Of late, one can go into places where women aren't around and hear a man joking about what he has done to the woman he has just left, or even, sometimes, to the woman he is still with - to the laughing approval of his friends. With the older men, presumably old enough to know better, laughing the most loudly and encouraging them to do more.

Even those who pay lip service to radical feminism, a philosophy that claims to exalt women, can often be seen treating them in a fashion that would have been considered a disgrace a decade back. Once he has said enough of the "right things" for a while and been accepted as a feminist, he will then begin to do things like spread rumors at the expense of those who have lost interest in him or otherwise said "no" to him. That is, if he doesn't bully them outright. If it is he who has lost interest, the slander that will be offered as his excuse for that which shouldn't be seen as needing an excuse, will often be beyond belief. Soon, friend is turned against friend. But then, to be loyal to one's friends requires the courage to stand up for them, and if yielding to the group's decisions is expected to be a given, how can such courage be present? Can there be any true friendship?

The woman so mistreated will then frequently make the disturbing discovery that the other women around her are supporting the man and not her. Radical feminism is, after all, a form of power politics that has never placed much of an emphasis on the rights of the individual or on the rightness of seeing reality without an ideological filter. The "rare man" who sees the 'truth' is more valuable to the cause (and one wonders if anybody still remembers what it was supposed to be) than one of the many women who are committed to it, and so ends up with an absurd degree of clout in it merely for having a Y chromosome and a lot of persistance as he poltics with the membership. And, some of us might say, more regard for his sex drive than for his own self respect.

In other, non-radical feminist settings, such behavior would quickly get the condemnation that it merits. But in a setting where dissent is a ticket to a shunning, the sense of independence needed to question the behavior of someone that the group has deemed so wonderful, might not be found. And, the very doctrine of male vileness, in lowering the expectations held by those women of what they will see from men, lowers the expectations they hold of the men they have accepted. They lose the hope that they can do any better.

The illusion that he is no worse than the others provides a convenient cover for a multitude of bad behaviors and bad attitudes. It provides a way for the more dishonest men out there to spread the hostility that their actions generate onto their innocent peers, diluting it out until it has so little impact on the reactions on the women around them that it might as well not be there.

While we are on the subject of irony, let us consider a movement that calls for putting men in their place, whose members show the men who have established a place in it, a level of deference that would be unthinkable even in a fundamentalist Christian setting. How seriously should its members be expected their cause to be taken and just how liberated are they, really? But then, will they even allow themselves the freedom to think that thought or to see what has gone wrong? Those who relinquish their freedom of thought in order to stay in line with the group consensus will invariably become easy prey for the more manipulative among us. This, even as they angrily reject the friendship and moral support of those who respected them enough to deal with them honestly.

How, indeed, could one think that it would be otherwise? The sincere followers out there follow a group consensus crafted by individuals who have often surrendered their individuality, taking the ideas that they base their suggestions on how the consensus should evolve from the consensus itself. It is as if they have become part of a vast, blind, unconscious beast - a group mind, that bases its thoughts not on a clear view of reality but on the hallucinations created as it sees only what it has decided is there. Really, on a cascade of reflex reactions. If a few should join, paying lip service to the group consensus but keeping their minds clear and their vision of things undistorted - that is, remaining fully conscious in a way that the group mind can never be - what chance does the group mind have to avoid capture? Its reactions are mechanical and subject to study, while its would be captor holds onto his freedom - allowing himself the chance to be the controller, rather than the controlled. And if the requirement to lead ends up being that one be the sort of person who is willing to manipulate to trigger the reflexes of our beast to get it to do one's will, then how much can one hope for in the character of the leaders who will arise?

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