# something to fall short of. something i know only from the inside. something it is in me to become, but which i deny, and always betray. masculinity means standing up straight. it means being loved and feared by a woman you control completely. and it means being supported by women and women's love as the body is by the spine. 

# feminism, for me, is the masculine project to eliminate and dominate the feminine, which is a threat to the masculine. women have been complicit in this project, but the initiative has been men's. the feminine element which feminism makes it its business to disdain is not reducible to the female body, but transcends it. this is how women can betray it, which is what they have done in the name of feminism. women have been betraying the feminine in favour of the masculine -- and in unhappy pursuit of a sort of fulfilment they could only truly attain through submission. feminism is the female betrayal of the feminine. 

# if you are a man who likes women, the way you see the world is fundamentally sexist, because you instinctively rank women according to their beauty. beautiful women seem to you simply to be more valuable than ugly ones. (women's beauty is in fact a decent physical proxy for the good in ethics.) the manifest value of a very beautiful woman, sitting there in front of you in all her fuckability, is something that strikes you viscerally and with a force that can change your life. by the same token, ugly women can seem to you to be quite irrelevant -- pointless creatures whose only purpose might be to be helpmeets and mute companions to their unlovely boyfriends. 

# in the west, even women have become helplessly alienated from their femininity. i fear the death of the feminine, and the unopposed rule of the masculine. i fear a woman-king, a woman-king more male than any man, a slim-hipped woman whose clitoris dwarfs the endowment of even the most considerable stud. i fear the female penis. the vagina -- the petalled hole piercing every woman -- is a living metaphor. it is a metaphor for truth. truth multiplies itself. the harder you try to pin it down and penetrate it to its heart, the more it mocks your efforts, eluding your grasp like a brood of girls outgrowing their mother's care. i fear the female penis. i fear the irrevocable inversion of the vagina.

# my relationship with it is that i wank over it. i resort to it in the way an addict would. i depend on it. it's the reason i don't have internet at home, where you can use it in private. most of the porn i look at is made by the girls themselves. girls love to be looked at just as much as men love to look. porn for women is being seen. porn for women is an audience of onlookers. porn for women is opening one's legs to a lens. women are born with psychological holes mirroring their physical ones. these holes should be filled by a man's will. when they are not, women spend their time forlornly seeking men's attention in the hope of finding the one man who will fill the hole with an annihilating love.

# it has to do with a sort of sexlessness of the spirit. i fear the milky leaky physicality of women.

# don't you think that, in championing a feminism that celebrates women only when they are masculine, feminists just ratify the supremacy of the male style? 

the real refutation of the masculine is the feminine woman, in all her lovely elusiveness, in all her inscrutability. 

# well, there's a part of me that hates women -- their fragility, their vanity, their obliquity. i hate them for the things i love them for.

# you can't 'feel frightened' of being weak without being weak. isn't it weak to feel frightened of being weak? myself, i'm weak. but being weak is being frightened of being strong. i'm weak, yes. i'm frightened of being strong.

as i see it, men who are misogynous hate the fact that they're snivellingly vulnerable to women's beauty -- which can wreck their composure with humiliating ease -- and that they can't really get by without women's presence and care. they hate it that, in this sense, they will never be self-sufficient. 

# 'feminine' is the term that's being suppressed here. (and can you imagine a man conducting a survey to canvass women's views on their femininity?) i can't shake the feeling that it's a naive acceptance of the male interpretation of the feminine style that's giving you trouble, here. to see masculinity and femininity as equivalent but different is only a delusion from a masculine point of view. why give way to masculinity in this?

to be masculine, in any case, is not the way for women to have power over men. there will always be a man more masculine than the most masculine woman. if shakespeare's volumnia had tried taking on coriolanus by purely masculine means, she wouldn't have got anywhere. femininity commands its own form of power.

# 'patriarchy' is not a category i accept. i don't accept any feminist assumptions about power. i think these assumptions are parasitic on masculine ones. i think there is an inherently feminine form of power. it more than holds its own against the masculine. 

women and men have worked together. women have deferred to men, and this has been men's privilege. but women have also been privileged: men have died for them. how absurd it would seem for a historian cataloguing the grievances of men to go back through history and lament all the occasions on which men have sacrificed their lives for the women they loved. i'm not saying that women have not had a raw deal. certainly, their claims to any self-determining agency have been scorned. they have been confined to the kitchen, and shackled to cradle and cot. but it hasn't been as unfair as the feminists say. men have died for them, after all. 

in the unprecedented years of prosperity and peace enjoyed in the west since the middle of the last century, women have no longer needed to ask as much of men, because their basic needs have been met as a matter of course. but it has always been their task to try to recover as much of the spoils of selfish male endeavour as possible for the benefit of the future generations whose interests they represent. though they have now nearly run out of things to ask of men, they have not stopped asking. their power has in fact increased to such an extent that they have been able to sample the male life -- and male privileges -- as well as their own. women don't see that feminism is an expression of their power. it is not a movement of resistance against their subjugation, it is the culmination of a long campaign to bewitch and manipulate the male.

# there is no pressure on me to 'be a man' at all. it is not pressure. it's an obligation that is not imposed on me but which compels me in myself. when i fail to be masculine, the shame i feel is all mine. i know how much it would mean to me to have a wife i loved. i know how much it would mean to me to succeed. when -- time and again -- i fail to man up and take some nugatory step towards sex or success, the shame i feel is mine.

# there's nothing i lack more in my life. i need a woman's body like i need water. women's bodies bring men into the world, but they also welcome them into it. without a woman to love and to be loved by, to hug and to adore, i feel like a shadow on the very edge of things, and like a futile comment on the story they tell, or an accidental aside waiting to be withdrawn and forgotten. women give meaning to men. without a woman, a man's existence is a mere tautology. it is merely the result of his birth.

# have i worried about it! i am creepy, and creepy is me. what does 'creepy' mean? it means wanting to take without wanting to give. it means wanting to look without wanting to touch. it means wanting to look without wanting to be seen to have done so. and what does the creep do? he stares, but he can't commit even to his own gaze. the creep is a coward: he wants a two-dimensional woman, a woman who can't ignore him because she can't acknowledge him, a woman who can't refuse him because she can't assent to him, a woman who can't answer back or ever declare independence or strike out on her own. is this me? absolutely it is.

# it's true that there's nothing that interests men more than women in their twenties. and nothing could be less surprising, or more rational, than this.

# whether submissiveness is powerlessness depends on what you want. even if submissiveness was part of femininity, it would not follow that powerlessness was too. the point is that goals are never essentially feminine or masculine, whereas styles are. alternatively we could say that, when masculinity manifests itself in the female, it is always only a thwarted form of femininity.

# much of feminism's value as a cause for the political left springs from the fact that feminine power is distributed disproportionately -- and with grotesque unfairness -- to women who look good. the utopian ambition of feminism is precisely to make women's power less dependent on the arbitary distribution of women's beauty. insofar as femininity is about women's taking the roles they are allotted in accordance with men's sense of their beauty, it is admittedly a bane. i admire feminism for its utopian ambition, but i'd remind feminists that beauty is only one of the many arbitrary things that dictate our destinies in unjust ways: a project to redress this injustice in particular will always attract challenge on the grounds that x or y other injustice is in greater need of our attention. so feminism needs an account of the special severity of the situation of disenfranchised women.

i nevertheless agree that men's tendency to idealise women is regrettable. i regret it in myself. men's need for women to seem virginal and unearthly, though women may take advantage of it, ultimately does no one any good. isn't it wallace who says -- in the famous commencement address -- that everyone has to have something to worship? i think men's tendency to subtract the humanity from women they love perhaps has to do with this phenomenon. that is, the need to see the sacred reveal itself in the profane is not easily distinguishable from the drive to make it do so.