美國

美國的政治情勢像個車禍現場，全是我不知怎麼認領的一堆扭曲金屬、凌亂的碎片。我應該參加那些想奮力修復扭曲車架的人，或繼續再排列又重新排列碎片？書寫者別無選擇，只能找回拼圖碎片？

Resistance to Heidegger: Reading Graham Harman’s Heidegger Explained

Philosopher Graham Harman
It’s a simple enough question, but perhaps difficult of answer: If Martin Heidegger was the major philosopher of the twentieth century, as Graham Harman argues, why has he not become a more central guide to philosophers since? And why has Heidegger’s work not had an impact on the West even remotely similar to that of thinkers like Freud or Marx, or even Nietzsche?

Harman is one of the key philosophers working in the rising Speculative Realist movement. Much of Harman’s project emerges from his reading of Heidegger, particularly Heidegger’s brilliant tool analysis, which makes his 2007 book length portrait of the great philosopher, Heidegger Explained: From Phenomenon to Tool, doubly interesting.

I’ve been an occasional student of Heidegger since my university years in the 1980s. As it’s been a while since I’ve seriously engaged the philosopher’s texts, I decided to read Harman’s book to re-enter the realm. I couldn’t have chosen better. Harman has written what is certainly the clearest, most comprehensive introduction to Heidegger yet published in English. He covers the whole scope of Heidegger’s career, addresses the dismal turn of the war years, and, for me at least, clarifies things that had previously been murky, specifically Heidegger’s later writing on the fourfold.

But Harman’s work also led me to ask, given my own political concerns, if it is really worth seriously re-engaging Heidegger’s thought. Can Heidegger stand as a guide or teacher to those struggling with the demands of the present?

Heidegger insists that the history of metaphysics has come to an end and that we await a new beginning in philosophy. One of the main problems facing this "new beginning", at least in terms of its calling to those like me who might (modestly) engage it, is that based on Heidegger’s own work we sense that it will prove insular, self-enclosed, ultimately unproductive. One suspects that any such philosophical beginning could not actually change the facts of the political world in the ways that seem necessary--given our ever graver ecological/technological predicament. Such a beginning would be, rather, a local philosophical shift; it would be yet another philosophical school easily ignored by the machine now running roughshod over us, just as it ignored the philosopher’s work during his lifetime and after.

I’m aware of the irony of criticizing Heidegger’s new beginning as “unproductive”. One of the salient problems of the old metaphysics of presence is, certainly, its very productiveness. But even so, I suspect that many thinkers continue to neglect the Heideggerian path because they sense, quite simply, that it would not catch--it would gain no hold on the forces now rushing us toward annihilation.

Thus the conundrum facing thinkers tempted by Heidegger’s formidable project. We still hope to change or help rescue the world; we still hope to harness some of the power of metaphysics, even if at the same time undermining its totalizing power. Is this hope at all valid? I'm not certain. But next to this hope, the philosophy that begins with the “revealing/self-concealing event” seems to lead fatally to a kind of quietism. Or at least it did so in Heidegger's case.

Explicating the Heideggerian prognosis, Harman argues that all attempts to manage technology through technical means (which here would include everything from statistical analysis to environmental protection committees to land use laws) are doomed to failure from the start, as they still function within the metaphysics of presence that fosters technology's rampant growth. But is this prognosticated failure really so absolute? Might not such "technical means" be at least preliminary to, or attendant upon, a developing awareness of the crisis, which awareness, which danger, might then prepare the ground for the more fundamental "turn" Heidegger envisions?

One could argue that with these comments I’m putting too much of a political or practical burden on philosophy. One does not take up philosophy in order to accomplish certain goals with it. Asked the question of what one can do with philosophy, Heidegger once answered that the point is not what we do with philosophy, but what philosophy does with us.

But what is the place of philosophy once those political ills become potentially synonymous with our self-induced extinction as a species? Does the Heideggarian argue that we do not fundamentally exist as "a species”, but always rather as individual Dasein? If Dasein always means my ownmost, historically grounded existence, how do we think our ownmost historically grounded existence as species? Is such a thought possible in Heideggerian terms?

Harman's last three titled sections before his conclusion are "Heidegger's Vices", "First Objection to Heidegger" and "Second Objection to Heidegger". On Heidegger's vices, Harman doesn't merely restate his earlier points regarding the philosopher's disastrous failure of judgment during the war years, but, rightly I think, traces this failure to a more fundamental one: the lack of any true political philosophy in Heidegger's work.

Of course this lack is apposite to the questions I pose above. My own sense is that it stemmed from a certain fatality in the periodization of Heidegger's career. First, before the war, Heidegger was grappling with the questions that culminated in Being and Time. Subsequent to the war, and more problematically, his avoidance of writing directly on the political had more personal causes. The philosopher was no doubt aware that any attempt to weigh in directly on questions of the West's "political order" would only serve to re-ignite the question of the war years. It would provide an easy pretext for his philosophical foes to repeat: "Who are you to philosophize on these questions? Haven't we already heard enough in your Rector's Address?" In short, had Heidegger not made the mistakes he did during the war, he may have been emboldened over the following decades to develop his philosophy in ways more directly challenging to Anglo-American capitalism on the one hand and Soviet communism on the other. As is, he shrewdly (and perhaps inevitably) avoided political philosophy altogether.

Which leads readers of Heidegger like myself to ask: What would a true Heideggerian political philosophy look like? It is clear to me that the stances he took during the war in no way represented a rigorous development of his thought. They represented rather a poorly thought out attempt to paste his thought onto a political movement whose deeper meaning offended against that thought. Heidegger himself, though a supremely powerful thinker, was too immature politically to recognize this.

This leads me to wonder if Harman's section "Heidegger's Vices" wouldn't better be titled "First Objection to Heidegger", as it is in his lack of political philosophy, I suspect, that we should approach both his fall into Nazism and the problem of his incongruously small impact on the contemporary West. Heidegger insisted that thinkers are to be the "shepherd's of being", but apparently viewed the shepherd only as one who watches and waits. In fact, to develop the metaphor, shepherds must also at times ward off wolves and seek out new pasture.

In the two "Objections" to Heidegger with which Harman closes his book, he raises important challenges to Heidegger's thinking on the status of things and the interrelations of entities in the world. Each of these challenges lead into Harman's own work in what he calls "object-oriented ontology". Not familiar with Harman's work, I'd mainly be curious to know how he might address this question of what a Heideggerian political philosophy would consist in. Perhaps he's already taken up this question somewhere in his work. Or it may be another Heideggerian path which he may some day be interested to develop.

And of course: If Prof. Harman himself can spare time to answer an amateur, I’d be very curious to know how he might address these questions. I’ll be sending this link to him and will post any reply.

In any case, Harman’s book should be on the shelf of anyone engaged in the strenuous but always rewarding work of reading Martin Heidegger. Explanations of difficult philosophical arguments don’t get better than this.

Eric Mader
Taipei

Updated:

Graham Harman kindly responded to my brief review with some remarks on Heideggerian politics.

Important in Harman’s thinking on Heidegger is the recognition that whereas the the philosopher himself fell for fascism, his philosophy is of a different order. Its basic gestures and modalities, the approach to truth it sketches out, would on more careful consideration lead to a different politics.

In his book, as I've said, Harman argues that one of Heidegger's main flaws was his clear lack of a developed political philosophy. Which left him easy prey to the allure of the rising fascist movement.

First, Harman writes me that “the easy guess is that [Heidegger’s politics, made explicit,] would be like the politics of Carl Schmitt”--i.e., they'd be a product of where Heidegger was already headed under Hitler: “At a certain point rational negotiation disappears and there is simply an existential struggle with the enemy, who need only be defeated rather than wiped out completely. This would appear to fit very well with Heidegger's decision-based model of human action in Being and Time.”

This is an assessment of how Heidegger himself likely would have characterized his political stance had he been asked to declare it during those years.

Harman, however, sees a different politics implicit in Heidegger’s more rigorous side (that side where he actually wrestled):

But I think Heidegger's philosophy actually leads us in a different direction politically, if he had thought it through more carefully. Since Being is that which withdraws, this means that political decision always excludes an outside and focuses on what is present. I've written a whole book on Bruno Latour's politics that ends where I wish Heidegger could have ended politically, which is by saying that politics is based neither on truth or sheer decision, but on a collective dealing with issues whose solution is never fully known. Even Latour drifts a bit in Schmitt's direction in his recent work on ecology, but the Latour of the early 2000s was really onto something politically, I think.

To further the questions implicit in Harman's monograph on Heidegger, then--or at least the questions that most nagged me--one might move on to Harman’s book on Latour.

Quitting Tobacco: The Risks

Sorry, Jack, not today . . . SOB SOB . . .
I’ve been smoking cigars since about 2000. Finally this week I decided to quit. Cold turkey. Today is my third day smoke free, and boy does it suck. How do people live this way?

It’s like I’m walking around with my head inside a kind of echoing glass bubble, I can’t concentrate on anything, there’s a floating rage coursing through me, and it seems like I’ve lost about a third of my IQ.

Now I know what it must feel like to be a Republican.

Christ, I hope I make it. But really--is it worth it?

Eric Mader

A Personal Manifesto

If our future is to be anything but a nightmare of war and despotism, we must put the genie of unregulated capitalism back in its bottle. And we must clamp the lid down tight.

The neoliberal capitalism which now holds sway is rapidly eroding our environment, and without a moderately stable natural environment, civilization is impossible. These facts are irrefutable; they are backed up by the community of scientists and by political thinkers alike. Given the grim facts on the ground, appeals to neoliberal theory (that the “free market” will somehow ultimately provide solutions) are not only misguided but suicidal.

The future to be hoped for is one in which certain liberties are upheld (cultural, religious, political) but others are seriously curtailed: 1) economic liberty, 2) the “liberty” of global free trade.

Regarding the first, the individual’s right to own and manage property and capital is essential; even so, a responsible order will establish clear and enforced limits to the amounts of capital individuals may accumulate and control. For instance, in a sane and just social order it would be unthinkable that any individual could have a net worth thousands of times that of the average citizen. Rather than thousands of times, the number should be perhaps 50 times, or 27 times (the optimal ratio needed to maintain healthy competition while also maintaining a healthy democratic order would of course be subject to debate).

Regarding global trade, it must be more rigorously regulated, if only because global business has no government to watch over it and thus is never answerable to citizens’ needs. “Free trade” is now just a euphemism for corporate predation in both developed and developing countries.

If we are to avert the oligarchic dystopia we’re now sliding into, my generation and those younger will need to force the current capitalism off the throne. The markets must be wrested into form in which they can serve the people, rather than people existing as raw material to be ground up in unchecked markets. I envision a social order strict in certain economic and environmental regulations, but promoting liberty in other areas. It is obviously possible; there is no inherent reason free speech and freedom of religion need coincide with unregulated capitalism--in fact capitalism may come to undermine both.

I personally would support nonviolent political action as the most effective way to bring about the saner order needed. Much can be learned from Marx and the rich tradition of interpretation of capitalism he gave rise to, much can be learned from Gandhi; personally I learn the most from the Christian tradition--still, as a Christian, I see no reason not to struggle along with those who are non-Christian or of a more secular mindset. We’ve a job to do here, and can respect our differences while working together.

In any case, either the current order will fall, or our civilization will. The regnant neoliberalism is unsustainable; we will have no future as a civil society if we continue with it.

A rough pathway forward is clear and has been for some time. If this is my “personal manifesto”, it is such in the sense that I commit to supporting and engaging in efforts toward the goals laid out. Without being a full-time activist, I nonetheless must strategically decide where my efforts toward these ends will be made, and make some commitment of time, energy and resources.

The problem for many of us is that we see the problems, we "weigh in" on the Internet in one form or another, we vote (for what that's worth) but we don't finally come around to much in the way of concrete action toward social change, or even in the way of concrete support for activists who are fighting directly. This personal manifesto is, then, a statement of a basic position, and a statement of commitment. I commit to the task of finding more concrete ways to engage.

Eric Mader

David Graeber speaks in a recent debate “Is Capitalism Part of the Answer?” (next to Graeber is debate facilitator, Amiri Bhohi):

In the Country of the Erics

Saturday students: Frances, Shawn, Anthony, Yoyo.
The following historical chronicle is being written by my student Shawn (莊崴翔). Shawn is a junior high school student here in Taipei, and English is a second language for him. I’d say he’s got a pretty good narrative flare and a good sense of snark besides. I’ve edited a little and provided some transitions and tweaks, but in general this is Shawn’s writing.

It’s now Sunday evening in Taipei. An hour ago, I woke from a nap and had a big cup of Ethiopian Yirgacheffe coffee to get my wits about me. Then I decided to type out these chapters that Shawn had written and post them here, in hopes he will continue. Because I want to learn as much as I can about my people’s history.

Eric Mader

I.

In the middle of the Pacific Ocean, there is a large volcanic island about the size of Japan. With the clear water around the island, and the beautiful coral under the sea, the island would be one of the most amazing sights on earth, if we could visit it. But this island does not appear on any maps. Long ago world leaders agreed to keep it a secret.

In the 16th century, Captain Ericano Erannielcoric discovered the island. Soon he brought most of the Erics scattered over the world to live there. Thanks to Captain Erannielcoric, the dream of the Erics was fulfilled. The Country of the Erics was finally established.

Unfortunately, after the Captain died, the next king, Ericano Erannielcoric, Jr., stopped the country from communicating with the outside world. He threatened any countries that wanted to visit the island with a terrible vengeance: “We will send Erics to you.” It is for this reason that world leaders, to protect their own nations, agreed to erase the island from all maps.

The Country of the Erics is plentiful in natural resources, so that millions of people could live there. But after the centuries since its founding, still only Erics live in the country. People around the world have forgotten the island and the strange country founded of course.

People in the country of the Erics are all equal of course. That's because they’re all the same. With curly hair and fat bellies, which they swell out by drinking large quantities of coffee, the Erics have a population of millions, though exactly how many is unknown. First brought by Captain Erannielcoric, coffee plants are grown throughout the island. The Erics consider the coffee plant holy, and there are various important rituals they celebrate around it.

Even if the Country of the Erics sounds like a peaceful place, blood will soon flow over the land. The Erics will fight. With the hairy corpses left beside roads, the golden time of the country will never return.

II.

The COE’s trouble began with King Eric XXVII, who still rules the island today. How this king attained the throne and became such a hated ruler is told in the Story of the Glowing Crow. Collected by scholars in central Asia, the story is originally in the Uzbek language. It is translated here:

Long long ago there was a magical tree. It grew Magic. People around the world learned of the tree and went on journeys to find it. The search for the tree led to rumors and wars.

When the crow saw the tree, it decided to try to hide it so it could keep the magic to itself. The greedy crow disguised the tree with many other kinds of branches and learned the tree's magic powers. It got the power to defeat death and it acquired such magic that its feathers began to glow. Each feather could save a life.

Hundreds of years passed and the crow was still alive. One day an asshole discovered the glowing crow and learned something of its powers. The asshole tricked the crow and caught it. Knowing the feathers could save lives, he started to pluck them so that he could sell them.

Like all assholes, this asshole wanted to become rich.

But at the market nobody believed him. How could he prove that the feathers could save lives? Finally, as he was deciding to give up and try elsewhere, an Eric showed up.

In the Country of the Erics, where everyone is an Eric, it isn't easy to be king. Any Eric can easily overthrow the Eric on the throne because he is exactly the same. However, being the oldest of the Erics, looking much older and wiser than others, might make holding the throne easier. So Eric killed the asshole and took the crow.

Many years passed. The elder Eric, called Eric XXVII, was on the throne and the glowing crow had become the emblem of the Country of the Erics. Aging and weak, but impossible to kill, King Eric had become a total asshole. All the Erics wanted a new king, but they had no idea how to get rid of their current king because he had the power of eternal life. They didn't know the secret of the glowing crow.

And all this happened because of the greedy crow, the greedy asshole, and the natural greed of Erics.

This story, while providing information about King Eric XXVII, is also seen as evidence that Erics occasionally leave the Country of the Erics to visit other countries. For what purpose, no one knows.

III. A chapter from a history of the struggle against the evil King Eric XXVII:

“Eric!” Eric cried out. “Don’t do it!”

“You can’t stop me,” Eric said. “I’m going to kill Eric. I’ve already made up my mind. It’s for the country, for all the Erics who live under this hateful oppression.”

“But it is hopeless!” Eric said. “You’ll never succeed!”

“How has he been king for 117 years?” Eric replied. “How is it possible? I’m going to kill him and then we can build a republic.”

The cold wind blew over the darkness of the countryside. Eric disappeared into the shadows of the forest. Eric stood alone now. He’d just lost his best friend, Eric. What could he do next?

He heard someone standing behind him.

“Let him go, Eric,” the voice said. “You should trust him.”

“But . . . Eric, you know how many assassination attempts there have been. It’s hopeless! He’ll die like the others. We must stop him!”

“His mind is made up,” Eric said. “And if he doesn’t make it, he may still succeed in death. You know he is one of the most respected Erics among us. If he is killed, all the Erics will take up their weapons in revenge. . . . But now we need to rest. Tomorrow will be a day we’ll never forget.” * * *
The sun rose over a turquoise sea. Another day was beginning in the island country. But now everything was different. The country had changed forever in the course of the night.

“He’s dead,” said Eric, dropping the newspaper to the floor. His voice was full of sorrow. Eric looked at Eric. They both knew in that moment what they must do.

A page of Shawn's MS.

Post Office

住在台灣的外國人每天都要面對這種小誤會。我在郵局。一位小姐在幫我約我想寄出的包裹。

「裡面是什麼？」她問。

「書。」

「你要掛號嗎？」

「不用。」

「$273。你要報帳嗎？」

我沒聽清楚。她講話太小聲。

「我要爆炸嗎？」我問。「不要，謝謝。」

她開始笑。她的同事也大笑。

「我知道我的鼻子有點阿拉伯人的樣子」我正色地說。「可是我是天主教徒，而不是伊斯蘭教徒。」我想戲弄她一下。

「不是！不是你的鼻子，先生!」她說。「我沒有說爆炸，我說的是報帳：你要不要報帳？」

「喔。報帳嗎？也不用，謝謝。」

郵局裡的人都在笑。

Shirtstorm: Will American Feminist Hypocrisy Never End?

I’ve now read through much of the initial feminist commentary on the zany shirt Prof. Matt Taylor wore during the live stream of the Philae landing. I now understand why these women see the shirt as a major news story, and after reading their pieces, I’m ready to offer some new figures.

American feminists deserve to be ignored about 78% of the time. The number was 70% just a decade ago, so you see the trend.

I didn’t always think of the feminist movement this way. In terms of the feminism that insists women are equally capable to men and should be equally represented in companies, government, universities, etc., I’m still totally on board. But as for the newer feminism, or this neo-feminism, that focuses on the sexual politics of everyday life, I am like many people: I see little there beyond a deep and infantile hypocrisy.

Feminists have somehow come to insist that women can be sex goddesses and revel in their sexuality--they regularly champion those who are aggressively sexy--then in the next breath scream against men who react to them as sexy. (Well, not always: If it’s an unwanted man who shows some interest, that’s called “objectification”--“He’s a pig,” etc. But if it’s a guy they judge hot, then it’s not objectification, but “flirting”.)

Such feminism is a shallow hypocrisy, and should be called out as such. Women who subscribe to it refuse to recognize that they can’t have it both ways: namely, they can’t both "celebrate" their sexuality in the public arena and then not be recognized as sexy when they'd prefer not to be. Because the public arena is just that: a public space, where people mix and intermingle in relative freedom.

For decades now, these women, in their writing and speaking and everyday behavior, have sought to impose an absurd double standard on those around them: "Notice me; worship me; don’t notice me--what are you looking at?” all at the same time. They are like a little girl at a birthday party who, when she is told she can have cake or ice cream, says she wants both, then cries and ruins the party because in fact she can’t have both.

As for Matt Taylor’s shirt, the irony is that the supposedly “objectifying” images on it are images of female sexual power that these very same feminists would celebrate--were they in a mood for celebration. But instead, since they see the shirt’s being worn by a bearded scientist, it suddenly becomes an offense more newsworthy than the scientific history Prof. Taylor just helped make.

Never mind that the shirt was designed by a woman friend of Taylor’s--such details aren’t likely to slow down these women when they're feeling righteous and have a not-so-sexy male in their sights.

In fact such feminists have very nearly succeeded in making feminism a dirty word via their endless pettiness and hypocritical posturing. The movement used to focus on substantial issues of women's equality, but somehow, beginning in the 1990s, we watched it devolve into a sort of non-stop tirade conducted by a clique of largely privileged Women's Studies grads who apparently could find nothing better to do than discover new ways men were offending them.

For years, the main conceptual tool wielded by these women has been "objectification"--which, as I've said, they now apply selectively to any kind of sexual attention that doesn't arise from their own deified personal libidos. If something turns them on, it's cool or liberating. If the same kind of thing appears, say, on the shirt of an overweight man like Matt Taylor, suddenly it's "objectifying women". Which means what exactly?

The concept of objectification is itself nearly useless. Why? Because every human in love or in normal social interaction shifts constantly between objectifying others and respecting/interacting with them as persons--indeed often with the very same person in the course of the same get-together. This comes with the fact that we are sexual beings; it is not something that will ever disappear as long as we are human.

And so: a man admires a woman’s legs from across the room, but then admires her wit and passion as they talk; then later, again, he’s looking at her legs; then they talk more, and he’s back to thinking about her character and ideas. Though in this way she has been "objectified" several times, his respect for her hasn't suffered because of it. She may in fact end up being someone he respects more than anyone else he knows. And of course women are also constantly doing the same thing: appreciating men’s physical charms without thinking any less of them; ogling men's abs and making sly comments barely out of earshot--without necessarily thinking the man is therefore just an object.

Yes, some of the sharper feminist theorists have tried to define the parameters of objectification more carefully, but even among them there are those who recognize the concept is inevitably subjective or undefinable. And that is precisely how it comes to be used by the thousands of card-carrying "feminists" who spend their time in a fury against the male gaze. They use it simply as a pseudo-theoretical slur to throw at anything that doesn't please them. This is why the whole concept of “objectification”, as a basis for criticism of the desiring gaze, should have been junked years ago. In itself the term has virtually no conceptual meaning.

I could go on, about women's representation in the media (usually their own self-representation therein) but I think these are different topics. The key words here are "narcissism" and "childishness" and “hypocrisy”. As Glenn Harlan Reynolds wrote in a USA Today column, some women watching the science event unfold on their screens were apparently “overcome by the desire to feel important and powerful at others' expense”:

Thus, what should have been the greatest day in a man's life--accomplishing something never before done in the history of humanity--was instead derailed by people with their own axes to grind. As Chloe Price observed: “Imagine the . . . storm if the scientist had been a woman and everyone focused solely on her clothes and not her achievements."

The best thing intelligent women could do for the feminist movement is spend some time, as women, attacking the shrill "feminists" who regularly claim to speak for them in the press. They should attack those who made a big deal out of Matt Taylor’s shirt; those who think "objectification" is a useful concept and who use it almost to the exclusion of all other concepts; those who think using the term "patriarchy" in one's critique is sufficient as analysis; those who've managed to make feminism intellectually useless through their nonstop shrill posturing.

I wish I were part of a society where I felt I could be proud to support the self-identified feminists around me. But it looks like I’ll have to wait. As long as the movement continues to demand both cake and ice cream, it shouldn’t be surprised if people consider it childish and irrelevant.

Eric Mader

Added 11/23:

Among the many feminist pieces online responding to Taylor's shirt, Nikita Ramkissoon's piece at Thought Leader provided a casebook example of the kind of thinking "objectification" theory leads to. I recommend reading it. As the reply I tried to post there at first didn't get posted, then got cut in half, I'll offer it here--for the record as it were:

If we reduce it to its basic premises, the argument you make here, Nikita, runs as follows:

1) Men in our society “own” women, so men’s attention to women’s beauty or sexuality is always an attempt to further consolidate this ownership and is thus always a matter of objectification.

2) Women in our society don’t own men, so women’s attention to male beauty or sexuality is never objectification, but rather a kind of worship of or awe at masculine power.

Really I don’t know what is more striking about this argument: the sheer obviousness of the double-standard or the fact that many so-called feminists still think such biased claims are worthy of any respect.

First, a few simple questions: Who showed you (or your feminist sisters) what is happening in men’s heads when they look at women? Human sexuality, after all, is a complicated phenomenon, with many levels. How would you know anything about the various levels or elements that make up male sexuality? How do you presume to define my sexuality, and that of other men, so precisely? Please show me your sources, if you have any, besides other feminist writers who’ve now been repeating this same worn-out urban legend for decades.

But second, and more importantly, the only even tentative logic your argument holds is based on your first premise, which is easily disproved: namely, your claim that men in modern societies “own” women.

I’m sorry, but I personally have never met a man who owns any women. As far as I can tell, there is no one around me who knows of such an institution either. As a modern Westerner, I see all the time how women are free to walk out on these men who supposedly “own” them. It’s called breaking up. And in such cases, if the man were to try to force her to remain under his “ownership”, that would be a crime and our justice system has statutes to deal with it.

So what society exactly do you live in? If you live a modern Western society as I do, the level of malice and possessiveness you project into the heads of men like me is simply offensive--those men you somehow imagine “own” you or are trying to own you. Or have I misunderstood your argument? Because to me it looks no more respectable as argument than it would be to claim that, say, “Black men are inherently violent” or “Jews will always try to cheat you.” Nobody who tried to foist off these kinds of unfounded racist generalizations would get a second hearing. Because such claims are not critical discourse, but merely bigotry. Yet this is just the kind of prejudiced assertion you’re promoting. This is the intellectual company you belong with. Like antisemitism or other forms of racist theory, your discourse is offensive starting from its very founding premises.

You write that: “We cannot lay back and make feminism comfortable for you. We refuse to work within your paradigm, because it’s your paradigm that is doing the oppressing.”

Okaaaay. Frankly, Nikita, I don’t care if you make it “comfortable” for me or not. I’m personally not interested in getting closer to people who themselves are comfortable living a prejudice that is nearly sociopathic in its extremity. But forget about me. Think of the women around you. The least you could do, for them, some of whom have posted comments here, is to make “feminism” a bit more respectable in terms of its intellectual rigor. Because at present your discourse is shabby, offensive, and bankrupt.

Yes, there is still serious gender inequality in many world cultures, including Western ones, so I would think that you, as a feminist, would recognize the work that needs to be done. Why not begin by throwing out this transparently two-faced discourse of “objectification” and finding a different tack? Sure, it may not be as sexy or exciting as the man-hating mythology you currently spout, but it will almost certainly bear more fruit. After all, evidence suggests that even most Western women are getting tired of the spiel you currently have on offer.