Exemplary Men of Gone Girl Feminism
It is a great irony that so much of modern feminism is part of an attempt to deflate the male ego, while the participation in Gone Girl Feminism inflates the ego of men. According to the Gone Girl Feminists, all men can, and do, participate in their campaign. In so doing, they are allowed to indulge in their most repugnant impulses, impulses often associated with men under the nomenclature of ‘toxic masculinity’. The explanation most men give for their participation comes in the form of ‘If he is x, then fuck him”:
‘If he is a misogynist, then fuck him’
‘If he is a racist, then fuck him’
‘If he is a cheating cad, then fuck him’
‘If he has a wandering hand, then fuck him’
Yes, ‘if’. ‘If’ he did that, exactly the concern of justice. However, this is not expressed as an honest enquiry, but a principle. Everyman will ‘fuck up’ any man that a woman accuses of something, because the accused therefore deserves it. If women want him to drug a man, of course. More to show women that he is not the kind of guy that would do ‘that’, than show that he is concerned with justice. The laconic manner of statement is masculine, but it borrows content from modern feminism. In its campaigns of cancelling and public shaming, Gone Girl Feminism sacrifices a scape goat to collectively express:
“I would never do that”.
It is not important whether the scape goat is guilty of any crime or misdemeanour. The collectively identity can be successfully expressed and affirmed regardless. If there is any sense to this violence, it is because the spectacle of his punishment might act as a deterrent to anyone from behaving in the manner the victim is accused of. If any more needs said regarding the justice of the campaign, it should suffice to say, that not caring ‘if’ someone has done wrong, or not, is a good definition of what being unjust is. Not caring if the punishment is disproportionate or indefinite is also unjust. That allowing one person, innocent or not, to pay for the misdeeds of a whole community is unjust.
The other great irony of modern feminism is that toxic masculinity now finds it’s socially acceptable form in and through feminism. Gone Girl Feminism has given license and cause to men who would never have otherwise committed dehumanizing acts of violence. Meanwhile those who are projected upon, or set upon, have been proven to harden those characteristics which are hated by their abuser. This is an act of defiance and reclaiming what has been dismissed by society. Critical race theorists, for example, argue that black men project hyper-masculinity in order to combat the feeling of being primitive, stupid, and powerless that are imposed on them by an “abusive and repressive” society. Gone Girl Feminists are trying to provoke a sense of powerlessness in men to illicit toxic responses. The latter are used to justify their existence, to justify the expedient measures they are willing to take.
This is a feminism that believes in revenge and punishment over and against rehabilitation and prevention. They have taken up the demand that women should be safe from toxic Other, and use it as it has traditionally been used, as propaganda for violence. Think how the mass rape gangs scandal is being used to incite hatred and violence of Asian men in the UK now. The same argument can be made about the discourse of toxic masculinity and Gone Girl Feminism.
Gone Girl feminism demands that misogynists be more subtle. It does not deal with the problem. At best, it is a form of virtue signalling that simultaneously gives people a sense of agency over their victim, but this does nothing to fight misogyny or undermine the patriarchy. While innocent men are punished as scape goats, the worst of men are watching on and learning how to disguise their misogyny in new ways. Single men, no matter their age, are the worst. They are the most eager to impress women and gain their favour, but that does not stop them from being misogynists or racists.
Some Exemplary Men in Gone Girl Feminism
Uncle
I had long heard stories about my uncle. Mainly from women who were admirers. In his early twenties he would go from door to door selling insurance. Women would hide when they see a salesman coming, but most women admit to making sure they were in when my uncle was spotted doing his rounds. He had the banter. He does not tire of stringing stories together with, ‘It’s funny you mention that…’, when no-one had said anything at all. It didn’t matter. He was tall, dark and handsome, with an athletic build. He had silky black hair that was split from the right temple, and combed over so it would flop over his eyes. In photos he looks rather dapper in trousers, shirt, and Italian style V-neck sweater with a thin leather jacket flung over his left shoulder.
The same joke was always dropped in the conversation by women, ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if your uncle Robbie had a few children he didn’t know about’. Women simply considered this a testament to his charisma, without any reservations whatsoever. ‘I tell you, I would have’. Now it’s different. Women acknowledge they were very much part of a culture that should shame men today. Later, I was sure it was intended to shame me, and I wondered if a friend of the family had heard something about what was going on in Berlin.
One day he was told that someone’s daughter claimed that he was father to her child. This was just outside my village. I wonder if there are others that my uncle decided we might never hear of. He was a bit of a chancer. He took money for car insurance from my parents and kept it. This was only discovered after the car was found set alight in Glasgow, after it had been used in a robbery. My uncle paid my parents back. He also commandeered a few cars over the years from another uncle who worked all over the world in the oil industry. This brother warned my father not to trust Robbie with money. When this brother passed away, Robbie claimed that he had been asked to help the kids with the inheritance.
Returning to toxic masculinity, my uncle abandoned his wife and two adolescent kids. After a decade, no one had any idea what had come of him. The children have not forgiven him to this day. He eventually turned up in France with an old flame from his school days. She had bought a Chateau and they were doing it up together. This relationship would eventually go south which left Robbie to return to his home-town, now in his 60’s. After fathering and abandoning unknown offspring, having affairs and two wives, and abandoning his wife and children to disappear abroad, he would return into our family life by playing a role in Gone Girl Feminism.
It was my idea to bring someone from the family in to mediate. My mother had been threatening to leave my father. At first I was on her side, as I always was. Then she started sniping and verbally attacking me. Meanwhile, my dad was doing childish things to get revenge on me because he thought we were ganging up on him. He was already too scared to say anything to my mum. My Uncle started the conversation: “A lot of men destroy the confidence of their wives, and a lot of men do not even realise they are doing it.”. My mum had obviously prepped him, and he had no problem believing he was special. The feminists in Berlin told me that every man they had ever enrolled in their campaign immediately looks down pitifully on the other guy. As my dad was walking about the garden, my uncle waxed lyrically on my father’s faults as a husband, a father, and as a man. This was the man that abandoned his own wife and children and stole from his extended family.
Little did Robbie know, that in his decade long absence, I had sat down with my dad to speak to him about the way he spoke to my mother. Robbie would never have confronted my father. He was charming and conniving, but he had no courage. He would get a laugh with old school pals at racist jokes about ‘niggers’, and homophobic jokes about ‘poofs’. He is in his element laughing at the comeuppance of others who are not so clever.
He advised me to admit I had made mistakes. He had obviously forgiven himself for his mistakes and presumed that the feminist network would forgive mine. I had been targeted for 7 years at this point. I had never threatened to act against the feminists. I changed jobs, quite my job, moved flats and left Berlin. They kept drugging me, even now that I was ‘home’. Now they had taken advantage of my mum’s anxiety illness. My uncle presumed that I had made the same mistakes, and I was only less of a man than he for not admitting it. In fact, I had not ever cheated on a woman. I had not ever groped a woman. I was not racist, and I was not homophobic, and I was not transphobic.
He would later steel my external hard drive which allowed the activists to delete recordings I had of abusive therapy sessions. He also accompanied to my meeting with the clinical director on the promise that he would just take notes for me. He did not take notes and interrupted me early on, to suggest that I should move on now I had had my say, and let them deal with it. It was clearly an attempt to undermine me, and he was so pleased with his charm in the room. He knows what to say and when, and what not to say and when. Like most racist, homophobic, misogynist men of the Gone Girl Feminism movement.
Undergrad pal
Taking a regular train to commute home was an invitation for the network to harass me in many ways. They would organise a crowd in the bike carriage until the first stop and scratch a bike that I had been saving for years. The Scottish Rail folk at Central Station would block off the barriers as I arrived, or switch platforms to the annoyance of more than me. There is also a ploy to have a short middle-aged Glaswegian block the only gate for bicycle access to the train. After you brush past them, the small angry man kicks you and abuses you on the train. As I was warned in Berlin, the train waits while ‘passengers’ ask to be a witness, encouraging you to make a report to the police. Yes, all this to delay you until the next train comes, and people enjoy the footage posted online, being screamed at and kicked around on the train.
They had no need to switch platforms for the next scripted harassment, but by telling me about this in Berlin, the ploy would not go past me unnoticed. I could see a few people already had their seats. Some people knew something we didn’t. Anyway, an old undergraduate pal came to sit beside me on the train. In case you don’t know, as well as being systematically drugged in flat in Berlin, my PhD work was stolen and published by someone else in a foreign language. This was pointed out by a feminist on a dating app about a year later. Between that and the drugging, I was in no position to complete my PhD. It just so happened that this old philosophy pal, who came and sat opposite me, had just been offered a professorship in the Philosophy Department at Glasgow.
I fell out with this undergrad pal of mine, years back, because he insisted that there is no place for women in philosophy departments. I remember sitting in a Costa Coffee on the corner of Great Western Road and Otago Lane. Sadly, it is no longer there. Glasgow did not have any women in their department. This was the norm at the time. He argued that this was how it should be. Women cannot think logically in the way men can. He did not mean this in bad way. Women think differently, they are more emotional, which is not a bad thing. It is just not good for philosophy. I remember my pal was “genuinely shocked” at me for “dismissing his argument out of hand”. What was weirder, he liked the lectures Susan Stewart gave on Kant, but she was doing this from the Psychology Department- where she belonged apparently! Interestingly, these lectures can be found on Open Culture, but they take some finding because Susan’s lectures have been misplaced from the other Kant lecture series by men.
While my friend was dealing with controversial topics, he tried me on Pakistani grooming gangs Glasgow. He hated Pakistani people and said Indian people think the same. As he put it, Pakistani men hang outside high schools in Glasgow and ‘pick up’ young white girls and then share them with their friends. This is sadly how certain senior politicians viewed these grooming gangs, in principle, and they instructed local police forces to disregard the complaints made by families. At the time, I thought my friend was being racist. It sounded something certain white men would do as well. However, I acknowledged that I had no experience of this coming from a rural setting.
All in all, I think his credentials as a feminist are suspect, but not as a Gone Girl Feminist.
Post-Graduate Pals
At the very first meeting of the Master’s Students at Dundee, the first thing that the student representative said to me was, “I see you managed to speak to the best looking woman in the room. I was going to speak to her, but you got there first”. This was a conceited remark; it was snidely, but also sincere in its congratulatory tone. To be fair, I also thought the woman was attractive. We were lucky to have a post graduate room, and I would meet this woman there in the months that followed, eventually I asked her for a coffee, but nothing really happened.
Months later I got a call from this woman to ask what I had told Mat. I told her that he knew we went for a coffee. “Is that it?”. Yes, I said. He implied that he knew she had already ‘been’ with me, and that it was a problem for him. She felt humiliated. I had to promise that I had not said anything more than ‘we had a coffee’. In fact, we had met more than once, and we ended up on her bed at one point, but we didn’t sleep together. However, I hadn’t told anyone about that. Anyway, after talking it over, Lorraine and I figured out that Mat had led Lorraine think that he knew more than he did. So, she ended up explaining ‘everything’ that happened between us, so he was not upset. We agreed on the phone that he had done this intentionally.
Months later, I started dating someone, and Mat met me with the news: “Congratulations for officially going out with the hottest women in Dundee”. To be fair, two women told me Mary is beautiful and that she tended to move from one boyfriend to the next, which was her privilege because Mary is soo beautiful. Mat told me he was concerned because I seemed like the kind of guy who falls in love with everyone he sleeps with. Some months later, Mat dated a friend of mine who moved into the flat below me. She reported to me that Mat had made her feel like shit as well. He made her feel like she was not good enough and that he made a judgement about her very quickly on the date. This is surprising because she is confident. I apologised for not telling her more about Mat beforehand. Meanwhile Mat was telling stories about me, now that another guy from the States had come over to do a Masters, and they had become best buddies.
I was told that this other guy didn’t like me. It was the first time someone was so blatant about it, but fair enough, it happens. He couldn’t stand how I spoke. I was the class clown that used too many figures of speech, while he was ponderous- looking diagonally upwards to the sky when he spoke while twirling one hand around at the wrist while he thought of the right words. I liked him, I just thought he that he took himself too seriously at times. Anyway, I was told by a woman in our Masters group that Mat had felt the need to warn a female friend in her twenties about me. She and her pals were going to come carousing with our Masters group. What she needed to know was that, not only was I stuck in the first (aesthetic) phase of Kierkegaardian development, but that I might be a sex addict.
A female friend told me about this women because she thought it was ridiculous. Two other women pointed out to me how patronising this must have been to the young women he sat down with, and that Mat had made a fool of himself. They all felt that Mat was the problem. It got worse. Mat and John had asked a Professor whose expertise was in Psychoanalyses to befriend me on Facebook. The plan was that she could diagnose me. I didn’t reply to her request. Mat and John were sure that I would befriend her because she was hot. A woman in our Masters group was angry at this. Not just in my defence, or due to the way they sexualised this woman, but because they would never ask a male professor to do something so belittling as boost their ego in a competition with another man.
A few months before the end of the year John started dating my friend and flatmate, Jane. A few weeks before John was due to leave for the US, my flatmate told me that he had started sleeping with a friend from our Masters group. My flatmate wasn’t heart broken. Nonetheless, she felt humiliated and she would not be coming with me to the end of year art exhibition. So, I called John and asked him to meet me outside the exhibition. He could have dated these women over the past year, but only decided to get sex out of them when it was easier. He knew that it would cause problem, but not for him because he was about to fly back to the US. “I just considered these women an extension of myself”. He was thinking that I was egotistical enough to agree with him. It’s easy presuming that your enemy is intellectually and morally inferior while campaigning secretly behind his back. I cut him short and I repeated my point. He quickly went from trying to humiliate me to becoming tearful. I left the conversation there.
Mat would later be among the first podcasters that began to troll me at the behest of the Gone Girl activists. The material that was stolen from my hard drive while my uncle had has been used a number of times to mock my work. A series of podcasts from my friend’s philosophy podcast were on the subject of my work. The work of the Stone Aged Barbarian was a fictional character generated by the Gone Girl Feminists by making a ridiculous caricature of my work. Many journalists and public intellectual types on have trolled me on The Guardian, Unherd, and Substack following suit. Often with the comments section pointing out precisely to these perverse elements, where the writer has sacrificed their integrity to please the feminists, and the women in their life.
My two other male friends in Dundee were not sure whether it was my business to approach John about his infidelity. Women in our group had already disregarded these guys as nice and cute, but socially incompetent. In fact, one woman thought one of these guys might have some sort of disability. As other women explained it to me, they just don’t get it, they don’t pick up on ‘these things’, and there is no point in trying to explain it to them. When I was being ironic about my masculinity, the women understood, the men generally didn’t. This has pretty much been the story for most of my life. Men would attack me, with punches on food, because they felt they had a claim on a woman. Women used to defend me from these men. Not since the Gone Girl Feminists have spread horrible lies about me. All my female friends have disappeared without ever confronting me about any of the rumours. So, I am left with the worse of men attacking me to camouflage their own misogyny and racism. What else can Gone Girl Feminism achieve, except the worst of men hiding who they are, and indulging their worst vices?