Confessions of a Closet Misogynist

I have long held W. Somerset Maugham in high esteem. He was certainly a first-ra
te Satanist, and whatever his own
sexual preoccupations may have been, he really knew women. Because of -- rather
than in spite of -- his casting of weak,
wanton, yielding and fallen women in his stories, those very females became stro
nger than his male characters. Like Milton's
heroic Satan stealing the show from the Heavenly hosts in Paradise Lost, Maugham
's debauched floozies emerged with
stronger personas than his conscience-stricken, meaning-of-life seeking heroes.
Somehow, in reducing women to weak and
vulnerable creatures, humiliated as only a confirmed misogynist could portray th
em, Maugham evoked an essential as well as
eternal female. It is that very essentialness that makes a well-adjusted, hetero
sexual misogynist a bulwark against the most
devastating form of defeminization.
A misogynist requires an imperfect and flawed yet feminine form of woman in orde
r to properly exercise his disdain. His
disdain is, of course, based on jealousy. An overtly mannish or dominant woman c
reates no dualistic yearnings and is simply
contemptible as a useless critter too proud for burden and not attractive enough
for exploitation. In other words, it's far better
to be used than to be useless. I have -- since pubescent excesses and youthful e
rrors -- been a womanizer. I was never the type
that girls felt secure bringing home to meet their folks. I always met my dates
at prearranged and clandestine places. The fact
that I appeared as a "heavy" undoubtedly elicited a certain appeal to Sweet Gwen
dolyn types. It was therefore understandable
that aggressively passive women (yes, there is such a creature) gravitated to me
. Eventually I realized that I was, because of
my enthusiasm and naivete, becoming a slave to demandingly masochistic women. If
that wounds like a contradiction in
terms, it is. It is also a very real phenomenon, which can be depleting if unrec
ognized and unchanged.
There is a great deal of misunderstanding about misogyny similar to that of the
stock misunderstanding of sadism. As
related in The Satanic Bible, an epicurean sadist does not go about insulting pe
ople, pulling wings off butterflies, or tossing
banana peels in front of senior citizens. An obnoxious person is invariably a la
tent masochist with little self-awareness that
his baiting demeanor is simply punch-in-the-nose insurance. Similarly, an appare
nt superstud insulter of women who
sprinkles his vocabulary with offensive terms for female genitalia is usually a
forlorn aggravated by them because they are in
competition for his strongest cravings: other men. He may not even admit these y
earnings to himself, so he gravitates to
correspondingly man-hating women, usually latent lesbians, and they clinically s
wing together amidst groups of other
"liberated" souls.
A true misogynist is a straight man who -- because he is a potential pushover fo
r women and realizes it -- resents the power
a truly feminine woman wields, secretly admires this power, and seeks to capture
it before it captures him. By reducing a
woman to a role of servitude, he finds himself in the role of a tyrant. He wants
to be a benign and considerate tyrant, but all
too often a little consideration goes a short way. He really loves women but the
poor things won't let him effect an expansive
and pleasing sexual delineation essential to his masculinity. He consequently ha
tes them for it. By not displaying archetypical
signals of femininity they rob him of the ultimate expression of his masculinity

.
It will be argued that the foregoing only indicates insecurity of one's masculin
e prowess or self-doubt. This is not the case,
for prowess as a man is not at stake, but rather identity and counter-identity o
f a harmonious nature are threatened. The
desired merger is one of a Yin-Yang correspondence.
It might be fair to state that a misogynist is often really punishing the "pure"
female for the sins of the "impure" pretender - for whom he would either fell patronizing ridicule or else inflexible anger. S
peaking for myself, I idealize Maugham's type
of women, just as the types depicted by Rubens, Renoir and Reginald Marsh. They
are considered "common" types, but are
actually quite uncommon. A soft, yielding, voluptuous woman with a personality t
o match is a rarity nowadays. With an
overabundance of the opposite kind, Pan would be hard-pressed for nymphs and cou
ld not be blamed if his syrinx went flat.