The feminist turn from alienated object to retributive subject
As it is generally perceived, rhetoric is about bribing the ear with sweet lies. This has been the consensus since Plato argued that rhetoric posed a threat to the Athenian Demos. Plato juxtaposed rhetorical powers of persuasion with the philosophical pursuit of truth. With a few exceptions, like the stoics, rhetoric has been a fool’s game ever since, something for those not concerned with defending truth and integrity, but rather actively attacking people’s trust in the truth and in the good. It is just as likely, however, that rhetoric was first taught to defend truth and goodness. That is, training in rhetoric may have offered, first and foremost, a defence against con artists and liars in the marketplace. The increased awareness among the demos of deceptive ploys and tropes made refined persuasive argument a necessity in ancient Greece. As intellectual integrity and appropriateness of speech became praised, speech without them was held with suspicion. This lack became recognised as an attack on those virtues, and thus the demos. The conscious affectation of those virtues became necessary and attended the development of rhetoric. The power to use any means of persuasion while affecting these virtues was necessary. It was easier to develop a speech that was strikingly beautiful in its balanced presentation of these virtues than developing those three virtues in character.
The development of feminism follows similar lines. Feminism is generally considered a political movement to defend, promote and gain rights for women. It counters the prevailing abuses of privilege enjoyed by men. Feminism is a corrective, if not an alternative, to ‘patriarchy’. For arguments sake, let’s define patriarchy as the systematic abuse of privilege that men exercise in a society that patronises men with privileges as men. To borrow from Simone De Beauvoir, in a patriarchy, “A man is in the right in being a man”. It is easy to argue, to everyone except the perennial Thrasymachus, that this is a social good. To argue against this movement is to advocate the arbitrary abuse of a section of humanity. To put it plainly, to criticize feminism is to advance evil in the world. This is the most common perception of feminism, and it is is how feminism began. This is the feminism of the 17th Century, and in the 20th Century feminists demanded clarity and understanding regarding the construction of femininity. In the 21st Century a feminist turn analogous to that in the development of rhetoric is gaining in popularity and force. The repertoire of abuses that have been exercised over women are well understood and categorised, and now they are being employed against men. Just as the ploys of rhetoric are transferable to any situation and any topic, disregarding what is true and appropriate, the repertoire of abuses is transferable to any man regardless of his character or situation. These newly won ploys of punishment are not being turned against the patriarchs, but against the vulnerable, the moderates, and the foreign. To criticize this turn is not to advance evil, but to correct the corrective to an injustice.
Reverse engineering ‘the Other’
The most important twist in this development is the reverse engineering of ‘the Other’ after the study of its various historical guises. An analysis of how the reverse engineering of the Other is inspired by the genealogical analyses of past constructions is still to come on interpocula. I just want to point out here that since de Beauvoir critically appropriated the concept of ‘the Other’, feminists and others have drawn analogies between the construction of, ‘The eternal feminine’ ‘the black soul’ and ‘the Jewish character’. In order to distance ourselves from our own animality and mortality, we project – stickiness, stench and liquidity- onto other groups in society. See: Projective identification- is a pathology taking over the political? (part1/2) (substack.com) The antisemitic propaganda of the Nazi’s propagated images of being soft, porous, receptive of fluid. It has been argued that these are descriptions of animality are associated with feminity. Jews were portrayed in children’s tales as being lice, vermin, viruses bearing disease. The Nazi’s also made Jews do things that would further associate them and their religion with disgust. They were made to scrub latrines, even with their tefillin, or sacred prayer bands. Primo Levi describes the reaction of disgust when Jews were denied access to latrines and forced to squat in the open.
Feminist group chats now organise series of humiliations to associate their ‘toxic’ victim with filth in more refined ways for the contemporary far left. Whether it is colleagues mixing human facies in his lunch, or bar people mixing spit in his pint, or sperm being mixed with his food at restaurants, or laxatives that take a sudden and acute effect in the workplace or in public, or drugs that effect the functioning of the anus, or even just the side effect of a running nose and watering eyes from the drug used to incapacitates him. Having access to his flat means they can tamper with any food stuff or defecate in the toilet. Animal faeces is tipped into the toilet for the victim to clean out. The toilet itself is not properly sealed and the estate agent refuses to seal it for months, thus a smell lingers. Neighbours repeatedly spoil his washing machine so that he struggles to get rid of a foul smell in his clothing. The women who pick up and date British men can have unprotected sex immediately before, and they can soil his toothbrush, and put sperm in his toiletries. All of this is documented on the group chat by the barman, neighbours, or tinder participants.
Of course, the term ‘toxic’ means the contaminating substance produced by animals or bacteria, usually secreted as a liquid. The term also carries the association of a virus bearing a disease. The intentions behind the discourse on ‘toxic masculinity’ could not be stated more clearly in scientific literature without risking the reproduction of Nazi terminology. In truth, few scientific papers use the term ‘toxic masculinity’ while others surreptitiously employ it as a correlate of the more constructive and rigorous term ‘hypermasculinity’. Thus, the sensational headlines and outrageous posts on social media have a pretence to scientific objectivity, when they claim this or that is an expression of toxic masculinity. This arouses disgust and shame that most readers project onto the victim of the dehumanizing smear campaign. This in turn excites further acts of dehumanizing violence.
Doxing and smearing
Gamergate started with a long peevish post from a man who had been cheated by his girlfriend, it was filled with private emails and texts. Feminists criticize the reaction to a girlfriend cheating. It seems so pathetic for a man to seek revenge, or perhaps it is because he disguised it as noble quest for social justice. Yet, a group of feminists will spend years taking revenge on a man who is alleged to have cheated on a woman. What was chastised as another grotesque form of misogyny and male violence has now become normalized behaviour in the noble fight against toxic masculinity and ‘Terfdom’. They now employ intimidation and carry through their threats of violence in a way the Gamergaters never did. They have refined the strategic use of social media platforms to systematically destroy people’s life.. I have been smeared as a racist, misogynist, right-wing elitist, cheating cad with a wandering hand. They have hacked my mobile and email accounts to garner harvest quotes that they can take out of context to smear me. They can also see where I apply for jobs and where I might view a new apartment. This means they can smear my character and prevent me getting a job or flat, besides the one they have set up for me, with people willing to spike me. This is another example of studying the most extreme examples of misogyny online and then outdoing the destructive violence of men offline. See: Gamergate: the Dark Precursor to a Violent Feminism (substack.com)
Gas-lighting
The group, believing he has cheated in the past because of rumours, try to entrap the target while in a relationship. However, the women he cheats on and the girlfriend are in on the entrapment. The girlfriend gaslights him in an abusive relationship, while women planted at his work harass and gas-light him from there.
The two women at my workplace claimed British men hate German women and they described the effects of trauma and father absence in Berlin. All this aroused compassion and I felt obliged to kill them with kindness. The hours, months, and years they put into being with me, made me feel like I owed them something. However, they attacked me in other ways while telling me I was sensitive like a woman. This is a classic line to gaslight someone. Meanwhile I was desperately trying to get my girlfriend to respond to what was happening to me. They knew I was talking to my girlfriend, and they reminded me about how men offload on women like they are his mother.
I was not cheating, I was a caring, sensitive person, when this group set out to abuse me and harass me. I talked to my girlfriend about it, and she gas-lighted me. In a normal relationship, the person being harassed at work would receive support from the other. She only talked it down, and normalized it, while also working to destroy my self-esteem over years. Then I talked to my girlfriend about her muted response. She repeatedly claimed she could not remember the incident. Then she would really be loving when we were alone. She also said she was anxious around people, then that she was seeing someone for depression.
I did sleep with someone else eventually, but a woman who had suffered much less abuse, would still be celebrated for taking some agency back from her abusive boyfriend. I needed to contact people outside the abusive relationship. I did not feel any loyalty to my girlfriend when I realised, she is intentionally abusing me, as part of the campaign I had been long suffering.
Key to the smear campaign mention above, is the ability to substitute the effect of the abuse with the cause, swapping the reaction to his abuse with the alleged past wrongs. That is, the power of metonymy to justify these abuses as forms of activism: The method in the madness of modern activism (substack.com)
Victim blaming
My post about the inspiration for this violent form of activism concentrated on the twisting of the sexist stereotype of woman as a vulnerable victim in the film Gone Girl. This twist is to employ the support people offer women to frame men for things they have not done. The smear campaign is believed, the poor victim is championed, the men are abuse: Gone Girl Feminism - interpocula (substack.com). However, the film faced criticism for portraying an unstable woman getting away with false accusations against her husband. It was criticized for undermining the women who claim to have acted out of self-defence when they retaliated after years of domestic abuse. An analogous situation is dramatically recreated with a man being harassed and abused for years by a group to intentionally damage his mental health and provoke a reaction that can be used to condemn him. In truth the group cannot punish the victim and prove his guilt at the same time. It is only in the context of months or years of abuse that he reacts in ways he had never done before, saying things he would never have otherwise said. This is the natural reaction to being on the receiving end of hostilities, generated by people projecting what they cannot accept in themselves onto their victim: Projective identification- is a pathology taking over the political? (part1/2) (substack.com)
Spiking
There are three cognitive bias that dispose to overreact to potential risk. We overreact when we can picture the victim. We overreact to intentional actions. For example, in the words of Professor Daniel Gilbert, “we worry more about anthrax (with an annual death toll of roughly zero) than influenza (with an annual death toll of a quarter-million to a half-million people). Third, those incidents that risk violating our moral sensibilities rouse anger and we tend do something about it. These three fundamental cognitive bias help to keep millions of people clicking on social media platforms and newspaper articles. The false reports of an epidemic of spiking and injections are a good case in point. All three cognitive bias are exemplified in the narrative of the toxic males preying on young innocent girls in plain sight. Meanwhile, bartenders and baristas in pubs and coffeeshops across many cities the UK are on a group chat that targets men who are drugged wherever they go. If you want to know how you might be spiked by bartenders, read my post: 9 Ways Bartenders Can Spike You, If They're Asked to (substack.com).
Workmates can be talked into spiking him before he even starts his new job. The women who gas-lighted me at my work in the bar convinced me to apply for social housing. There is no waiting list for social housing in Berlin. I turned up to my first flat viewing along with 60 other people who were milling around on the street. I thought I was just lucky when I was taking for a private viewing of a bedroom flat in trendy part of Berlin. I would be harassed here by neighbours who could access my flat and spike my water supply.
Revenge sex tapes
There are women who hook up with British men on dating apps to prove they are cheats. This would, for the hate group, justify the men being drugged and humiliated and the footage of whatever went on being put online. I was not on dating apps, however. So, during workplace harassment I was told about Tinder, and the like, to encourage me to get on, and get cheating. They told me the number of your Facebook friends suggested the number of partners you have had, and how good or bad you are in bed. That British men are notoriously bad in bed, probably from lack of practice, and they suggested this is why my girlfriend was cheating me. Despite their efforts, I did not try a dating app until 4 years later, 2 years after I suffered sexual assault at work. For those two years I hardly left the flat. I was still coming to terms with the fact that women put 2 years into harassing me, and that one went so far as sexually assaulting me after I rejected her for a year. Once I no longer had contact with my girlfriend, and no visitors, they started to drug me in the flat they had prepared for the task. The main reason that I started to use dating apps was to meet people and try to socialize again. I was not in a fit shape to start a relationship. At this stage, the men targeted may have been abused and drugged for months, if not years, in a flat in a foriegn country. They are broken animals reaching out for contact with people who will not abuse them, hoping someone will treat them humanely, as they once were treated. They may have never used a dating app before. Perhaps, they were not promiscuous before being isolated and drugged by this hate group.
To cut a long story short, the women who reach out are part of the campaign and the sex/assaults were filmed. However, the women who harassed me at work may have wanted me to just think that footage shared online. After dates that my workmates had described in detail years earlier, people would walk past me in the park and burst out laughing at me, sometimes hysterically. This might have been one of the dramatized scenes scripted to make me feel there has been sex tapes posted. This is what women report experiencing. It only happened near my flat, and on my usual route entering my usual park. Equally though, if people on group chats are told that no sex tapes were posted, they cannot know for certain that footage was not shared amongst certain types.
Medical intervention and confinement
The eighteenth century is commonly thought to have held women in constant state of jeopardy with the deplorable levels of confinement to the asylum. Women could be committed with little evidence and for no other reason than not bending to their husbands will. That said, “asylum admissions lend no support to the view that male chauvinist values were disproportionately penalizing women with mental disorders”. However, eighteenth century novels and plays depicted such scenes, and the number of admissions in the following century began to outstrip that of men. Hannah Mackenzie is an instructive example of how husbands confined a ‘difficult’ wife. Peter Mackenzie wanted to make his wife niece with whom he was having an affair the mistress of his house. When his wife did not agree, she was confined in secret. Luckily, Hannah could attract the attention of a young boy working in the garden next door to whom she threw some money and one of her shoes. Her friends were informed of her whereabouts, and she was rescued from the asylum. Thus were the mores of men protected by the medical intervention.
Today, there are some medical facilities that punish men on behalf of women who allege that they have cheated on a girlfriend. Of course, the modern targets are also a racist, misogynist, right-wing, cheating cad with a wandering hand, and perhaps a TERF to. Why not? When the group manage to direct the victim to a flat-share where he will be harassed, he is also in the catchment area of a particular mental health practice. Just as it was explained to me in a bar in Berlin several years earlier, the young nurse does her best to antagonise him during the sessions which are recorded to humiliate him on the group chat. More importantly, the group gets a student doctor to hear everything he says about his abuse in Berlin, and sign him of as delusional. The victim does not agree with diagnosis. However, he is told that he will not get another appointment if he does not accept the prescription, and that the practice is the only one available to him on the NHS. Under this pressure, I agreed to the smallest dose possible to keep access to the NHS, with no intentions of taking the medication. When I tried to recant the next day on the phone to my GP, I was told it was too late. I later discovered that I would have the diagnosis of delusional on my record forevermore. I made a complaint and it took months to get my complaint acknowledged. Although the clinical director apologised profusely, he told me he could not amend the diagnosis and that it cannot be removed from my record. I was offered another appointment at the same practice, but I refused. I wrote to ask about the result of the investigation he promised, but he fudged his answer.
To cut a long story short, after writing an MP to ask about the investigation and starting this Substack, I went to another NHS psychiatrist, 2 years after the first diagnoses. After one appointment I was taken and detained in a mental hospital against my wishes for one night only. At the time, they could not tell me if I would be in for 48 hours or a 28 day assessment, nor if I would be forced onto medication. As it turned out, I was released after one night. I was glad, I had full time job and I was return to University in just over a month, I had not been in my flat for a week before I was taken away. I was told it was a mistake to confine me, I was told I would not need medication, and I was told I would not need to see a psychiatrist again. To be more exact, when I asked him if he could amend my diagnoses, the last words of the consultant and clinical director of this facility were:
“I hope you do not need to see a psychiatrist again. You just need to remember that you think a bit differently than other people, a little bit more to the extreme and just remember, if you attack the system, the system will attack you.”
He stood up and shook my hand.
I was released.