Image by Flickr user pikerslanefarm.

In just a few short lines from a song, and a few more from her heart GeekyVamp reveals the complete, bleak, and total lie that is "women have all the power."

kaigenlucinda:

I’m in the corner watching you kiss her, oh.
I’m right over here, why can’t you see me? Oh.
I’m giving it my all but I’m not the girl you’re taking home.
[I keep dancing on my own]

I hear this and I am suddenly a gawky girl again on the dance floor, dancing my little hormonal heart out, desperately trying to attract a boy’s attention, and trying to hold my head up high and swallow the boulder in my chest, as I see him leave with some gazelle-like creature.

Source: Interpretive Pants

I'm not sure who started the lie but it's mostly us men who completely, 100% don't realize the only "power" women have in standard hetero dating is the "power" to answer if asked! No ask, no power. None. Period. At all. In other words no matter how gawky a boy you were, or a man you are, 100% of the "power" you might complain women have over you is power you give in the first place.

This realization, which only sank in for me back in 2007 (I first started trying to date in 1973!) was the moment I realized all the attempted "men's rights" alternatives to women's rights movements I'd been trying to get my heart into (since 1974!) weren't ever going to work because they located power where it wasn't and then complained about it. Just a little later I decided to not only drop all the variations on men's rights, men's studies, men's advocacy, etc., and even drop all the variants on "feminist allies," supporters, sympathizers, etc., and it's later variants -- especially "good men" -- and just call myself a feminist. Because that was the point when I realized men and women are both indoctrinated to the same set of artificial constructs that nominally advantage men and certainly disproportionately disadvantage women, but really continue to persist in order to control all of us.

I happen to believe, as do many others, that feminism doesn't have all the answers. But there's a giant flipping difference between "not all the answers" and "wrong." Which is why I see the work for men like me -- and I'm obviously proposing for men like you too -- as extending feminism by analyzing and challenging the consequences and not just the nominal advantages of Patriarchy for men.

And it can start with something as simple as listening to little snippets of song lyrics.

I’m in the corner watching you kiss her, oh.
I’m right over here, why can’t you see me? Oh.
I’m giving it my all but I’m not the girl you’re taking home.
[I keep dancing on my own]

Oh!

Image from Quickmeme.

So on a previous post, Thanks to the Expiration of the VAWA, Stereotype-Busting Studies Like the NISVS 2010 Report Are in Jeopardy, where I lamented the passing of the VAWA and said

The Executive summary of the CDC’s The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey: 2010 Summary Report … provided hard evidence that based on available information, … the reservoir of probable victims of intimate partner violence is at least half again as large as prior studies assuming only female victims would lead us to believe.

Someone named Sig replied in comments that no,

That information has been available since the 1970s. Its just that it has been systematically covered up by the feminist movement. With VAWA and feminist agendas finally out of the way, we will have much better flow of information.

Is he saying if it hadn't been for the "feminist movement" suppressing all that evidence there wouldn't be any male victims at all? Or that no one would deny there are male victims? Or what?

If so then why when I was sexually assaulted by a young woman in 1959 or 1960, when the feminist "movement" didn't yet exist, the men and women in my neighborhood didn't take what happened to me very seriously? Why did I have to wait till 1980 or 1981 for the director of a feminist-separatist crisis center / women's shelter to tell me that a) what had happened to me was a sexual assault, that b) men can be assaulted, that c) men can be assaulted by women, and d) such assaults accounted for at least 10% of cases?

Why? She was unquestionably part of the "feminist movement." Why was she so casually forthcoming? I mean I already "knew" that men can't be raped so it would have been easy as pie for her to nod her head and let me continue believing it. Instead she was right up front about it. And, I have to say, the knowledge she freely shared helped me reconcile just a whole shit-ton of conflicting feelings I'd had till then.

If Sig was right that there was a feminist conspiracy to deny it and, worse, cover it up why would she have said anything at all?

The truth instead is that there's a social conspiracy to deny what happens, to cover it up, to whitewash over it, to look the other way, to both innocently and sometimes maliciously misinterpret what happens -- just like the jackass who helped the women in the neighborhood rescue me did when I was 4 or 5. Because really? It didn't exactly help that he said half enviously and half jokingly that I "was getting an early start." I'm pretty sure Feminists didn't go back in their time machines to put him up to that.

If feminists sometimes get caught up in that paradigm about men as always the initiators and never needing consent well, sure, they grow up as indoctrinated to believe that shit as anyone else does.

The difference is that once you start looking at the issues in earnest, as feminists have tended to do, you actually become disposed to see what's happening. And be prepared to recognize it and to call it what it really is.

As opposed to the "Sir Galahad" types -- the cops, politicians, prosecutors, judges, and other "Good Men" -- who put most of the measures people like Sig keep complaining about on the books because they just want to "help the little ladies out." And, therefore ignore anything that might befall men because like true patriarchs they don't give a crap what happens to us because to the men who are still mostly in charge other men like us are, yes, expendable.

Point being you can complain about "Teh Fehminist Chonspiracy" year in and year out (as guys like Sig have) but you'll notice it hasn't done much good. But that's not because feminists are a conspiracy more vast than the combined Elders of Zion and the Bavarian Illuminati, it's because they're really not the problem in the first place.

And by the way, no, if Sig's kind ever gets the "feminist agenda" out of the way, the way they've gotten the VAWA out of the way, there won't be "a much better flow of information." Not least because, again, do you really think once the men who are trying to crush the feminist agenda get their feet back on women's necks they'll suddenly start caring more about men? You think they're going to make foot soldiers like you jump through fewer hoops to prove your "worthiness" and "earn" relationships with women they're fighting to restore their control of? And most of all, does anybody really think the silverbacks are going to think of male victims of sexual violence (whether victims of men or women) as more important or relevant than they do now? Not too fucking likely, mates.

Image via Sowetan Live

"Don't tell your daughter not to go out, tell your son to behave properly"

This seems like a thoroughly reasonable request. I'd add that it would be nice if the society would stop indoctrinating our young men to have no impulse control.

(If nothing else this is supposed to be a patriarchy! And according to patriarchy aren't men supposed to be superior? As it stands the whole victim-blaming business is a tacit admission men's self control isn't even up to the standards of a golden retriever.)

(Important note: "Behave properly" does not mean be a "good man" and treat women differently than you would men. The golden rule would suffice.)