Diving into the Dreck

Most libertarians and anarchists are not really concerned with freedom or liberty or self-determination or property or the nonexistence of property or any of their other infinite set of synonyms for autonomy per se.  Their philosophies of personal freedom are quite literally personal.  The old insult that libertarians are in it for the weed is reductive, sure, but it has the element of truth.  To some degree or other, we are all in it for the weed, the guns, or the butt sex.  By we, I mean men, and I'll come back to that.

Most libertarians will tell you that they would be willing to countenance a more randomly dangerous world and most anarchists will tell you that they understand that their philosophy, were it somehow to become actual, would result in what we late-modern materialists would regard as poverty and material privation.  It is supposed to be a mark of bravery and/or sincerity to embrace a philosophy that would see you knocked down an economic peg or two, giving up the iPad in exchange for the ploughshare or what have you.  But ironically those reduction in circumstances do not lead to a decline in the advocates' position within the structures of power; quite the opposite: the dismantling of traditional hierarchy and authority advances the lower orders in which the anarchist imagines himself.  No number of caveats about a more horizontal world, a declined West, an equitable distribution of wealth or property or political determination undermines this fundamental truth in any way.  To some degree, all you dudes imagine an advancement in the advancement of your interests.

Now, tell one of these freedom lovers that every interaction with the state rests on a foundation of violence, and he will nod in considered agreement, but tell him that every interaction between women and men rests upon a foundation of rape, and he will throw up his hands in genuine bewilderment and cry that he is never going to rape anyone!  The theory is disproven.  This suggests that he is at the end of it willfully opposed to considering, really considering, his own supposed principles, less yet to actually using the analytic tools of his philosophy to observe and consider the world around him.  It is true that not every man rapes; indeed, most do not.  Most officials of the state do not enact violence; the IRS is full of pencilnecks; the cashier at the city-county building is not going to blow your head off when you're late to renew your dog license.  Still, we have no difficulty in recognizing the web of coercion underlying even the most banal interactions with the various agents of the state, even as we are astonished at the suggestion that the patriarchy functions in precisely the same way.

The difference is that men, when confronted with the specter of Woman, Ascendent, perceive the potential for an actual, relative decline in their own status, a meaningful giving-over of their own privileged position in the world to the benefit of someone else.  Never mind that the decline is meaningless within the context of a real equality; indeed, it is the currency with which we might all buy a better world.  Instead, they yelp like a gang of talk-radio benchwarmers confronted with the nightmare that some black guy, somewhere, got a job that might've gone to a white.  Suggest that we must fundamentally reorder our very civilization, and they are all on board; suggest that this might involve a total renovation of our ideas of sex and gender, and suddenly The Women are coming in a genocidal program to cut off all their johnsons.  Watching a group of soi-disant radicals circle the wagons against the very suggestion that men rule women--a statement so banal as to be a truism in any other circumstance--is one of the most laughable and pathetic sights imaginable.

If this most ancient and unyielding form of human inequity is of no interest to your philosophy of the destruction of all authority, then your ersatz philosophy is mere affectation, and your protests to the contrary are lies.  If you find yourself confronting the word feminism with questions about how there can be a feminism if masculine and feminine are false categories, and if you are impressed with your cleverness in this regard, then I invite you to consider your own anarchy, wherein the whole object of your obsession, the State, is a metaphor and an abstraction.

Nothing is as disappointing as discovering that one's self-described compatriots are fools.