Never one to shy away from using vaginas to promote herself, Eve Ensler is still at it with the V-Day project, which she uses as a vehicle for the dissemination of her questionable material, most famously the Vagina Monologues, in universities across North America. Founded on Valentine’s Day 1998, the organization has pulled in over $80 million, and has staged thousands of events and fundraisers. According to V-Day’s website, “The ‘V’ in V-Day stands for Victory, Valentine and Vagina.”
Amusingly, last year saw the establishment of a group called “V-men,” which includes our old friend Michael Kimmel, men’s studies guru and and critic of masculinity. Now, some have criticized use of the term “mangina,” but what else could one call these V – and that stands for “vagina” – men?
Each of these V-men shares some story, usually about something horrible that some man did to a woman, but a couple of them really stand out. Take Jared Miller for example. A white knight and violent criminal, he admits to assaulting men on numerous occasions for “disrespecting” women:
In high school I was always looking for a fight, typically for the sake of some girl’s honor. In my twenties I was the guy the female bar tenders called on when a girl was being harassed. I would gladly jump across the bar and deal with any man that had the indecency to disrespect a woman. My motives were pure, but the methodology was obviously lacking, and ultimately landed me in jail on numerous occasions.
Eventually, Mr. Miller found solace in working with prostitutes, and now “his quest is to help create an egalitarian society worldwide.”
Bart Scott, a professional football player – a linebacker – grew up on the mean streets of Detroit surrounded by women, raised by a single mother. You’d think a big strong guy like Bart wouldn’t be insecure in his masculinity and would be free from complexes, but he suffered the same abuse that created Joe Biden, the architect of the monstrous piece of legislation known as VAWA:
From the time I was a little boy I was taught to love and respect women. What choice did I have, being raised in an estrogen dominant atmosphere? When Mom left for work every day, I was left at home to endure whatever abuse my two older sisters thought necessary to inflict on me that day! They undoubtedly thought it was funny to fold me up in the pull out sofa, lock me in the basement for hours, terrorize me with fake-haunting sounds through the heating vents. Ah, the love of older sisters.
So what did Mr. Scott learn from a couple mean sisters?
It wasn’t always easy being a male minority — but it did teach me appreciation for the real essence of what makes a woman. Even after there came the point that I was physically bigger than them, I continued to respect them; no amount of them pushing me around could incite me to raise a hand against them (and they weren’t small females, both 5’9″).
[...]
The slightest strike of my hand would disrespect that love, tarnish the gratitude I still feel for the exhausting workdays and sleepless nights my mother gave to help me become the man I am today. Every woman in my family — from my mother, to grandmother, to sisters, to my wife are symbols to me of this same strength and dignity.
Amazing, isn’t it? Bigger girls beat up on a little boy and you end up with a guy who can’t fathom why a man would ever strike a woman… Perhaps they broke his spirit.
Saddest of all is the story of Mark Matousek, a man who was raised by a mother who abandoned his father and abducted the children to run off with another married man. Mark’s mother and sister were apparently frequently taken advantage of, but poor Mark can’t figure out that it was his mother’s choice to plunge her children into this environment. Would this have happened if his sisters were under the protection and care of his father?
Here are a few passages from Mark’s painful story:
I grew up in estrogen overload, in a house filled with difficult women, the only son of a harridan who’d sent her husband—my father—packing for love of another married man.
We were poor — not ghetto poor, but borderline white-trash Jewish poor: my mom, my three troubled sisters, and me, in our three small underfurnished rooms. For a long time — truthfully, my whole life — I’d convinced myself that this single fact of my boyhood, this isolation with too many women (picture a lost sperm circling an ovum), was the most formative piece of my story — hands down — the twist that made me me and formed my sperm-headed view of the world.[...]
“You mother was raped?” she asked.
“All of the women in my family were raped,” I told her.
Martha seemed shocked. I was shocked myself, not because the information was new but because I’d never said it out loud, which meant it had only half existed.
Now that it did—now that I’d said it—a truth (so obvious that I’d missed it) blasted a hole through my story line, the version of things I’d believed to be true. It wasn’t being trapped in a house filled with women that had made me the very strange person I was, but growing up in a houseful of raped women.
[...]
These memories were just the beginning. There were more, there were echoes, the rapes continued — by men and soon enough by themselves, as my mother and sisters sold themselves short, raped their own choices, potential, respect; forced themselves into too-small, tawdry lives with men who used them as pleasure mules. The pictures came back, and as I described them — revealing so much more of the truth — a disturbingly different, more accurate picture began to emerge in myself of myself.
It wasn’t estrogen overload that had turned me into a rescue artist; it was rape overload, abuse overload, an excess of feminine self-mutilation — an absence of innocent love toward a woman.
For all his therapy, it looks like Mark was sold a bill of goods. Until he can come to terms with the fact that his mother did a horrible thing to him and his sisters and that she is responsible for much of what happened to them, all the blaming of “the patriarchy” in the world isn’t going to make things better, and in fact he’ll only guarantee that the same happens to even more children.
If anything, the V-men provide us with a portrait of a male feminist: a deeply wounded, self-destructive, dysfunctional and sometimes dangerous man. It is almost as though Michael Kimmel is deliberately surrounding himself with these types, and hard at work creating more by working to destroy families through support of exactly the kind of legal tools that enabled Mr. Matousek’s mother to remove his father’s protective influence from his and his sisters’ lives.
We have to keep in mind that male feminists are often severely disturbed individuals who have a burning hatred for masculinity, and therefore a deep sense of shame and self-hatred for their own natures. It is no wonder that some of the followers of the men’s studies discipline have made the choice to utterly abnegate their masculinity through self-castration.
These stories only confirm the importance of fathers in their children’s lives. The most disturbed of these V-men grew up in female-dominated households, and the last thing society needs is more sick boys. No, we do not need any more vagina men — we want healthy, confident boys and men who are not crippled by the wound of having an absent father. We want them to be free from constantly agonizing over the predicaments women get themselves involved in so that they can go on to do great things and lift humanity ever farther out of savagery and toward the stars.
