demand for macho homiez far outstrips supply. However for a self-professed non-macho-man & feminist sympathizer, you are an outstanding Internet homie. It's too bad we don't live in th same town

P.P.S. think ah just got to th part you were talking about in Battlestar where it started to shit its pants: Starbuck/Apollo boxing match, right?!

Essentialism isn't necessarily antithetic to feminism. (If you can even refer to one monolithic entity that counts as the body of feminism, entire.)

I can continue to love and respect you, no matter what views you express on this topic, and am happy to pull out all my old, dusty women's studies larnin', if this conversation grows legs.

My comment may belong somewhere else in the world of threaded comments, but mostly I want to say that you are my internet touchstone - I feel like you have been the bridge from then to now (for which I feel I owe you a debt of gratitude) - and as someone else in the friend-loneliness of a "new" place, I hope that we can all find places for our roots to grow. Community gardens, this old eljay patch, real life, whatever.