But negativity is an unavoidable part of life. We may encounter it because we face our problems head on, without flinching. Or, we may pretend that the negative realities of life aren't there, denying ourselves the opportunity to deal with them in a timely fashion, and eventually find ourselves confronted with problems that have become so grossly bad that we can no longer put them out of our minds. In the past, this was often the result that confronted those who tried to use alcohol as a solution to their problems. Today, we use the power of positive thinking to achieve the same unconsciousness, with the same consequences.
This essay was written by the author of the piece (formerly on this site) opposing the legalisation of prostitution. In part, it gave him a feeling of closure. This was the topic he came onto the list with, and when it was time for him to depart, he found that it had been answered in the course of his being there and it sort of summed up the experience of his stay. In writing this, he found a certain sense of release and a lot of anger went away.
The author suffered the misfortune of bad timing in life. His dating life began during that strange time, beginning around the turn of the decade, when man bashing was at its height. It was a time when young women were pressured by their peers and their elders to act as if they believed that the attention and company of the young men around them were things that should be of no importance to them. That concessions were things that only the man should make in a relationship.
While the right of women, even those who were total strangers, to comment on how a particular young woman should conduct herself in her relationships was considered an absolute that it would be inexcusably rude to question or refuse to listen to (they were "entitled to their opinions"), the young men in those relationships often found that their loved ones were refusing to discuss anything with them. That they weren't even allowed to participate in the decisions governing the relationships they were in. When they expressed the just anger that they felt about this, they found themselves asked, if they hated their girlfriends (or women in general) so much, then why did they want to date them?
Such, one might add, would seem to be one of the real reasons for the effort to arouse fear in those young women who wanted to go out. To be one of the few women present in a setting can give one a degree of power, and if one wishes to be intransigent in one's dealings with the opposite sex, power is exactly what one wants. Thus, the push for separatist feminism, promoting hatred as a tool for encouraging some of the competition to take themselves out of the picture under false pretenses. Thus this manipulative campaign of fear, which in part was a roundabout way to get some of those uncooperative individuals who weren't in agreement with the expressed theory of separatist feminism, to carry it out in practice.
It also was an expression of some of the cultlike characteristics of radical feminism, in that it undermined the freedom and sense of independence of those who let themselves be taken in by it. It effectively separated them from past friends and those who might become friends. It left them more dependant, emotionally, on those they had remaining in their lives - including those leaders of radical feminism who had been encouraging the separation. By creating a gaping emotional void in the lives of those followers who happened to be heterosexual, they created a neediness that could be turned to their own advantage. This was nothing more than a crude quest for power which, if one checks, many of them publicly announced was the one thing that a woman should crave above all else in life.
If the results seem to betray a certain maliciousness, one shouldn't be surprised. Power, as many have observed before, is the power to do harm, and a vicious spitefulness is the ultimate expression of a craving for it. By establishing that one can harm another, one establishes that the other could not defend herself against one, and thus, comparatively, one was stronger than her. To wish to be kind to someone, though, will put tight constraints on the choices one may make in one's dealings with her. This will run contrary to the very concept of power for power's sake - the ability to do whatever one feels like at the moment.
Of course, the question, asked a few paragraphs back, glossed over the difference between anger (the passionate desire to do away with a situation that is unjustly harmful for oneself) and hatred (the desire to create a situation that is harmful for the other). But even if good will had been damaged beyond repair by that point, it would not be a valid reason to become indifferent to the arrogant attitudes which were being encouraged in the women of the younger generation. Attitudes have a way of being passed down from mother to daughter, and even had it been the case that the young women of the time had gone so far that their male peers could never truly love them, it might not have been too late to give the next generation, as yet unborn, a chance at knowing better than this in their relationships. If one can no longer love the world that is, one must at least try to help make a world that could be worth loving.
But real harm was done. In encouraging the young woman to present all of her attitudes to her mate on the same "take it or leave it" basis that employers were presenting policy to their employees and customers on, the rabble rousers who started the man bashing fad managed to tap into a deep reserve of anger that was building up. Such arrogance may seem cute and funny to the person indulging in it, but to the person whose feelings of powerlessness are being validated, it is the inspiration for cold rage and eventually the beginning of true hatred. Ironically, in trying to "put men in their place", those who indulged in this "philosophy" were leading ever increasing numbers of men into a mentality that left them seeing women in general as the enemy. Leaving them seething in an impotent rage that was just waiting to grab a hold of the next woman that they established a relationship with - even if she had never been like those he had come to hate. The prophecy began to fulfill itself.