Many men got and continue to get I’d assume the message quite young that it’s wrong to be attracted to express any interest in women at all. I can’t believe this is just accidental, as it seems to have happened to a lot of us. It certainly was the message I received loud and clear from feminism even in a hick town in the early 1990s. Many other men I’ve talked with about this got the same memo.

Part of this is just both higher-class women and men’s policing of the “basket of deplorables” like me to avoid undesirable attention and mainly to delineate class and other boundaries.

I won’t go into the sociology further here, but what this sort of feminist messaging means is that the boldest, rudest and most sociopathy-tending men will continue to willfully approach women aggressively with no real consequences while those with some politesse and conscientiousness will restrict themselves from doing so. (For instance, I was in my 20s before I was confident enough to ask a strange woman for her phone number without feeling like I was sexually harassing her. Think that Caleb the Fratboy Rapist feels those same pangs? If yes, please explain why.)

I support feminism fully — but too much of Amanda Marcotte style feminism exists to bolster existing structures of power and to demonize undesirable men (while giving a pass to people like Caleb), and that is what I’m reacting against.

I know it’s not deliberate but in reality men who actually respect women or at least won’t rape them the first time they have a Coors or two get the message that “Desiring a woman or even liking her is evil and bad” while Caleb is implicitly supported in his realization that whatever he does is all good because he is the right kind of guy. Sadly it appears to me that this message comes in loud and clear from mainstream feminism as much as anywhere else.