05-03-2017, 08:01 PM
(Edited 05-03-2017, 08:15 PM by meridannight.)
Emiliano Wrote:Donovan is a misogynist, and he has ties with the alt right and white nationalists. Your timing on reading this book is kind of funny, right before I saw you posted this, I'd actually read this article with Donovan:
http://nymag.com/thecut/2017/04/jack...alt-right.html
My experience reading Androphilia was a lot like my experience reading Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver. They are both interesting books that caused me to view things from a different perspective. They clarified some ideas I'd had, offered fascinating explanations for things, and really just opened my eyes to outside views i hadn't come across before.
I didn't agree with all of the points made in either book, I was at times made very uncomfortable by both books, and I don't particularly like the men who authored either one, but both did something very valuable for me and how I perceive things. Those two books are the ones i recommend the most.
I had to look up what alt-right means. I still don't understand it. That seems a confusing incoherent mess to me. The stuff about the neopaganism, etc, that's just nonsense. That is repulsive, and doesn't reflect well on him.
Even I don't agree with everything said in Androphilia. I also think he generalizes on gay men a lot, to a point I'm not sure holds. What he says about gay men, I'm sure there are a number of gay men on whom it holds true, there's likely even a large number of such gay men. But I wouldn't generalize past an inconclusive indeterminable fraction of the gay men in that respect.
Also, I never had a 'reversal' of my character/behavior, like he did. I've always been this way, i.e. had these standards on masculinity as he does. I grew up among men like that (not like Donovan, no, but like men he talks about in his book. Men who had such a character and expression of masculinity). I don't have a history of flamboyance or drag, like Donovan does. In my opinion, such reversals are a bit questionable, at best. I don't think a person can really do a 180. Either before or after the ''change'' had to be false.
Be that as it is, however anti-sympathetic a character Donovan comes across, he is right about a number of things. For example, the things he says about victimization within the gay community, that is true. A lot of people, and the community in general have a tendency for that, when there is no need or point to express yourself in those terms.
He is also very right that liking other men does not make a man effeminate. I myself have always thought that men who like other men are, if anything, more masculine, because they like men -- the representatives of masculinity itself. The reverse doesn't make sense to me.
He is right about a lot of things. But the means through which he tries to achieve these ideas/ideals/etc, that is not right.
''Do I look civilized to you?''