There is a very nasty and very sad book by Otto Weininger called “Geschlecht und Charakter”, Sex and Character. It’s a nasty book because it blames women – or “the Feminine“ or just “the Woman“ – and Jews (the feminine being par excellence) for many of the world’s ills. It’s a sad book because it very clearly has a lot of immense self-loathing behind it, projected outwards.
Weininger was very likely gay but couldn’t admit it to himself. So he asked himself: Why can’t I be attracted to women? And because the truth wasn’t an option he turned to “Because they’re horrible and empty creatures”. Weininger was also a Jew by birth and later converted to Protestantism. In his chapter on Jews there is a heartbreaking footnote halfway through: “The author needs to state here that he is himself of Jewish descent.”
Weininger committed suicide at the age of 23. He was later held up by Hitler as the only decent Jew in the world – because he had realized that the Jew only exists by destroying other cultures, and killed himself out of guilt.
So Weininger’s life is a tragedy (as Theodor Lessing put it), and almost certainly a cautionary tale. While his book didn’t make the impact he had hoped for during his lifetime (which is also said to have contributed to his suicide) it became an important text after his death. It was the age of the Big Book to explain it all, most of all the inevitable end of the world – like Spengler, like Stoddard, like Heidegger.
What connects all these people, apart from the obvious, is that they’re dilettantes. Their books are full of half-understood facts, or factoids, which all have to fit into their weird worldview which is at once incredibly precise and incredibly fuzzy. (The ultimate in this is of course Mein Kampf: “every animal only copulates with a comrade of the same species.”)
You can still see people argue for the value of some of these people and ideas. There are still Heideggerians (and what sad creatures they are, too), there are still some Spengler folks around. And Weininger is maybe the first Men’s Rights Activists of the 20th century.
Whereas Weininger was a sad case of self-hatred Men’s Right Activists are just fuckwads. The game is still the same: take some anecdotal evidence (or make stuff up) and use it to say that women are evil and rotten. So they will say things like: “More women voted for Hitler than men.” (This is not a parody. I have seen that in print, in a large German newspaper, as an actual argument. I know, I spilled my Ginger Ale too.)
If any of us still knew what the fuck we’re talking about the first reaction would of course be to ask questions. How do you know this? How many women voted in general in contrast to men? And then we’d laugh, because that point is so very clearly ludicrous bullshit.
Instead it’s presented as something “worth debating”. But here’s the thing: “Why and how did German women support Hitler?” is something to talk about. (In fact there’s just been a good book about that topic that’s sadly suffering from a melodramatic title called “Hitler’s Furies”) “Women voted for Hitler and thus are to blame” is not. It’s just a load of bull.
(In contrast “Masculinity played an important role in the Nazi worldview” is also something we should talk about – because the numbers bear it out, and even more importantly reflection based on these numbers bears it out.)
So this is the way to rebuke Men’s Rights bullshit – as attractive as ignoring or just slapping the shit out of them might be. But this is also, in general, how to think about issues – historical, political, social. Moral. “Should women have the right to choose?” is a question. When the answer is “yes” (as it so very clearly is) then we ask how, when, where. And why: we look at the biological and social facts. Which is precisely what the Pro-Choice Movement is doing, has done and will continue to do.
If we ask “Should prostitution be legal?” the same rules apply. Whether the answer is yes or no, we also have to answer questions about the structures that exist, the structures that we want to exist and the structures that we want to destory. And we back that the fuck up with evidence. Because we’re not dealing with abstractions. Come on. It’s not like Laurie Shrage is dead.