The Importance of Being Misogynist: The Evolution of the Douchebag Throughout History (Patreon)

Something a little different this month--not so much writing advice directly as musing about history and the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. I hope that's okay, many people have asked for a few more essays on non-writing topics and as you can see, I got my back up under this one. Apparently June is my month for righteous indignation and ranting. 

Come with me on a magical journey of anger and yelling at the internet!

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I’ve got a bee in my bonnet lately. True, I was born with, and host at any given time, a constantly evolving complex colony of highly motivated and loudmouthed bees continually making furious brain-honey in my alarmingly swollen bonnet, but this one has gotten beefy.

You see, this particular bee lives on the internet, and sees the number of hateful incels, MRAs, MGTOWs (if you don’t know those acronyms, please continue to live your best beautiful life and don’t google them) and plain old-fashioned sexists growing at a terrifying rate, working their fingers to the bone to legitimize themselves intellectually via “thinkers” like Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro and the dreaded Milo and any number of people who think a YouTube account makes them Socrates, and legally via, you know, our President and 2/3 of our government. Of course, any woman is pretty used to hearing this kind of drivel from old men at this point, but quite a lot of young men seem to have discovered misogyny with the glee of a new toy on Christmas morning, and just will not stop playing with it. Young men who have mothers and sisters and aunts and colleagues with careers and ambition and freedom in their own lives, yet have drifted toward an online philosophy that calls them whores and chaos dragons and “foids” and any man who doesn’t treat them like absolute trash that most elegant of all modern insults: cucks. Young men who have started just shooting and running down women who won’t sleep with them because the internet told them that was a sane and logical thing to do with the mad that’s inside you.

The thing is, they all seem to think they invented their fetid little arguments about how terrible women are, categorically and by nature. That they are oh-so-clever and edgy for calling makeup fakeup and working themselves into a lather about gender while yelling at everyone else to stop talking about gender so much. Their arguments are so new and so brilliant that they just have to create eighteen-hour web series to breathlessly explain their own genius notion that hey maybe women aren’t actually completely 100% people no maladjusted dickweed has ever thought of that before smash that like and subscribe button boyos! They think this is a new shit they’ve groaned out onto the internet instead of an ancient, dusty, turd squatted upon the tired earth since time immemorial. 

Then that bee, just yesterday, read about Mary Anning. Yet another woman who did difficult, thankless, pioneering work in the sciences while men took credit for it, made money off of it, and erased her name from history. Another Rosalind Franklin, Clara Driscoll, Caroline Herschel. And if you don’t know those names, or why there is a Tiffany lamp at the top of this post, there is a goddamned reason you don’t. It is not an accident.

The bee began to punch the bonnet.

Then, the latest episode of The Handmaid’s Tale aired, with some more (this time particularly visually arresting) torture porn that increasingly feels like it’s not quite so much about shining a light on the evils of oppressing women so much as it’s fetishizing it, and a bunch of fan discussion about the worldbuilding and how you would think that, wombs being valuable and sperm being cheap, women would be exalted and in control even though women’s fertility has always been expensive and men’s has always been cheap and that’s almost never made one bit of difference in the history of the world.

And the bee has just about fucking had it. Officially. 

The thing is, I, lowly lady-brain that I possess, have actually studied history and philosophy and sociology and psychology in places other than YouTube, and I am not impressed by these little wannabe Otto Weinegers who seem to think books have the same cooties girls do. My degree is in Classics, nerds. I have been to the douchebag font and I have drunk deep. I have read Cato the Elder cry about fakeup and Aristotle goat-yell about how women don’t have as many teeth as men and that’s why they’re teh dumbz lol in the original Klingon. I am an expert in the dusty, ancient turd of men’s opinions about women. 

Plus, me and the bee have been catching shit for being an angry feminist so long one more letter to the editor of planet earth isn’t going to earn me any more or less screeching in my inbox than I already get, so in the name of the Father, the Son, and #NotAllMen, here we fucking go.

Picture one of those Evolution of Man charts with all the different Homo species leading up to the invariably white, male paragon of Facebook Man we currently enjoy. Only this time, it’s just misogyny, and it’s gross then and gross now and it has hair all over it and Facebook Man isn’t new, he’s just the latest asshole in a long line of assholes going back to the first asshole, all of whom think they’re special for coming up with the idea that it’s just way more fun to keep half the species as sex slaves than treat them like equals.

Yes, it’s true. Eggs are expensive and sperm is cheap. In terms of the effort put into reproduction, there’s no contest between men and women. Not only do we get the menstruation and the nine months and the terrifying snuff film of childbirth and the breastfeeding and all the rest, we are the population bottleneck. One man can impregnant a functionally infinite number of women if he is either good enough or bad enough to do it, while each woman can only produce one or two children per year. This is basic stuff—in an environment where resources are scarce, women are more valuable than men because you need a lot of women to make more people quickly, and relatively few men. So you might think, if you had never ever read a history book or set foot outside the house, that women would do fairly well in societies around the world. Afforded a lot of agency and freedom because remaining healthy and alive is vital to the future of the species.

And there is some evidence that while we were hunter-gatherers, this was more or less true. Gathering was a lot more efficient in terms of providing calories than the occasional successful hunt, and while no one was collecting resources in one place, day to day life was a lot more egalitarian than the guys who like to mouth-fart about how men are such brave hunters of meat and glory would like you to think. Probably. 

And then everything else happened. You know the drill: agriculture, animal husbandry, permanent dwellings, the whole Civ IV shebang. 

Unfortunately, though wombs are more valuable, women are physically weaker. Shorter, narrower, less muscle and bone density. That’s really all the main difference has ever been. And this bit isn’t even exclusive to men. This is just what humans are like, except that men could force women to follow the rules that pandered to them and women had a rough gig if they wanted to compel men to obey. She needs protection and I don’t, therefore I am better than her in the same way I am better than deer or rabbits, all of whom I can choose to protect or not at my whim, but mainly need protection from people like me, but the important thing here is who run the world? MY WHIMS.

Humans like things that bring us pleasure. Food, warmth, sex, love, alcohol, shiny things. We are, in fact, a little psychotic about those things as a species. And we are nasty little hoarders. It’s all ours, we wants it, precious, and once we have it, we don’t want anyone messing with it. Looking at and touching women brings (most) men pleasure. And they’re strong enough to mansplain the rules. 

So women (and to some extent, children) get sorted into the category of “stuff that makes me feel good” for ancient OG douchebags. Nothing else in that category is a goddamned human being, but the species is a garbage fire, what do you want? Women get hoarded and abused so that men can feel like they control a valuable resource, because controlling valuable resources means survival. But uh oh! Sex makes you feel vulnerable, so it’s super important to make sure the pleasure thing can’t hurt you. Especially by having a baby that isn’t in the category of “my stuff” and therefore good and right.

Then, because they don’t want other men, who sometimes make them feel weak or old or jealous which isn’t at all pleasurable, touching their resource that they hoarded fair and square because she couldn’t fight back without getting beaten down/killed by other dudes who all agreed to these rules what’s her problem, or her children hurt to punish her, well, when you think about it, women don’t really need to be educated or work (unless the man is poor then she has to but only where she doesn’t compete with men because lol bitch could never) or even go outside that much. In fact, if they do go out, they should probably be mostly covered up or done up in elaborate clothes so that she displays how wonderful the man who owns her is. Doesn’t really matter which, it’s the same instinct. If I saw a fuckable resource, I would try to take it, so I have to keep my fuckables under lock and key. It’s just safer if they stay out of the public sphere except as metaphors for male prowess. That way all the babies are “my stuff” and nobody can hurt them or accidentally treat them like people and thus bring the whole thing tumbling down like a house of ass-cards.

Then, well, gosh, women are just so stupid and weak and fearful when you don’t let them learn or go outside or do anything but pump out kids, aren’t they? Dumb bitches. Who would ever want to hang out with them? They’re fine to fuck but just the worst in every other way. So boring am I right? They just yap yap yap about frivolous things like housework and babies and beauty regimens because that’s who they are, not because they could literally die if they aren’t beautiful enough to continue pleasing me and sometimes my friends if I want. Not because if they weren’t beautiful enough to begin with, they would starve to death because they’re not allowed to make their own money, so their beauty is literally the only currency me and my mates permit them to trade. Naw, women are just shallow!

And they don’t even LIKE to fuck. That’s part of their nature, too. It’s definitely not that they never get to orgasm and I treat her like a sack of meat and also every time we have sex she has a really good chance of dying nine months later while having my baby (that I will whinge and bitch about tying me down) and doctors actually learning about women’s bodies is someone else touching my resources so it’s gross and wrong also no women doctors because they might get ideas about who’s in charge when they are the ones who know how to heal me. I don’t like feeling vulnerable. She can’t know my body can break. For reasons. Reasons like: she might decide to break it and she makes all my meals. 

Oh, but they’re all whores too, you know. They have to be or I might not be a good person for keeping her under effective house arrest her whole life. And if I bring her pleasure, well, then I am the pleasure-giving thing, which makes me her resource, and that makes me feel not strong or big at all. Plus, if another guy is remotely kind to her or makes her feel like life is more than drudgery in service of my whims, all the books me and my friends write say she’ll go off with him and sometimes it actually happens. Because she’s a whore. That’s the only reason. Also I patronize and help maintain an underclass of actual prostitutes and I pay them to say they like what I do and effectively appearing happy about it is all that stands between them and death so all women must like what I do because resources are a category, not a person, and are thus interchangable. 

Then, it evolves again. It becomes: they just aren’t capable of thinking or feeling or creating like men, it’s nothing to do with not allowing them to function like a human being or speak out of turn or create anything but children and making them live with the knowledge that those kids that are their only source of love and activity and purpose will be sold into identical slavery if girls and molded into identical slavemasters if boys. Women are just so child-like! It isn’t because the culture that benefits me requires her to devote her entire natural human drive and ambition to accomplish things into caring for a series of small children, many of whom die young, who are the only people she gets to talk to all day and the only ones who don’t talk constant shit to her or ignore her outright.  

Why is she so depressed all the time? GOD. Women are so emotional! Not like me and all the men I know. We’re awesome and everything we feel is actually just logic because that’s our nature, and it’s nothing to do with dividing the world and giving ourselves everything we define as good (and shoving off everything we don’t like or want to do to women until we think it might actually be kind of good after all and then they have to give it back no arguments no takebacksies) while outlawing women from touching it because they’re just so gross and shitty and boring and all they care about is lipstick. Which BY THE WAY is evil, because it makes the resource seem more valuable than it is, which is theft. What we feel is what God wants! That just feels like it’s SO TRUE, so let’s write a few more books about how it IS true, just to make sure. In a couple of hundred years, no one will want to argue with the way things have always been because I and my friends made them that way and we like it.

Then it evolves again. Because they’re basically not even human. Not like men are human. They’re so MYSTERIOUS (but not because we don’t let them talk or listen when they do talk because who wants to hear what a boring woman has to say) and ALIEN (but not because I don’t try to know anything about them except what I have already decided is true). 

And even though they are solely responsible for every facet of reproduction except the fun part, you have to remember how stupid and inhuman they are. They can’t make decisions about their bodies because those bodies aren’t theirs. They belong to men. They are resources. You don’t ask a box if it wants to hold bread inside it. She’s just a box for a man’s eventual baby, and you can’t trust a dumb box to make choices. 

Besides, what have they ever contributed to civilization? I mean, we have never allowed them to participate in civilization, but that can’t be it. It must be that they don’t want to or can’t or are essentially dumb and boring and incapable and that’s just how God made them. 

That woman over there who did contribute? Well, she’s a freak, one exception doesn’t mean anything. Or she really didn’t do anything much and it’s fine if I take the credit because I actually definitely did most of it when you really think about it, I had to have because she’s a woman so she can’t have done anything important, and anyway I have a family to support so the money is better off with me and some man will take care of her so she doesn’t need this like I do. Or she’s a lesbian and not really a woman so it doesn’t count. Or her father/brother/cousin/son really did it and just gave her a little credit to make her feel good. Or what she did doesn’t take any real skill and isn’t that good or integral to the project as a whole. Or it’s in a field I have decided is dumb and useless and will continue to consider so right up until it starts being lucrative, at which point it’s men’s work and she needs to GTFO lol make me a sandwich. Or loads of men did more important stuff so it doesn’t matter. Or she didn’t have kids so she went against her true nature when she contributed because it was just a thwarted mothering instinct and again it’s fine if I take her work since she shouldn’t have been doing it in the first place, or she’s lying, or she’s a witch, and will be stoned to death in short order.

Women are nothing. Men are everything. Resources don’t have an inner life. Sex slaves aren’t people.

And so this is the big problem. You have these societies where men hate women categorically and do not consider them people, but most men are straight, deeply attracted to women’s bodies and driven to have sex with them as much as possible, and also need a woman to have a family (which shows their potency and command of resources to other men with whom they compete for status) so unlike a racist or upper class elitist, they can’t just wall themselves off from the kind of person they hate. They HAVE to deal with them. They have to live with them. They definitely don’t want to raise children or keep a home because that’s boring work so they are forced to live every day and procreate with someone they have decided is an inhuman monster by birth, and show her at least enough consideration that she doesn’t poison his dinner. It’s just an intolerable situation when you consider that women are so far beneath men by their nature and not for any other reason. You simply can’t get away from them. 

Take my wife. Please.

And then not even very long ago these dumb cockroach women have the gall to stand up and demand to vote and work and do things men can do, sometimes better, when every religious text written by me and my ancestors, most classical literature and philosophy written by men who benefit from it, and a whole lot of movies and culture say they can’t by nature and category. Of course, it’s not that I wrote a whole book full of rape and horros visited upon women because I wanted to and I liked doing it, it’s just realistic. Of course, I didn’t write an entire book without significant women characters because I don’t care about them, it’s just that in my mind women never contributed to manly things like war and it never occurred to me that I might be wrong. And now I have to fucking watch Captain Marvel in the theaters the world is OVER. Everything was FINE, and I know it was fine because other men told me it was fine, and then these inhuman monsters started complaining all the time about being sex slaves and that really hurt my feelings because the Bible told me they liked it and the Bible was written by people who look like me so there’s no reason it wouldn’t be true because I’m not a bad person therefore people like me aren’t bad people. 

And thus you have both the ancient and modern misogynist. All because of a difference in muscle tone, bone density, and height a few thousand years ago.

But now we get the shrieking incel/manosphere problem. Because it is hard for the generation who can still see the old ENORMOUSLY WEIGHTED TOWARD MEN deal in action. Grandpa got to have a sex slave and I can’t! Grandma seems fine. She’s never complained to ME. IT’S NOT FAIR. And not only did Grandpa get to have a sex slave, but he got to have a sex slave that everyone approved of and thought was wholesome and wonderful and holy and not at all weird or unsavory or exploitative. His sex slave accepted her life! She liked it! She always smiles at me and tells me I’m handsome. What’s wrong with all these modern bitches that they don’t like it and they don’t smile at me or tell me I’m handsome? They’re probably just lying or stupid and they really would like it if they would just do what I tell them. In fact, if they don’t become a happy sex slave, they’ll probably go crazy. That feels right to me. 

God, why are women so SHRILL? Why are they so ANGRY all the time? They’re just so irrational. I’m not like that. What do you mean the lead in the new Star Wars movie is a girl?

Plus, it’s not even sex slavery, that’s such a horrible thing to call the Way Life Should Be, it’s definitely not accurate because women until just about goddamned yesterday and not even that in some places were literally bought and sold, consent optional but not required, between men for unpaid labor in exchange for food and board, affection optional, their daughters given no choice but to be bought and sold likewise, allowed only to work 24/7 in my home, bear my children, some menial tasks for pay if I allow it, unable to own property, divorce me, or live on her own unless I, again definitely not her owner, DIE. And she better look happy doing it, or I can commit her to an ASYLUM and everyone will still think I’m a good person forever. (And by the way, just because they work now doesn’t mean they shouldn’t still do all that other stuff, too. I worked hard today, I deserve a clean house and a warm meal and a happy spouse and not to have to deal with screaming kids.) Not calling it sex slavery is actually crucial to the whole system.

Anyway if she doesn’t want to serve me my whole life in exchange for me working eight hours a day at a job I would also do otherwise, she’s a chaos dragon. 

And look, it’s a good deal. For men. Not that they haven’t bitched about how terrible it is to have to get married and father children they barely care for for millennia. Because no matter how good you have it in the marriage deal, you still have to live with a woman, who every ounce of culture has told you is an alien in your living room. Not that half of comedy isn’t still about how dumb and awful women are. So along comes Trump and he grabs them by the pussy and acts like not even Grandpa but great-great grandpa, and people love him for it and say it’s great and so much better than that modern couple who was in the White House before (ha ha no racism if you say no racism it’s not racist) and you see a window back to the world where you could have your own sex slave and she wouldn’t be allowed to complain about it on Twitter and you could just ease back in time like sinking into warm water. Into a universe of: who run the world? MY WHIMS.

It’s just so hard to shift into getting women to be with you because you’re a good and interesting person rather than because you made an agreement with her father or because there was no other option for her. And yeah, a lot of marriages weren’t like that, even when things were very bad for women, but the Greater Internet Douchebag doesn’t care about that. They hear the phrase “enforced monogamy” and they cheer. They want the old deal and they want it now. And a whole lot of old men are whispering to them that they can have it if only they just give in to full fucking fascism and hey, you know, full fucking fascism feels pretty good as long as you’re the one holding the gun so why not? It’s better than being alone. It’s better than feeling lost. It’s better than not knowing your place in the world. 

And so it goes, for nearly the whole history of man. The hoarding of pleasure. The hoarding of fun. The hoarding of pride. The hoarding of power. Nobody wants to share because down deep we are still those ancient hominids who are afraid that sharing today means starving tomorrow, and it ain’t always food you’re starving for.

And then there’s Mary Anning. Walking along the cliffs of Lyme Regis pulling dinosaur skeletons out of the rock while men sit in their studies sipping brandy and giving Latin names to her discoveries and being very proud of themselves indeed because that’s much more important real science than mucking about in the mud collecting fossilized shit and seashells. And all that’s left in the common consciousness of this woman is a children’s rhyme: she sells seashells by the seashore. A tongue twister every one of these lost internet boys knows while they pronounce to their chosen forums that women have never contributed to science or art or civilization. 

Yet somehow, they think their little tirades are new, and not what every man who had a twinge of guilt about the system that allowed him to be born the master of half of humanity and told him that was right and proper has said and done to justify that position and keep it without having to feel bad at what it costs another human being. 

This is why that particular breed of internet warrior gets so upset at having to see women in books and films and TV as anything other than love interests/resources. Because that spoils it all. Their grandma doesn’t have a STORY (because they never showed any interest in her life) she has a HOUSEHOLD and that’s how it should be. Science fiction and fantasy is about how the world will be or how it was or how it might be, and women, POC, LGBTQ being anywhere near the center of it is an existential threat because it shows another possibility than the one where straight, white, middle class and up men get the greatest hand ever dealt a group of human beings and never have to listen to anyone so much as question it. If enough books show those worlds well enough and they start to get popular? Welp, better freak the fuck out and try to destroy an award so they can’t have it. Because the only way a system as exploitative of so many people can exist is if no one can see another option. No one can even imagine it with wizards in. 

In the end, to men like this, those other people are aliens. They’re to be defeated at the end. To be stabbed by their boyfriends in an empty throneroom because they couldn’t handle their emotions. 

This has been very long and to be honest, it’s not even close to everything I’ve been thinking about lately. And YEAH I KNOW NOT ALL MEN. If you’re reading this it is VANISHINGLY UNLIKELY I am talking about you. I’m talking about a whole group of people trying to plug back into a collective worldview that is missing a wheel: the bad old aliens aren’t going along with it anymore. It’s baffling to them, because appearing happy with the arrangement whether you were or not was part of the deal but they never understood that. To them, those old photographs look wonderful, so it must have been wonderful, and anyone who doubts that is lying.

I fear for where all of this is headed. It’s getting worse and worse. I fear for a world that once again seems to want to tell me I am not fully human, and they’re making the laws to do it. I fear for the portion of the population cheering it on because they want to belong, they want a world with a plan, they want to be at the center of something and it’s all too big and weird and hard now for anyone to be at the center. My job is to write stories about worlds possible and impossible, and it is fundamentally easier to write about a world with griffins or starships than a world without gender inequality. 

Where are we going, when so many of us don’t want to ride together? Because no matter how much these kinds of fossilized shitshells by the seashore want to, they can’t put us back in the trunk. Or maybe that’s just something I hope is true.

What do I know? I’m just a chaos dragon.

Raaar.