25th October 2024:
You don’t often find much written about the objectification of men, but for me it is one of the major forms of oppression that men face today.
The idea of men being oppressed has been largely ridiculed and demeaned by feminism, and where it is acknowledged it is generally just as a token exercise, as though to say ‘oh, women are way more oppressed than men, and it is not really worth talking about male oppression, but it does exist, and here are a couple of examples, now let’s move on as it is only a minor topic and not worth spending any time on.’
You won’t find any workshops on male oppression at any activist gatherings either, or anywhere except the odd resurgence of the Jungian inspired ‘men’s movement’ that had a brief moment in the sun in the 80s and 90s and that may still pop up here and there. In fact, to all extents and purposes, men are considered to be free of oppression and the supreme masters of the universe, with unbridled freedom. Yet that is not what you see when you come face to face with men today. What you do not see are free spirits who are able to live in joy and happiness, what you see is often, certainly among the working class, hardened and brutalised faces and people who do not at all look like they are enjoying an abundant life at the top of the social pyramid. And in the wealthier classes the same is often true, and the men you come across do not seem happy or liberated at all, but rather under the yoke of oppression and very unhappy.
So I wanted to write about this topic a little bit, as it has been on my mind recently. I have been going through my own process of liberation as I deal with a lot of male specific oppression that I have faced and am attempting to resolve it and move through it in a structured and meaningful way.
Firstly let me expand on what I mean by objectification. Objectification for me is the foundation for all oppression, as what it does is to remove, to some degree, the humanity of a person, and reduce them to an object. Their entire emotional and psychological existence is totally wiped out in the service of this goal. Once they have been reduced to the status of an object, they can be abused, as they are only an object, and not actually a human being. People do not generally abuse human beings, but they do abuse people who they perceive as less than human, or beneath them, and who have been ‘objectified’ in some way.
Men’s emotional lives are completely ignored, and this is perhaps the most fundamental form of oppression men face. Ignoring the emotional life of a person reduces them to the status of a machine object, and that is very useful for a society that wants workers who will work mechanically in a factory or office to produce goods and services. Our inner life, our emotional life, is the source of our happiness, our sense of wellbeing, our sense of self respect, of pride, of joy, and when it is destroyed like this the outcome is men who are deeply unhappy, unstable, aggressive, domineering, predatory – all of the things feminism describes as ‘patriarchal’.
The role of women in this process is pivotal. The mother is the main source of a boy’s emotional life, and as he grows up so the women in his life similarly play this pivotal role. It is not that other men do not also form an important element of a man’s emotional life, it is just that women are the dominant factor in this sphere of life, just as men are the dominant factor in the workplace. Men have been and always will be the main producers of society, and women have and always will be the emotional mainstay of society. That is not just a ‘traditionalist’ view of society, but rather a recognition of the biological role men and women play in human society, of fundamental biological differences.
Women today degrade the emotional lives of men. They mock and ridicule, shoot them down, manipulate them, and make out that men who cry or are emotional are ‘less of a man’. Given the important role women play in the emotional life of men, this form of oppression is devastating, as it snuffs out emotional development and leaves men in a stunted state of development all their lives. Women also demand that men provide them with physical goods. I mean, feminism traditionally blames men for dominating the workplace and excluding women, but let’s look at it another way: that men have for centuries provided women with a home and all the goods and services they need for free. In short, women have enslaved men and objectified them through emotional abuse, keeping them controlled though moral and emotional complexes, in order to provide themselves with the physical goods and lifestyle that they want (though this has an unpleasant side effect – patriarchy). With men’s emotional lives stunted they are ruled over by their inner emotional complexes that their mothers and other adult women have instilled in them. Be the ‘man’, go out and work and don’t be a lay-about, be a ‘good’ boy, real men don’t cry, and so on. A man’s sense of self is reliant upon the emotional approval of women until such time as he is able to emotionally mature, and in this way men are controlled all their lives by these hidden inner forces.
The way to overcome this form of oppression is through emotional work and development, but of course men are largely blocked from doing this by the very emotional complexes they have been dominated by all their lives, and which came from their mothers and other adult women, and which tell them that ‘emotion’s are for sissies’, or that real men don’t need emotions, real men are hard and emotionless, and so on. This is what I what I refer to as a ‘binding’, because it keeps men bound and controlled within fixed parameters and unable to grow or express themselves, a bit like being in a prison cell. Another example of a binding might be the fact that men are told not to be rude to women, or to hit women. There is no such moral force in play for women though, and so what happens is that men go through life being soundly abused by women and unable to speak out about it or do anything to stop it. They are ‘bound’ by inner forces, and those that break those bounds are roundly condemned, but the women who abused them chronically are left completely off the hook.
There are lots of ways that men are bound emotionally and controlled by women – this is the matriarchy, as powerful a force and equally as ruthless and authoritarian as the dreaded patriarchy that feminism traditionally demonises.
The matriarchy reduces men to that of objects, and instills in them that their main purpose as a ‘man’ is to work and provide for the ‘family’, which really means the women. Men are controlled by this all their lives, with their freedom and emotional selves butchered in service of women and the ‘family’. This is nothing short of slavery, with men held in bondage by a controlling matriarchy, and because of their stunted emotional development, are unable to even perceive their situation, and instead are made to feel as though they are the problem, that they are the ones controlling everything and excluding women.
Another key way that men are objectified is their sexual objectification by women as erections. That is, a man’s sexuality is reduced to that of being able to get and maintain an erection. Women ridicule men with small penis’, or men who don’t provide an erection ‘on demand’, demeaning them as ‘less of a man’ and so on. Men in turn grow up with the notion that their sexuality amounts to getting and erection and thrusting it into a woman, a pale shadow of what real male sexuality actually is. This is humiliating and demeaning to men, robs them of their sexuality and natural sexual expression, and turns them into robots who are expected to perform, rather than human beings to be loved and valued.
It is in this way, and many others, that the ruling matriarchy abuses and oppresses men and turns them into soulless machines whose purpose is to provide for women and the family and nothing else.
A patriarchy? It is high time in my view that the oppression of men, the true extent of it, it’s origins in the controlling emotional matriarchy of women, the severe damage it does to men, and the forms of male behaviour that emerge from that damage (often referred to as ‘patriarchal’), are talked about and exposed, and that men begin to challenge feminist women on their dubious version of history and on their naked prejudice and demonization of men.