The Male Feminist Convention

Weird fiction piece by Clark Humphrey

12/2/90

From dozens of study groups and coffeehouses across the U.S. and Canada, they came to the Male Feminist Convention. They argued over which of them bore the greatest amount of personalized guilt over crimes which they had not, as individuals, committed, but of which, as members of the male gender, they were still guilty.

On the first night a collective meal was prepared in the hotel banquet room. Instead, the men of the convention shared in cooking, serving, and cleaning up after the dinner. Every convention goer who volunteered in the process received a badge of honor reading, “I did my share!”, and was encouraged to wear the badge throughout the remainder of the convention. The hotel staff had nothing to do with making the meal, but was still paid in full for the work they would have performed, according to what hotel management said was an obscure union bylaw.

They read poems personally apologizing for the witch-burnings and the suppression of women in Iran. They cheered at films of dominant women serviced by submissive men. They held panel discussions about what mainstream books, movies and TV shows these men would like to ban for being “offensive to women.” They held a heated debate over whether to condemn Margaret Thatcher as a “man in a woman’s body.” They complained that the convention’s hotel didn’t employ more men in subservient jobs (waitress, maid). They held an art show featuring paintings and sculptures of goddesses with female faces and torsos but male musculature and expressions. The final day ended in discord; all eight speakers boasted of being more truly feminist than the other speakers. They all called each other closet misogynists. A fist fight broke out.