bear bones books

http://bearbonesbooks.com/?p=163

Results typical.

Completely misses the point. Manages to validate mine completely.

Read Bears on Bears. I encourage you to do so.  It should be easy for even the casual reader to objectively identify how thoroughly most of the material presented has been influenced by radical gender feminist ideology.

Chapter 15 is on “Bear Beauty and the Affirmation of Bear Contests.”

Chapter 22 is on “Lesbears and Transbears: Dykes and FTMs as Bears.”

And finally, in response to this “sassy” ad hominem rant…I’ll quote author Ron Suresha, p.179:

“An ironic feature of hypermasculinity is that it seems to compel men to want to emasculate others.”

Pulled from Chapter 14, titled: “Weight and Fat as Masculine Drag,” which I had specifically in mind when I wrote that “Bears on Bears read like a bible for furry feminists.”  The entire chapter is basically written in feminist code.

This is not the first time I have had to respond to this kind of assault on my own masculinity. Every time, the answer is the same.

I have never said or written that I was the ultimate exemplar of masculinity. I’m not. I’m a work in progress, and I think every man is. Masculinity is something that is proved over and over again, day in and day out. Honor is a system of accounting for men’s souls.

I know more effeminate males, and I know far more manly men. Gay men sometimes claim to recognize something in me, probably mostly due to suggestion and their particular group dynamic. My enemies insist that they see a “gayness” in me that my straight peers don’t see at all. I work with and talk to straight men every day–some manly, some less so. I really don’t need the distorted perspectives of gay fetishists to validate my manhood.

In Androphilia, I encouraged homosexual men to re-examine their own masculinity and reconnect with the other 95% of the male population. Gay males love to accuse straight males of “performing masculinity,” (borrowed feminist/gender studies jargon), but gays do a lot of performing themselves. I encouraged them to examine their own behavior, examine their own rejection of masculinity–often based on fear of exclusion–and see themselves as men first, and as homos, well…somewhere further down the list.

I’m somewhere in the middle of the guy scale. I’m about average across the board. Remedial in a few areas (it takes a while to make up for the “gay years”), and not too shabby in others.

What I realized while writing Androphilia, and have confirmed in the years since, is that masculinity is about a lot more than a handful of tough-guy gestures and a certain “look.” That stuff gets gays, bears included, laid. That’s porno masculinity. But manhood has always meant a lot more to men than that, and I’m far more interested in archetypal masculinity–masculinity as a collection of values which, in my opinion, always and must always relate back to the core value of strength, defined loosely as the ability to exert one’s will over man or nature/environment.

I would apologize for saying what I said about Mr. Suresha’s book.  But I can’t.  Because I’m still right.

I pulled Bears on Bears off my bookshelf and flipped through it to write this. It’s written from a feminist perspective and uses feminist language.  There is a palpable anger against “hypermasculine” straight men throughout. The author and many of the interviewees dutifully worry that their preference for a certain kind of masculine behavior and appearance might make them appear to be sexist, and they fall all over themselves trying to be “inclusive” about their pick up bar subculture.

It’s an overtly feminist book. For furry men.

* * *

Incidentally, one of the things I will probably note in the Afterword to the next edition of Androphilia is that I wish I would not have used the term “hypermasculine.” I know what I was saying, and I think what I meant got across, but even “hypermasculine” reads as feminist terminology to me now. Sometimes extreme exhibition of masculine qualities is a good and necessary thing, sometimes it isn’t. “Hypermasculine” seems to pathologize extreme masculinity, and I’d rather not do that. I don’t really use the word anymore.

_________________________________________________

UPDATE: Ron pulled his comments about Androphilia from his site, as of 9/23/09.  But I archived them last night.

http://bearbonesbooks.com/?p=163
Bears on Bears called “Bible for furry feminists,” makes critic gag

Recently I was asked my opinion of a 2006 book, Androphilia. It has too many hyper-masculinist screeds for me to analyze here, but I do wish to go on the record about a comment he made about my book.

Character, not caricature
It will inevitably be said that I just want homos to ‘butch up.’ In a sense you’ve got me pegged. Yeah, that would be a nice change of pace. But that means something different to me than it means to a lot of gays. There are already subcultures of homos who have ‘butched up.’ They’ve grown beards and built muscle and worn uniforms and bought motorcycles. All of that is certainly more aesthetically pleasing to an androphile, but it frankly means dick if there’s nothing underneath, no true masculine character there to back it up. Being a man isn’t about lining up in faggy beauty pageants to see who looks the most masculine. I almost lost my lunch reading Bears on Bears, which, except for a few patches, read like a bible for furry feminists. The leather scene is no better. Though I’ve always found that dark, deviant biker look appealing, for all of the malevolent posturing,a lot of these guys out quickly as peace and love powderpuffs competing in a pissed-off pose-down. This is typical of gay culture; gays seem to embrace masculinity only as a pose, as a vulgar caricature of men, comparable to the drag queen’s vulgar caricature of women.
— Jack Malebranche, Androphilia: A Manifesto, p. 95

Apparently Mr Malebranche, having established himself as the one-and-only true north of gay masculinity, is so uber-macho, and his sensitivity to mere descriptions or depictions of male effeminacy is so responsive that, excepting a few “patches,” he can barely bear to read about gay / bi / trans men in Bears on Bears expressing their both their masculinity and their femininity without being actually nauseated. I mean, really, if just reading about the sometimes-effeminate traits of queer men makes you gag like a teenager giving your first blowjob, what kind of manly homo are you?

If when he says, “You’ve got me pegged,” he means “pegged” as D. Savage defined the term, “fucked with a strap-on by a female partner,” how homomasculine is that? I do believe I have him pegged correctly here — for all his macho bluster, Mr Malebranche is likely no more “straight-acting” than the next cocksucker.

I don’t know what he’s like personally, but in his book Malebranche really comes off like an adolescent. He gushes like a schoolgirl that his iconic model of gay masculinity is . . . a nongay movie character played by a nongay actor. Why should anyone, let alone all queer men as he suggests, look and act more like the reckless womanizer James Bond? Just because he says we’re not manly enough?
This is spoken with all the adolescent authority of an eighth-grade bully/closet fag who thinks brain size is correlated to his dick size. Malebranche, appointing himself the arbiter of gay manhood, seems to feel he possesses the masculinist authority to judge others’ behavior, and to instruct others to act less faggishly / more macho. Who died and made her princess of the machos?

He launches his tirade against queer male nellyness as if anyone is actually going to change their innate behavior simply because he whines that they aren’t manly enough queers, but such rants and exhortations to greater machismo are ineffective and impotent when the reader realizes that the author of those comments is just as faggy as any other fag in Fagola — except with a much worse gag reflex.