My politically incorrect university: Tale and plea of a "misogynist"

"Stereotypes: When I lived in the Bay Area in the 80s, it seemed to me that among the many people I met in either category, gay men were playful (hence "gay"), flamboyant, and adored women, while lesbians were cold (at least to men, sometimes making a show of welcoming other women), more or less blended in with the establishment (the visible forms of which in very white places were by this time overwhelmingly female), and they thought of themselves not as gay but as feminists, as if their sexuality were a consequence of their politics. Feminists did not m make the personal political, as they claimed, but the political personal, and so reducing it manageable to the terrain of relationships and feelings that most women understand. Women predominate in secretarial jobs because tasks that would seem humiliatingly subordinate to men seem to them opportunities for exercise of a nurturing intelligence. Questioning gender was being polemically opposed to normative masculinities, and the definitions of femininity in terms dictated by them. Perhaps because our society was already moving towards a normative femininity, which would simply be taken for granted in many milieux. Gay men were obvious in what they liked and identified with; gay women were inconspicuous except in what they hated and disidentified with. It was the season of the critique of men, which had more or less been written into law.

Women seemed to me the conservative sex. They fear men's desires for transgression, and precisely because they make everything personal again. Trangsressive male artists are not usually rapists, but listening to most radical feminists you would not know that. Of course, traditionally at least kinship rules involved men exchanging women between them, so women can easily think creative men don't want to change the social world, but only violate them. And so you get the left-wing feminists in a decidedly right-wing key. Intolerant extremists. At Berkeley, radical theories always underlay the extremist postures.

But most people think women are more liberal. True, they are more nurturing then men usually and so more "liberal" in the American sense of the welfare (and police) state. The more progressive you were, and the same was true of race, the more you were in favor of that. It was no wonder, since the administration in league with progressive students took for granted that the Great Sin was insulting someone by virtue of their race or gender. I think of this as the great reversal. If a woman or another man calls a man a schmuck or a prick, and he's bothered by that, he'd better be a feminine man because a real man will not be. Are you not a prick? Then why be bothered? But call a woman the equivalent insult of metaphoric reduction of personality to genitalia, and you have committed a hate crime. And, I learned, women in this position are supposed to trust their feelings, which are God. If a man and a woman argued and the man was uncomfortable, the only question would be what crime may it presumed he might commit. But if the woman feels uncomfortable, her feelings are necessarily true, and he has already committed the crime.

Remarkably, in America about as many men are raped as women. The men are mostly prisoners. And carceral feminists who want to punish men to wreak a left-wing politics in the guise of a moralism whose sole possible recourse is the system of enforceable public laws, they help sustain the system. I wonder if there is any relationship in the workings of our society between the reasons why so many women are violated and why so many men are.

Women bureaucrats would often seem to me to be pronouncing my loss, and they would always do this with a perfectly poised coldness, bespeaking indifference.

I learned that for these creatures, Relationships and Feelings are the two names or forms of God. If you trip the feeling wire, you're game in their sites; and the relationship god will likely come forth as part of the squad.

I left Berkeley for New York City as soon as I graduated and was able. I consider the above impressions of extremeness. I never believed, and still do not, that prejudices, which everyone has in the form of habitually and experientially based predispositions to see and think in certain ways, is immoral, and I still do not. I remember the Bay Area basically as seeming extremely Protestant, both in the playfulness of men who were often jerk-offs or intolerant or both and the coldness, seen in close proximity to the university, of so many women. Maybe the saving grace socially is that I encountered some interesting intellectuals and not only unpleasant functionaries. But it was my fate to find so many of them unpleasant.

New York seems to me similarly divided, mainly because I find Americans who are not immersed either in the intellectual world or the art world, pretty awful and trying to have to deal with. Then again, I was sort of a born social incompetent. Occasionally, people like me in this respect become artists or something, when we are not sadly seduced into some faux political campaign militating for our inclusion on the theory that our bad luck with so many social institutions and environments is because we are members of some oppressed caste, class, race, or what have you so that we can just complain all the way to the campaign.

Bruised for their interlocutors' iniquities, they campaigned for recognition of their complaints. It was time and world when people thought happiness the sole and necessary sign of a salvation known through those damned for lacking the grace. No discontent went unpunished, save those that went unrevenged. For how would the good guys and girls win without bad men to fight?

Of course I am long past generalizations. I meet people of every kind that I like. I always assumed that they are exceptional and that is why. I practice the mild misanthropy of the monastery, not the more virulent strains. I would give my extra copy of Lolita to be around only those "whose sole idea of indignation is [something other than] a messed-up trifle" (a quote I rip from a "feminist" filmmaker) or complaining about the identity they are so proud but that is little more than the colorful manifestation of a category box on the Census. Though I never fought in one of the great wars (literally), I think I know a cause from a vanity. Yes, I think many stereotypes are true, and of many people, maybe most in the set or class, but haven't you noticed I don't wish to enforce such notions with you? What makes you so sure I can irreperably damage your innermost soul by what I impute to you? What happened to the critical remark that understands itself in contingency? The liberal view of representations as mimetic and poisonous, which comes from Plato, assumes that all speak magically changes people into something they are stuck being, as if mind or will had no freedom. I mean, if someone calls me a jerk or a schmuck, I will be chagrined if I respect their judgment, and only then, but then I am free to change myself; otherwise, the criticism would not be one. If you don't know this, then you are destined to think that criticism is injury. I'm also prepared to criticize or ridicule, and this insult, my own social group identities such as they are. I could hardly be the "good European" Nietzsche spoke of and that I to be otherwise. If I dislike some kinds of women, it's to like others. And notice too, I don't want you denied opportunities because of how you think, though those who think as you do will do that with me, I have noticed.

And I would enshrine above my writing desk two slogans, the first ripped from a punk rock zine some friends showed me in 1982: "Would you rather be wrong, or boring?" This is not a right-wing but a left-wing statement! Fuck the identitarian retards! The punk sensibility stayed with me but that couldn't much help in a left-liberal university run like a corporation, that doesn't even have a student opposition. False radicalism incorporated. And the other statement? It is a command: 'Shut up and write!'

"Patriarchy" was mostly a straw man. Invoked today, it either is almost meaningless (as an anarchism attributed to a gender politics?) or it references somthing no one really defends anymore. It seems to me that the hidden agenda, unrecognized largely even to those who advocated it, of progressive social forces in the last 50 years was to turn American culture more decidedly and with some serious militancy away from European models. Sometimes to invented ones of "the East." The Orientalism of the New Age is an invention that corresponds to basically nothing on the other side of the Pacific Ocean from California. It has roots in American cultural history, such as with Thoreau. Its deeper root is the ambivalence that has always been the norm for Americans searching for anything to move towards or away from, in relationship to the paternal figure, or parental figure, but it was paternal, indeed, of "Europe." Act too European and New Agers will hate you, and many other Americans might too, not knowing what it is they dislike and why. This ignorance will be revealed in the strength of their antipathy and the certainty with which they seem to hold it. If they can accuse you of criminal thought, or better, feeling, or personality, they may very well do so.

There have been as many and important feminists in France and Europe as America. The difference is that they have not quit Europe in the way that their American counterparts would want them to. Most have not protested the mere fact of gender. Americans want to do plastic surgery on their souls. And it bothers them that grammar divides things and people, even if arbitrarily, into differ categories or types. "Category?" protests the American. "Don't you put predicates in my mouth! I have no categories. I am an infinitive, not subject to decline. I am infinite, divine, perfect and indeterminate. Criticize me and I will complain to your Dr. Freud that you are stealing and spitting on my soul. We are all innocent children, not deflowered but flowering! Hail the cosmic body of the absolute divine and childless mother. Freedom through parthenogenesis!"