The Screen Actor’s Guild, in its annual reward ceremonies has, since the early 1990s, been referring to females as “actors.” A quarter of century later and the Academy Awards still calls women |”actresses.”

And to the studio directors, producers, chief exes, and other Hollywood moguls this must capsulize her as, at best, a minor actor, a minus player, a lesser employee in their circuit. No matter that she has jumped through multiple hoops to achieve a degree of success, stardom, and prestige, she’s still there by invite, not by fiat, and is not a member of the club.

The actress may not become the actor because she’s primarily viewed as a performer. She follows the script. Her job is to impersonate someone much like herself, to act in the way men dream her, or Central Casting labels her, and to simulate acts that often undermine hers and women’s identities. As in slasher films, gore and horror movies; as in femme fatale, and violence victim roles, she’s really not in the picture at all, and certainly not self-directed.

The worker status of SAG is denied her by the Academy (even in a period when many insist on calling prostitutes “sex workers”) because her primary purpose in Hollywood is to attract. She’s in front of the camera, not behind it, and is known and featured for being seen, for being a screen for male projections.

To the movie industry’s power brokers, an actress is to perform on screen or off–in studios or in their sacrosanct private offices, and suites, in accordance with their directorial privileges. Whether its the claustrophobic casting couch or a misogyny-loaded scene, the man determines the action. His power over her is what upholds his status and stature.

And that command cannot, as #MeToo has definitively proven, exist without coercion. Motivated by dominance, revenge, entitlement, ownership, rivalry, rejection, and demotion, these make-and-break exploiters, wield a power which is both personal and institutional, and is never separable from male sex. Nor is it separable from that of their pornographer colleagues, or from their sexist, racist, and militarist movies which have a global reach. And which makes them more like emperors than entrepreneurs

So, the stakes are high with every female actor. Nothing can be lost by her because it’s flat out risky for self and career, the consequences, psychological and physical, being long-term and severe. Self-trained, she knows how not to stir up his anger, his dark moods, his accusations, his violence, his retributions. How to dance around his prestige, while enhancing it. How to please, and defer to his whims, no matter how crude, stupid, and oppressive. How to deflect harm and injury to his ego, and coddle his self-pity.

Judged by beauty, sex, youth, and ever-changing styles, any appeal of hers to merit is untenable, as is any appeals to other women trapped in the lower end of a highly competitive industry. Subjected to lies, distortions, “favor” exchanges, propositions, demotions, shady hiring practices, and even blackmail, the actress learns the exact material cost of being known, of having an acting career, of being a muse, and a sex object.

This is what success and glamour look like. Image is the key, and behind it is the designation of whore or the actress as whore. The actor of male fantasies gets sexed. She’ll do anything because she acts anything. If she plays a mistress, she is a mistress. Even a show of independence marks her as modern and available. She must run the gauntlet of sexual innuendo and sex jokes in which she’s the butt end. Which is why men played women roles in Shakespeare: the idea of the actress was base and loathsome, and more than suggestive of whore.

MeToo proves that the stigma sticks. This group’s revelations of sex abuse, harassment, and rape are met with veiled threats, and instant backlash. The courageous actors who speak in accusation against their tenured bosses are accused of conducting “a witch-hunt.” How’s that for an Orwellian reversal? No matter the preponderance of evidence, or how long the number of victims who testify against a producer or director, women are met with a campaign of disbelief, assigned the tag of “aggressive bitch,” and subjected to general nastiness waged by and for their smug cabal of narcissistic abusers, their flunkies, and all men who uphold a culture of pervasive sexual violence.

Which, of course, assures the collusion of male actors, the counterparts and peers to “actresses,” with their administrative kingpins. In some cases, male stars even get in on their sexual prowess, but for the others, who assess women’s disclosures by cautiously couching public statements in half regrets or in ambiguous verbiage, silence reigns. Convinced of the lesser status of their co-stars, they are as willing as their power-mongering employers, to assign them as “actress,” to view them as not fully human. As the true actors, they find the Act of their superiors more convincing than that of the actress.

In sum, the #MeToo “actress” is not all that distinct, as has often been claimed, from the immigrant farm worker, or the hotel maid whom she advances as co-victims. Both suffer sexual exploitation in a stunted and poisonous work environment, are equally brave in exposing it, and suffer the same vilification for doing so. Each proves that women in high and low positions are targets of misogynous ire and violence. And they correlate as workers, for contrary to official Hollywood opinion, female performers are workers… and yes, actors.

My knowledge of transgender began when, after posting an anti-porn comment on a liberal political site, I was recruited to join one of its forums. Although I understood, and was opposed to, trans-sexual, I wasn’t sure about the term “transgender,” but flattered by such a rare personal invite, I decided to check it out.

After randomly reading several posts, I was disturbed, confused, and startled. Why was this guy recruiting me? Where was feminism? or feminist issues? And women’s voices? Why the sexist slurs? The dearth of humor? What was I doing here?

Did these guys actually believe they were women? Is that it? Did trans actually mean trans? Were they born again as if from the head of Zeus? Or had they simply given birth to themselves?

My naivety embarrassed me. I obviously took the recruiter as some stripe of pro-feminist, and vaguely thought that trans might at least include extending the definition of male, as in incorporating some strong female attributes like courage, sensitivity, patience, commitment, competence, interdependence.

But my own harmless delusion was far outmatched by their more insidious one. To them, women’s identity was a pure social construct, biology be damned. It stole the most effective insight of feminism, women’s socialized subordination, and then inverted it into a weapon against them. By making the term “socialization” absolute and not subordinating (“gender fluidity”), it eclipsed women’s biology, history, and culture thus bypassing any resistance to their trans ritual.

So it was only too transparent that women’s absence here meant men could be more convincingly present as females. In fact, the displacement of women in cyberspace, and out in the real world, was trans’ logical conclusion. Women were so indeterminate that a definitive fantasy inside a male head bore more weight and import than women’s material selves, which could be erased with impunity.

These guys were impersonating male-imposed gender attributes which marked off women as other. To them women and sex were interchangeable. Women were sex. So, to be her, was to be sex, to have sex, and to signify her as no more than sex. This was called “transgression” into some “forbidden” zone, but it seemed more like the fulfillment of the adolescent fantasy of projecting females as erotically charged.

Yikes, but this was worse. Was I experiencing the next major backlash on feminism? Wasn’t this the newest version of the erotic assumption that upheld prostitution and the porn industry? Is this what the trans-sexual had rapidly morphed into? Via a buzz-brained shortcut? A brand new, unearned self-identity, assumed by the fiat of sex fantasy?

The forum was indeed evocative of the Men’s Rights Activists in terms of its cathartic misogyny (no “sissy stuff”) its circular logic, and its callow individualism. I sensed the same impersonal energy, the kind that reeks of corporate backing, the same men’s-camp bonding, and the same vapid assertions.

Was this the beginning of the end of women’s political basis, of women’s spaces, of women’s privacy, of Title XI? If so, this would be one more distortion, one more obstruction, and one more huge distraction set up by men to occupy women’s liberation.

The few posts I managed to compose drew silence. One was about their reactionary gender politics. Another questioned the fetishistic impulses and extreme stereotyping behind it. I think it must have been in the last post that I said: “thanks for ratcheting up the suspicion level of women for men, and specifically for pro-feminist men.”

For this was not the male supporters of women marching at the end of a “Take Back the Night” march, but men seizing the banners and taking over the parade; it was not men welcoming and recruiting women as guides in their pro-feminist groups, but men squelching the very idea of women-as women; and it was not men questioning all their prerogatives and entitlements in response to feminism, but men mustering every male advantages on behalf of a misogynist agenda.

Trans was a language of power, appropriation, and sex; indifferent and/or hostile to women’s lives, and experiences. In its re-invention of male as female, it steepened even surrealism commitment to fantasy’s power.

For, if men could be women, then who were women, and who were men; or, more critically, who was oppressed, and who was the oppressor? For, transgender not only erased the “binary” sexes, but concealed the domination of one, and the subordination of the other. It was the ultimate de-politcalization of women and of sexual politics.

Finally, transgender was so integrated into liberalism that I thought it must be bound for the same normalization process that both pornography and prostitution had undergone under this convincing arm of male hegemony.

But it also seemed that transgender’s extreme abdication of reality might self-destruct the cause, and undermine its liberal base. That was a wish.

I was wrong.

• ExitMale means exit Male, not exit male. He who aligns himself with women exits Male to become male. The transgender, in contrast, by asserting his invented identity as an actual female, not only bonds more closely to Male but is assured by Male that his new sex is both pure, socially embodied, and legally ratified.

**************

“At present a stronger unconscious, psychic alliance exists between the men of the worldwide Left and the men ruling the most powerful patriarchy in history, than between the men of the Left and the feminist movement.” (116 On Lies, Secrets, and Silence)

 

“… men can, and do, live for years in the most equivocal conditions of mind about the most vital subjects, the most personal subjects…” (Sean O’Faolain)

 

“… any man is free to renounce his superior position provided he is willing to be treated like a woman by other men.” (Redstockings Manifesto)

The Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970s was utterly compelling but, more importantly, a political necessity. It was not only what the Left chiefly suppressed but, as the collective voice of women, was a distinctly different politics.

This broader, more cohesive vision, by fits and starts, became not only an integral part of my radical identity, but widened, revived, and ultimately gave it a new form.

Soon I perceived life as heavily permeated by sexism: the mass media, advertising, communication systems, the arts, sports, the social sciences, sciences… beauty contests, weight loss programs… were all weighted down by a powerful anti-woman bias called misogyny, and driven by a perpetual propaganda campaign.

I learned that sexism was the model for all other forms of subjugation as in racism, classism, and colonialism. That the humiliation, terror, exploitation, and de-politicalization visited on half the world’s population, was extended to anyone who was Other.

I soon grasped that to split yourself off from your own oppression retracted one’s political stance. It not only caused one’s own assumptions, and dominance to go unquestioned, but undermined one’s response and connectedness to all oppressed groups. It marked the difference between the liberal and the radical, the individual and the collective, the abstract and the passionate, the surface and the root.

Yes, feminism was radical. All other versions were either a motion toward it or away from it. To fail political consciousness, was to fail radical feminism. The pro-feminist who missed this point, had to realize that, if women were to be taken seriously, there was little virtue in moderation or half measures.

But the dominant 1970s pro-feminist response was nevertheless liberal. Every pro-feminist group that I belonged to or knew–then and since, either initially or soon after, refused radical feminist positions. These groups wavered and split up because they had no persona, relied upon a quid-pro-quo structure, and had no foundational principles. So sure enough, each organization either ceased to exist or became largely irrelevant.

(The single radical exception was a brief rising in 1972, led primarily by gay men, which denounced the central tenet of male sexuality: objectification. But this was immediately counter-attacked–and defeated, by the porn profiteers that kept many gay publications afloat.)

My thinking on the radical-liberal divide has been that although these two can co-exist in individuals, they represent two different world views. Radical feminism is constructed by women for women; liberal feminism by men for men. Women can function inside the latter, but to one degree or another, they are acting against themselves and other women. liberalism a tool of men’s o0p0ression in the same way porn is. liberalism is a male invention.

Radical feminism holds to a moral and political exigency. It asks the questions that all of us have been trained not to ask. It names the agent of coercive and/or violent acts against women. It commits to social reality as a basis for theory and action. It rejects obtained “consent” as a defense in a victimizing and criminal act. And its autonomy means it is non-conforming, non-assimilative, non-reformist, self-directed and, when compelled, confrontational.

So is liberal even an option for the pro-feminist? First, there’s no way feminist work is less men’s responsibility than women’s. Second, liberalism adds to the loopholes already accorded the ruling male. And since “radical” was the dominant politics of the Women’s Liberation Movement, this should be the guide.

Because radical and liberal represent opposing paradigmatic views, it means that their language, culture, and political stances are significantly at odds too. However, some issues sharply define and determine the two dispirit views. The following male-defined institutions are at the center of the divide.

1) Prostitution: No, it’s not victimless; not “sex labor,” not optional.

2) Pornography: No, it’s not victimless: not free speech, not fantasy, not consent.

3) Transgender: No, it’s not victimless; not a change in sex identity, not an entitlement to female space or title XI.

4) S-m sex: No, it’s not victimless; not play-acting, not harmless, not consensual.

5) Reproductive technology: No, it’s not victimless; not about freedom of choice, not about self-fulfillment, not about her self-determination.

The “no’s” and “nots” express the radical response to liberal obfuscations and cant. They construct, through protest, abolition and banning demands, the axis of feminist consciousness. Rape, incest, sex-trafficking, Viagra, marriage, militarism, racism, environmental destruction and other serious male-driven formations also fit the bill as distinguishable. For example, while liberals want to reform the rape laws, radicals demand “End Rape;” while liberals want to improve upon but valorize that centerpiece of the male ethos, marriage, radicals see it as “compulsory heterosexuality,” unending dependency, and male-determined; and while liberals easily bought into the “save the women” pretext for invading Afghanistan, radicals, balked at and rejected it as empire hypocrisy.

Radicalism may seem less “practical,” “realistic,” “successful,” and “tolerant” than liberal ideology but no visionary, or transformative social change can occur without it. And the male-defined world which counts on its liberal infra-structure to sustain its power, would be invulnerable, but for the subversive force of radicals.

No, I don’t expect this notebook to change the world (ha), but if it stirs up a bit of mutiny, that would be good. One of the calls of the first national women’s organization in Vietnam (1927) was: “Abolish the habit of holding women in contempt.” Aimed at men, not at “society,” it envisioned both a response and a shift in awareness. May this blog convey, to some degree, that change.

This is a notebook, and not, in any sense, one that speaks for the generality of pro-feminist men, and certainly not for the falsely-termed “feminist” men. It will say what I generally can say only to myself. I’ll write from the past and the present. Given my age, isolation, achy complaints, and computer ignorance, it will be more occasional than regular.