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• Thursday, November 20, 2008 02:52 PM

  So many scars in the war of the sexes.

  Reading this letter thread I am reminded of that old Joy Division song, "No Love Lost"...

  Kryptogal and closetnerd (and postnoodz), you are the people here whose posts most agree with my own experience and vision. Perhaps you can tell me--why are these things so difficult to understand? Why do people have to suffer so much, and then pretend their suffering Means Something Cosmic?

  I see hurt people all over the place, interpreting their particular life stories as directly implying that the opposite sex is mostly worthless.

  So Brightstar, who (in other threads) can be almost poetic in his desire to become reproductively independent of women, who can be so disarmingly sincere when he wishes he had had more opportunities to learn how to make love to women, ends up saying women are bitches who want sweet sex with assholes and will never give a chance to a good guy. And blaming it all on feminism, as if this was its raison-d'être all along.

  And lifelike, so articulate and artistically aware, who knows her classics (I chuckled when she mentioned how she didn't like Updike's book, because I had exactly the same opinion), who is so thoughtful, has a fine ear for music and can (as she did in other threads) quote and enjoy poetry, nevertheless has to claim all men are ultimately assholes, brutes, incapable of loving. Balzac could have her (and Brightstar by the way) as characters, to prove yet another one of his many points about human nature.

  And both of them--Brightstar and likelife--have their grains of truth, which powers their passions.

  And then feminism gets blamed (as if feminism had been about the pursuit of sexual-emotional happiness in couplehood--yes, it entered areas such as pornography and objectification, where it strictly speaking shouldn't have entered, but have you known any socio-political movement that didn't end up exaggerating its own sphere of influence?...).

  And there's Dick Dworkin, eternally reminding us that men and women aren't alike. And constantly bringing back to my mind that doubt I myself used to have--I am (at least I didn't use to be) sexually attracted by men in any way; how can it be that women apparently sometimes are? What can they possibly like sexually about men? How can they enjoy penises in any way? So sex must be some sort of 'gift' from women to men, that they give them out of the kindness of their heart--or maybe because the cultural and socioeconomic situation force them to. Right? right?

  Dick, you are quite a smart guy, and I'll give you that you have never stooped to the level of mere name calling and SCREEMING CAPITALS and boldface anger and other such means so frequent when the stuff of human hearts and gonads -- the stuff of human dreams -- is placed on the scales and fairness is argued about. I think your questions should be taken (and answered) more seriously than some other people here seem to think. But I do feel in you a certain resentment at the asymmetry you keep talking about, and perhaps more than a certain feeling of hurt. But I see you don't want to immanentize it like likelife or Brightstar, which I am grateful for.

  So many broken heart, so many essentialisms... And broken hearts (and bones), and lost dreams, and people looking through windows at parties they weren't invited to (as Brightstar once put it), and various forms of abuse (as likelife once described).

  I also had quite a hard life in many ways--I've written at large about it already. But once I actually did hit the 'dating scene' -- or, as I prefer to think of it, once I started engaging in romantic behavior, rather than simply in romantic daydreaming--I ended up coming to conclusions close to those kryptogal and closetnerd stated.

  All in all, we're always dealing with individuals. Oh, I'm sure there are lots of statistical tendencies that differentiate men from women, and I'm sure a lot of them have to do with hormonal (i.e. biological, essentialistic) differences between them--I'll leave the details up to the appropriate research teams. But in real life, we always deal with each other as individuals. Nobody dates "Ms Feminist Bitch", or "Mr Sexual Abuse", or any such abstraction; we deal with real people, with issues, problems, a life story, and often quite a lot more of the little spark of life than meets the unaided eye. And we deal with practical problems, and people make quick judgements and decisions. A number of women did not want me, and maybe they were wrong about that, and maybe not. I also did not want a certain number of women who did want me, and maybe I was also wrong (in at least one case I now think I really was).

  Maybe bigguns was right, when she said so many of the things in feminism (and anti-feminism, its dark yet identical twin) are that people are really kinda selfish. It's all me me me, the problems I had, and why I didn't have the happiness I'm sure I deserved. The universe conspired, or maybe feminism did, or maybe it's the way men are, it's their nature, that's why I was never happy with them.

  Maybe humans are indeed fools. They can find so many ways of making their problems be something other than what they really are...

  —Asehpe Read Asehpe's other letters
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