Briffault’s Law is junk science

The following passage critiquing Briffault’s Law is excerpted from Peter Ryan’s three-part essay Gynocentrism, Sex Differences and the Manipulation of Men. – PW

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Robert Briffault

Robert Briffault (1876 – 1948)

The belief in female superiority ultimately rests on the unquestioned axiom that women are biologically valuable and men are biologically expendable, because women have a uterus and give birth and men do not. Propagating this lie is a part of normalising gynocentrism in our culture and is the foundational justification that is relied upon when gynocentric double standards are challenged.

Convincing men that they are expendable with this fictitious lie and using sophistry and twisted interpretations of biology to change men’s perception of themselves from a human being to a human doing, is a core means through which men are controlled in society. When men see themselves as expendable, then they willingly go along with their own exploitation. Even when they do not, men with this perception will not support any organised resistance to the exploitation and marginalisation of men because they perceive it as futile. The gynocentric programming has done its job in such cases- Men become paralysed in a mental prison of learned helplessness.

The notion that females determine all the conditions of the animal kingdom (or Briffault’s Law13), is part of that programming and is demonstrably false. Women are not omnipotent. Rape gangs exist, female sex slaves exist, female genital mutilation occurs, the murder and abortion of female infants occurs, arranged marriage exists, millions of Jewish women were exterminated along with men in death camps and the genuine marginisalisation of women exists in parts of Africa and the Middle East (and no I am not talking about Iran).

Even in highly traditional theocratic cultures like Iran, where both men and women are restricted, women cannot do as they please. Don’t believe me? Watch this documentary14 on women and divorce in Iran. Women do not call the shots in Iran and neither do men, the theocrats and the family do. Plus one for a restrictive culture and minus one for female omnipotence. Even in the West women do not always get their way. Trump got elected despite feminists and even the democrats don’t entirely follow female interests. These are not just exceptions to the rule, there are too many exceptions to count. These are chasms that cannot be explained with such an absolutist, monolithic and simplistic so-called “law”.

In dating and relationships we can see men that pump and dump women wanting marriage, or men that opt out of relationships entirely and go their own way. I have often heard women are the gatekeepers of sex, but men are far more selective when it comes to getting married and having a relationship than they are with sex. Women might only prefer the top twenty percent of men, but those same men have little incentive or desire to settle down with them. These men have an abundance of women that want them and many men in the top twenty percent can and do simply pump and dump them.

At the same time, whilst women are complaining about where all the good men went and men not earning enough and pretending like feminism has nothing to do with it, less and less men are interested in marriage and relationships. Men are becoming aware of the bias in divorce and family court and steering clear of marriage. They are also steering clear of certain women in the #metoo climate and domestic violence climate and refusing to be alone with female co-workers or mentor them. Then there is the wall, where women over 35 experience a sharp drop in their sexual mating value in contrast to the rising sexual mating value of their male counterparts. So no, women do not control every aspect of dating, relationships and how the sexes interact in the workplace. Ultimately women cannot force men to do anything and men do act at least to some degree on their own self-interest. There are too many exceptions to make the generalisation women control everything. They do not.

There is a big difference in suggesting women influence society and taking the absolutist position women control all the conditions of the animal kingdom and by extension society. Do women control every political and economic decision made by our governments? Did women cause Trump to launch an attack on an Iranian general? Did women tell the US government to bail out the banks? The reason modern evolutionary biology does not cite Briffault’s Law as a “law” or established theory, is because the facts and evidence do not support the absolutist position of female omnipotence it rests on. Evolutionary biology and psychology recognise female mate choice exists, but they also recognise male mate choice exists too and that other factors unrelated to female influence, also influence the conditions of society.

Like the Earth not being the centre of the solar system or universe and the Earth not being flat, modern 21st century science recognises that it is a bit more complicated than women being at the centre of everything. Why does such an outdated and questionable concept like Briffault’s Law gain traction within sizeable communities of the manosphere? Men have been programmed from birth to see female approval as the mark of their worth. Mothers, sisters, female teachers, the wider culture and their female friends and partners, all inform men that their worth is tied to living up to whatever women’s preferred definition of what a man is. That’s why. It is another form of manipulation and control. In my previous article6 I wrote about precarious manhood and the social pressure on men to prove they are a “real man” and cited a video15 on the subject by Tom Golden. What was the “white feather”16 during World War One? What are messages like The End Of Men17 in the modern day? All methods to condition male identity around female approval and use precarious manhood to control men.

Naturally men have developed a perception from this programming, where they see women as the centre of the universe. This is the programming they have received their whole lives from every corner of society. That’s where this thinking comes from and the manosphere is not immune to sliding into this fatalistic line of thinking that women are the centre of everything. It is why junk concepts like Briffault’s Law still gain traction even in the manosphere. So when men like myself start writing about the fact that females do not control all the conditions of human society, some men in the manosphere perceive it as a denial of their lived experience and of their twisted and seriously flawed understanding of biological reality (which they almost never scrutinise).

It is your lived experience, it is my lived experience and the experience of every man in this gynocentric culture. I do not deny that. However even a casual observation of society shows Briffault’s law to be false. Women do not control all the conditions of society. It ain’t that simple. The fact men are conditioned from birth to assign their worth to what they do and think of themselves as expendable, does not then make them an expendable human doing any more than conditioning a human being to act like a dog makes them a dog. All it proves is that you can control how people perceive themselves by using social approval and operant conditioning. It just highlights how powerful the effects of social and psychological manipulation can be, especially when done from a young age on the target group (men and boys in this case). People are social learners and we are a social species and are susceptible to manipulation (especially when that is all we are exposed to from birth).

Men need to recognise the extent to which the lies they have been told about themselves influence their perception of themselves and of reality. Female omnipotence and male expendability are illusions our gynocentric culture uses to control men. Whilst the Myth of Male Power18 was an excellent book, an equally important book is The Manipulated Man19 by Esther Vilar. How do you convince the physically stronger sex to subordinate themselves to the physically weaker sex? Manipulation. That is the nature of the mechanism of control over men at work. How do institutions and governments exploit men whilst simultaneously relying on men to operate the system of their own exploitation? Manipulation.

Source: This excerpt taken from the longer article Gynocentrism, Sex Differences and the Manipulation of Men (Part One)

Gynocentrism, Sex Differences and the Manipulation of Men (Part Three)

Please read part two of this article before continuing.

By Peter Ryan

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An Examination And Case Study Of The Gynocentric Bias In Reporting Sex Differences:

To illustrate the gynocentric bias in scientific research and the impact it has on society, I would like to go through a case study of what I am talking about in detail. There is now a plethora of research and data showing an adult male advantage in general intelligence (men have a higher average IQ of roughly 3-5 IQ points). Despite this reality, this large body of research and its findings are ignored and kept from the public by academic gatekeepers. Don’t believe me? Watch this presentation26. The truth is inconvenient and runs against the gynocentric narrative, so the research is ignored. That is the gynocentric filter operating in science. Males are not “allowed” to have any ability of value to a greater degree than women and reporting such a thing is sexist blasphemy. Of course there is no problem in reporting strengths women have relative to men though. That gets you published, earns you a plum academic position and appearances on television.

In addition to the cited presentation, people can read through this journal publication32 for even more information on the male advantage in general intelligence. The publication contains multiple journal articles that cover the positions of multiple intelligence researchers on the male advantage in general intelligence (experts from the field were invited to publish their papers for the publication to address the subject in question). Richard Lynn points out importantly in his presentation I cited earlier, that despite the plethora of research now available showing a male advantage in intelligence, academia continues to present a narrative to the public and in textbooks that there is no sex difference.

As Lynn explains in his presentation, the 3-5 IQ point male advantage in general intelligence, can have big effects on the representation of men and women at the upper ranges of IQ. Small differences in the average intelligence of the sexes, can have large effects at the tails of the distributions of intelligence. There are roughly 5 men for every woman with an IQ over 130 and 10 men for every woman with an IQ over 145, when there is a male advantage in intelligence of 3.9 IQ points. This is exactly the pattern observed in the population at the upper ranges of IQ and why there are so many more male geniuses than female geniuses in society. Lynn went on further to explain that the difference in intelligence between the sexes, can thus help explain the difference in representation between the sexes in the higher level occupations of society that require a high IQ. He also suggested this may help explain the gender disparity in representation in the sciences as well.

This male advantage in general intelligence has now been reported many times in numerous papers, by multiple researchers in multiple countries independently of each other and using a variety of different intelligence tests and measures of IQ. When the same IQ advantage in favour of males is consistently observed numerous times by multiple researchers and using different tests and measures of IQ, it cannot simply be ignored and considered an aberration. Here are two papers from different researchers both reporting a male intelligence advantage in (or general mental ability) in the United States- linked here33 and here34. The studies show a male IQ advantage in g and also in full scale IQ. There are many other research papers from other countries (and also more from the US) reporting the same male IQ advantage. Some of these papers are cited in the journal publication linked earlier if people wish to read through further studies.

Some scientists in the journal publication I cited earlier did not entirely agree men had a greater general intelligence than women in their articles, such as- Roberto Colom and James Flynn. Other researchers agreed that a male advantage in general intelligence exists and have reported this observation in their own research and also in their papers published in the journal publication concerned (although to caution a scientific consensus does not make something factually correct, just highly probable). Richard Lynn responded and addressed both Roberto Colom’s and James Flynn’s criticisms at the end of the journal publication I cited.

Since then Roberto Colom along with his other colleagues, has actually recently published research35 finding a male advantage in general intelligence as measured by g of 5 IQ points. As for James Flynn, even he says his research36 does not show a female advantage for “cognitive factors”, despite the media distorting his research to promote the women are superior narrative. Richard Lynn in his response to Flynn, provided a number of research studies showing a male advantage in IQ in modern developed countries and from recent observations of current populations. The two papers I cited earlier from the US were published in 2012 and 2016 and Roberto Colom’s study from Spain was published in 2019. All three studies show a male IQ advantage in modern developed nations and from recent observations of current populations. The results of all 3 studies were statistically significant and had good sample sizes. There are many other recently published studies from modern developed nations showing the same male advantage in current populations. The male advantage in general intelligence is not a blip, it is not an aberration, it has not disappeared and it is not disappearing. It continues to be reported independently by multiple researchers (including previous researchers now, that were initially sceptical) and remains consistent.

As Richard Lynn has pointed out, men do have larger brains than women (the difference is not huge, but it is substantive and significant) and this can explain at least some of the male advantage in IQ. The brain size difference between the sexes and the known correlation between brain size and IQ, does actually predict the size of the 3-5 IQ point male advantage in intelligence that is observed. Claims that brain size is correlated with intelligence are not incorrect. What is incorrect to assert, is that brain size alone determines intelligence. The two positions are not one and the same and yet that does not stop disingenuous people from conflating the two positions. Controlling for other factors, people with larger brains do have a higher general intelligence. Comparing human brains to larger brains in other species like whales and then asserting there is no link between brain size and intelligence, is nonsensical when the species that are compared have a vastly different brain structure. The sexes do have different brains, but they are not as different as a human brain and a whale brain in terms of structure. It is worth stating now, that none these realities make women inferior to men. Intelligence it is not the sole metric of human worth or ability.

The male advantage in general intelligence is consistently found across racial37 and other demographic criteria38 and also across multiple countries, continents and both developed (OECD) and non-developed economies. As I mentioned, the male advantage in general intelligence is not based on one isolated academic paper, but a plethora of research. The denial of the data and research showing the higher intelligence of males by academic gatekeepers, is the same gynocentric pattern we see with the denial of the data and research on domestic violence by feminists and our institutions. In both cases such research is generally condemned as being pseudoscience, when in fact it is actually academia itself practicing pseudoscience by wilfully denying facts that do not conform to a particular ideological point of view.

It is one thing for one researcher to report these realities and quite another reality for multiple researchers in multiple countries to independently report the same findings. Are they all pseudoscientists involved in a grand patriarchal conspiracy to put women down, or are we really dealing with a gynocentric institutional bias against inconvenient facts? What is more likely in this day and age, where even saying there are two biological sexes in academia can now get you fired? Civilisation unfortunately has a history of condemning people (and sometimes executing them) that challenge long-held and pre-existing views, especially during hysterical social periods and environments- like university campuses in the West in the present day. Many universities now resemble institutions of higher indoctrination39 rather than institutions of higher learning. Condemnation of certain researchers and academic witch-hunts does not make the researchers wrong, no matter how hard ideologues attack them.

I will grant that this research is uncomfortable to accept, however it is worth noting the large overlap between the sexes in the general intelligence IQ distribution (some women are more intelligent than some men and some men are more intelligent than some women) and that each sex has their own unique contribution to human intellectual and creative capital. Intelligence is not the only contributor to human intellect and creativity. Cognitive biases can make smart people think and behave stupidity and life experience, personality and acquired knowledge also impacts human intellect and creativity. So I am by no means suggesting everything women have to say and do is somehow less valuable than what men contribute.

Women do have cognitive strengths of their own in certain aspects of emotional intelligence, social cognition, memory and in certain aspects of verbal ability and perceptual speed (The speed that someone can complete relatively simple perceptual tasks, like matching words to pictures. In some tests of perceptual speed that are more verbally oriented women do better and in other tests of perceptual speed that are more spatially oriented men do better.). As with male advantages, there is also considerable overlap between men and women where female advantages exist.

The reason I am writing about this specific subject, is because of the glee that the feminist media reports women and girls outperforming men and boys in education and the ease with which they will automatically assert women and girls are smarter than men and boys. This regular pattern by our media of promoting female superiority, has been going on for decades now and is distorting the societal perception of men and women in a highly destructive manner for both sexes. The women are wonderful effect40 is a real phenomenon and does impact how sex difference research is presented to the public in the media and within academia itself, as Christina Hoff Sommers exposed in her video41. Reporting a female advantage in a given area earns you praise from the establishment and from society. Reporting a male advantage makes someone a misogynist, especially if it comes from a man and it is about cognitive advantages men have over women. I respect the opposite sex enough not to come to the conclusion that men are superior to women, when looking at sex differences. Unfortunately it appears the same cannot be said in reverse in this gynocentric culture.

We live in a world that keeps telling men and boys they are stupid, simply because they do not perform as well as women and girls in an education system designed to prioritise female learning at the expense of male learning. Claims men and boys are stupid and slogans like “the future is female”42, lie in stark contrast to the reality that men run society and have discovered, built and invented the vast majority of the science and technology society runs on. There is a gynocentric disconnect with reality that badly needs correction. One has to really wonder why a supposedly “superior” and “smarter” female sex, would need an education system that prioritises their needs over men and boys and affirmative action and preferential hiring policies to promote women over men, just to reach parity with males. Even with the massive assistance and preferential treatment given to women and girls in education and in the workplace, the supposedly “superior” female sex still can’t overtake men in patents for inventions, Nobel prizes and representation at corporate board level, in politics and scientific research etc and the list goes on.

One has to really wonder how much of these claims of supposed female intellectual superiority because “grades”, actually have any substance to them. So let me make a few remarks to set the record straight about sex differences in cognition. Grades are not solely determined by intellectual ability, especially when the education system is stacked against boys. Effort and motivation effects grades and many boys are not motivated to put in the effort to academically achieve, in an education system that sees them as toxic and defective.

Even when boys perform as well as girls on standardised tests, boys are graded lower than girls in their actual schoolwork. This grade discrimination against boys has been reported in multiple studies and has been shown to impact boys future education. See this study43 and this study44 for discussion. There are many other studies reporting the same pattern of grading bias against boys. A common theme from the research, seems to be that boy’s grades are penalised as a result of boys not being as engaged and behaviourally compliant as girls in class. Boys are not receiving lower grades because of lower academic performance. They are receiving lower grades because the teachers have a grading bias against boys due to their lower engagement in class and less compliant behaviour.

Why would boys not be as engaged or as behaviourally compliant as girls in a feminised school environment where their learning needs and interests are neglected and girls are held up as the gold standard? It is such a mystery! Now we drug boys in school, because they cannot sit still in a school environment that tells them they are defective. I would not be able to sit still either and would want out of the gynocentric asylum! Boys and men are marginalised from kindergarten to postgraduate education. Despite the reality women and girls have surpassed men and boys in education for decades now, all of the affirmative action, policies and programs, are still overwhelmingly focused on women and girls in education. Our education system is obsessed with closing the gender gap in STEM. In contrast our education system has no interest in addressing the general academic achievement gap between girls and boys, or the massive gender gap in reading and the low male participation in the humanities, medicine and in the teaching profession itself etc.

Women and girls are surpassing men and boys at every level of education, but the stop the presses! We must focus all of our attention in education on increasing female STEM participation. That is gynocentric madness. At the same time this is occurring, men and boys are forced to sit through classes at school and at university, where they are told how not to be rapists and domestic violence abusers. Young men and boys are lectured to in class about toxic masculinity and the false historical narrative of male privilege and female oppression.

We wonder why men and boys are disengaging from education when they attend class and the subject of discussion is bringing about a matriarchy and castrating men and boys. This has actually happened45 by the way. My full respect for the students that objected to this lunacy in class in the linked video. Just imagine the uproar from feminists and our society for a moment, if male teachers asked students to discuss bringing about an oppressive patriarchy in the West and the class began discussing mutilating female genitals as a means to control women and girls. Imagine for the moment the impact such an environment would have on the attitudes of female students toward the education system. Would they be engaged? Would they be compliant and behave well in class? Would they be motivated to put in the effort at school?

This is the environment men and boys are learning in, so reflect on that when you consider boys and their lower academic performance relative to girls. Whilst boys are bored, disengaged and unmotivated from having their learning needs and interests neglected by our feminised education system, they are being told how toxic and inferior men and boys46 are in class. I would encourage people to read through the link I just cited and the account of the boy that experienced this misandric school environment first-hand and the impact that had on his academic performance. I will quote a passage of his account from the linked article:

“We were taught, at such a young age, all of the atrocities western men had committed against everyone else. We were literally, I’m not exaggerating here, taught to be ashamed of ourselves and of our gender culture. Girls were taught how great the suffragettes were and that without them they’d still be under the tyranny of evil men.

 I remember a particular class about this in history. The female teachers and female students were all laughing at the stupidity of boys and men. I remember the female teacher pointing out “all the men had to fight wars, while women didn’t, but it was always men that started the wars,” while the girls all laughed. I remember looking around at all the boys in my class just sitting there, quietly, blank stares on their faces, saying nothing. Then it hit me like a silver bullet. I was doing the same as them: nothing.

 However, after having years of political correctness and self-shame pumped into me by this so called education system, I had no knowledge of how to even discredit them. Everything they said seemed true. If it wasn’t for my father teaching me about the great men of our past at a young age, I actually think I’d be another sad fool indoctrinated into feminist ideology.”46

There are two parts in that passage that have stuck with me for years. The first part- “We were taught, at such a young age”. Do people have any idea the long-term damage that does to men’s perception of themselves, to be given the message from the school system as a child that they are inferior, whilst their female peers laugh at them. I am going to call this for what it is- This is child abuse and this is brainwashing and feminism and gynocentrism in our education system are behind all of it. Then we wonder why boys are falling behind girls in education and we do absolutely nothing to address it. Instead we talk about how women and girls are “smarter” and how girls “mature earlier”. Anything to use sex differences to rationalise away the problem and justify neglecting boys. That right there, is the gynocentric use of sex differences by feminists and our gynocentric institutions and culture.

The second part of the passage that stayed with me is this- “If it wasn’t for my father teaching me about the great men of our past at a young age, I actually think I’d be another sad fool indoctrinated into feminist ideology”. This is why I make no apologies for spending a good chunk of this article and a good chunk of my series on gynocentrism, setting the record straight on male value and male strengths. Men and boys deserve it and men and boys need it. Notice how he mentioned the importance of his father in that statement. That is why feminism is at war with fathers. That is why feminism does not want adult men around children. They want to indoctrinate our children and psychologically castrate boys.

How many boys are now deprived of fathers? How many boys without a father are struggling in education? Reflect on the statistics in light of the young man’s account. Men and boys have been brainwashed to think they are inferior and expendable, when in reality this society would not last a day without them. As Tom Golden pointed out in a video47, this is the same type of brainwashing the Communist Chinese used. Men and boys are telling us in their own words the effect this environment is having on them and on their male peers. That is why the video by Andy Man, “Who taught you to hate yourself”48 is my favourite video. Watch the video and share it with your sons and other men. It is beautiful and I don’t say that lightly. Time for society to take a shot of wake the fuck up and swallow some red pills.

We know that when general intelligence is actually directly measured, it is men that have the advantage. The male advantage in general intelligence is consistently observed after the age of 16 and some male advantage is frequently seen at earlier ages of adolescence. During childhood a male advantage in IQ can also be observed sometimes. In the other cases, no sex difference in intelligence is observed in childhood favouring boys or girls. These observations are consistent with Richard Lynn’s developmental theory of sex differences in intelligence.

Even Roberto Colom who was initially somewhat critical of Richard Lynn’s position, has reported in his subsequent research35 support for Lynn’s developmental theory. This was in addition to Roberto finding a male advantage in general intelligence of 5 IQ points in his study. There are numerous other studies supporting the developmental theory, in addition to Lynn’s own research and Colom’s study. The reason for this observed pattern in sex differences in IQ, is because of the slower maturity of boys. Boys brains are still developing, just like their muscles, while their female counterparts are finishing puberty. Like sex differences in physical strength, boys have to fully mature first before sex differences in intelligence emerge.

The notion that boys maturing more slowly makes them intellectually inferior to girls is nonsense. Even with the slightly slower rate of maturity of boys (boys are about 1-2 years behind girls of the same age prior to 16), boys are observed to either have the same IQ as their female counterparts of the same age, or have a higher IQ. As boys and girls mature, the male IQ advantage emerges and grows as the sexes approach adulthood. If we are going to argue earlier maturity makes girls “better” than boys, then perhaps we should start saying dogs, cats and monkeys are “better” than humans because they mature earlier. Higher intelligence in adulthood, is associated with a slower rate of development and later maturity. It takes more time to develop extra muscle and extra intelligence, just as it takes more time to build a skyscraper in comparison to a small office building.

In addition to the male advantage in general intelligence, men have other cognitive, psychological and physical strengths over women. Men have greater spatial ability, mathematical reasoning (Whilst there is no sex difference in basic arithmetic, there is a sex difference in the higher-level ability of mathematical reasoning. Despite what some media outlets report, males are better at maths.), mechanical reasoning, pattern recognition and systems thinking capacity than women. Men also score higher than women on psychometric tests assessing general knowledge comprehension and have faster reaction times than women. There are more male cognitive advantages I could cite, but that is the general outline.

In terms of other male psychological and physical advantages, men have a greater willingness to take risks, score higher on emotional stability (a personality trait) and demonstrate a greater ability to perform under both physical and psychological stress. Men make up the bulk of our geniuses, those with high IQ’s and inventors etc. Men do have greater physical strength and general fitness than women and even now such an obvious reality is becoming controversial to assert. Again I could go through a much bigger list of advantages men possess relative to women, but the point I am trying to make is that men do have strengths women lack and not just in the physical domain.

Why does any of this even need to be stated? For the last 50 years it has become socially taboo to acknowledge any strength men have relative to women. In the same period of time, it has become not only socially acceptable, but encouraged to promote a narrative women are superior to men. This social, cultural and institutional milieu of female superiority, feminism and gynocentrism, is all some generations of men and women have known for their entire lives and this needs to be corrected. A society that regards men as toxic, defective, expendable and inferior, does not have long before it collapses in on itself.

Men and boys are not stupid and women and girls are not smarter. The lower academic performance of men and boys in primary education through to tertiary education, is not the result of men and boys being less intelligent than women and girls. It is worth noting though, that even if there was a supposed sex difference in intelligence favouring girls, it would still be far too small to explain the large gulf in academic performance between the sexes and the chasm in university enrollment between men and women. Men and boys and their needs and interests are marginalised in the education system and that is a fact. I would invite people to watch this lecture49 from education professional Dr. James Brown, on the bias against men and boys in education and to read Dr. Warren Farrell’s book on The Boy Crisis50. There is a systemic gynocentric and feminist driven bias against men and boys in our education system and there has been for decades. You cannot expect men and boys to perform well in a system that views them as a problem and as inferior.

Sex Differences Are Not An Argument To Support Female Or Male Superiority:

I could keep going tit for tat citing a male advantage to every claim a female supremacist would make about women being superior to men. However ultimately claims of female or male supremacy rest on solely focusing on the strengths of one sex and the weaknesses of the other sex. It is tunnel vision. There is never serious consideration of the weaknesses of the supposedly superior sex (like ignoring the greater susceptibility of women to autoimmune disease) and the strengths of the supposedly inferior sex.  It is delusional to ignore half of reality and claim women are superior to men (just as it is to claim men are superior to women and ignore female advantages).

Some of the sex differences undoubtedly have at least some environmental component to them, but there is a biological component to sex differences and that includes sex differences in cognition. The biological advantages that each sex may have relative to the other, does not make one sex “superior” to the other in a general sense. Making such a general remark about the sexes is vague and nebulous and has no real practical application beyond justifying bigotry and it actually causes a great deal of harm. Claims of male superiority or female superiority are subjective value judgments for bigots and not objective fact. A person can acknowledge sex differences without claiming one sex is superior to the other sex. By presenting this information I am not suggesting men are superior to women and I am certainly not suggesting we should discriminate against women in favour of men based on these sex differences. In contrast, those promoting female superiority do not share this view and rely on sex differences to justify discrimination against men.

It is important that we understand that the sex differences that do exist, are the result of a coevolutionary path that men and women have taken together. These male and female advantages have developed in an evolutionary context in which both sexes lived and worked together to perpetuate society and the genome. The sex differences are meant to complement one another. Some people find that wishy washy, but the reality is the long developmental period of our offspring, combined with our large brains and social behaviour, required the sexes to interact with each other beyond just simple copulation. Yes some degree of inter-sexual conflict can and does occur (no biological system is completely perfect), but that does not mean the sexes have not cooperated with each other and worked together at all (no biological system that has lasted is completely flawed either). If it were not for men and women working together, human society would have died out thousands of years ago or we would still be in trees.

How The Manosphere Has Bought Into Gynocentric Lies About Male Biological Expendability And Greater Female Biological Value:

Gynocentrism distorts the presentation of sex difference research to the public and even within academia itself. There is very little scrutiny of any research claiming a female advantage in some area (no matter how small the sample size is or how poor the methodology used). In contrast there are massive efforts put into scrutinising and silencing any research reporting a male advantage in any area of value. There are bold and highly questionable claims made by some scientists (not all), about women being more biologically valuable than men and men more expendable and these claims are never properly scrutinised. There is junk science like Briffault’s law and pseudoscientific claims humans are naturally matriarchal and if only we could be more like Bonobos and women ran the world we would all live in peace. People will believe such nonsense if they hear it from a scientist, because they think what they are hearing has a factual basis to it. The problem is that so many people do not bother to check what is being said and many do not even know how to scrutinise the scientific literature. This allows gynocentric ideas to be promoted as legitimate science, when they are anything but.

What happens when science becomes so corrupted by gynocentrism, that facts are omitted and distorted to craft a narrative men are biologically expendable and women are more valuable? People believe it. Even many people in the manosphere and men believe it. So this belief then becomes held as some unquestioned biological axiom and never scrutinised, even by the manosphere. People do not notice what has been left out of what they were told. People do not realise the facts that were not considered in arriving at such a conclusion. People do not realise that the manipulation of such information to control the societal perception of men and women, controls the behaviour of men and women toward each other and toward members of the same sex.

It is in the interests of our gynocentric institutions to promote a narrative that men are biologically expendable and women are more biologically valuable. All that is required for this manipulation to work, is for people not to question what they presented with and not critically examine the research or arguments presented. Corrupted science is in many ways the perfect vehicle to spread such a deeply flawed and bigoted idea and have it widely accepted in society as some biological law of nature.

The manosphere has fallen into the trap of thinking that blindly embracing sex difference research without scrutiny, is somehow more reflective of reality because of their perception feminists assert and emphasise environment influence (which is to a degree correct, but not entirely the case). They have been blind to the gynocentrism lurking within science itself. As a result, certain gynocentric ideas have propagated in the manosphere without any resistance or critical examination. These include junk concepts like- Briffault’s law, men being biologically disposable and women having the greater biological value and the persistence of a community all coming down to the female rate limiting factor of reproduction and rare eggs etc. There is a big difference between acknowledging society exploits men and treats them as disposable and believing men are actually biologically disposable. There is a big difference between recognising that women influence society and relationships and believing women control all the conditions of society. There is a big difference between recognising the importance of reproduction to a community and believing that is the ultimate factor in determining the preservation of a community. None of these important distinctions have been discussed in the manosphere and that needs to change.

People in the manosphere need to question sex difference research and ridiculous claims that men are biologically expendable and women are more valuable because uterus and rare eggs/plentiful sperm etc, like they do the feminist wage gap and the feminist revision of the historical record etc. It is in the interests of the gynocentric gatekeepers in the sciences, to promote a narrative that men are expendable and women are valuable and that women are superior and men are inferior. I cannot repeat that enough because of the extent to which corrupted science has been used to brainwash people.

Unfortunately significant portions of the manosphere have fallen for this kind of manipulation of science, by only being presented with half the facts when it comes to asserting false claims of male expendability and greater female value etc. People have accepted the lie that men are expendable and biologically less than, without recognising that the science they are reading from is impacted from the very same gynocentric bias that permeates the rest of society. The influence of gynocentrism and feminism in framing how science on the sexes and biological sex differences is presented to the public, is not a new phenomenon. This extends back decades and has distorted our general understanding of sex differences to at least some degree.

Consider the science you are told about regarding the sexes with caution and critique all of it like you would a feminist study. There is a gynocentric agenda controlling what gets reported and presented regarding sex differences and the sexes in general and what does not. Is all of science corrupted? Of course not. Not all of history and humanities is corrupted either, but feminism has corrupted a significant chunk of the disciplines and science is no exception.

Conclusion:

As with all forms of manipulation, it is on closer inspection that manipulation is revealed. When people give simple overviews of obviously complex multifactorial phenomenon (like feminists explaining the gender wage gap as due solely to discrimination, or people arguing gynocentrism occurs because men are biologically expendable due to women being the rate limiting factor of reproduction), that should be a major red flag for people that the picture presented is most likely incomplete and wrong.

A new paradigm in explaining gynocentrism is required. The work of Peter Wright and Paul Elam in Chasing The Dragon51 and Slaying The Dragon52, was a big step in the right direction. However far more needs to be done. Later in this series, I will present a multifactorial model on gynocentrism. Biology is involved, culture is involved and technology is involved. Gynocentrism is an emergent53 phenomenon arising from the combined effects of multiple factors. We need to be mindful that gynocentric programming can get in the way of properly understanding the problem we are dealing with. Like Neo who realises he is in the Matrix and has taken the red pill but still thinks he is breathing air when he fights Morpheus and must still deprogram, men still need to collectively realise that the gynocentric lie of supposed biological male expendability is not real. It is all part of the same gynocentric illusion to exploit men and keep men ignorant of their own intrinsic value and resigned to their own marginalisation.

The tunnel vision explanation that gynocentrism is all about the uterus and reproduction, is itself a product of gynocentrism warping the mind. It is a narrative to control and exploit men. Time to see the forest through the trees and let go of it.

 Time to fully deprogram from gynocentrism. Drop the false gynocentric fatalism of believing in male biological disposability and embrace your real intrinsic male value.

References:

26. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSLoiFSpp0g

  1. https://mankindquarterly.org/archive/issue/58-1
  2. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886911002212
  3. https://search.proquest.com/openview/db73c91bd057a53f3deb1a3cae4aacf0/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=30967
  4. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330058508_Testing_the_developmental_theory_of_sex_differences_in_intelligence_using_latent_modeling_Evidence_from_the_TEA_Ability_Battery_BAT-7
  1. https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/beautiful-minds/201207/men-women-and-iq-setting-the-record-straight
  2. http://helmuthnyborg.dk/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Publ_2015_Sex-differences-across-diffferent-racial-ability-levels.pdf
  3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5AkgRj2KgA
  4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jEQYHAFfjg
  5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_are_wonderful_effect
  6. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhm_HZ9twMg
  7. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/real-men-dont-write-blogs/201703/memo-our-sons-and-grandsons-the-future-is-female
  8. http://ftp.iza.org/dp5973.pdf
  9. https://mitili.mit.edu/sites/default/files/project-documents/SEII-Discussion-Paper-2016.07-Terrier.pdf
  10. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgrFdtHWtQU
  11. https://avoiceformen.com/boys/generation-z-boys-in-modern-britain/
  12. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wSZVm7PXlM
  13. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64nFPc93idc
  14. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LafoOGN-obQ
  15. https://www.amazon.com.au/Boy-Crisis-Boys-Struggling-About/dp/1942952716
  16. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VygKQV-hEpY
  17. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5WLNMX4COA
  18. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence

Gynocentrism, Sex Differences and the Manipulation of Men (Part Two)

Please read part one of this article first.

By Peter Ryan

genetics genome genes commons

How Sex Differences Are Used To Propagate A False Narrative That Men Are Inferior And Expendable:

The manipulation of men does rely on framing sex differences to support a narrative men are inferior to women and that men are biologically expendable. There is a misplaced belief in the manosphere that feminism takes the position that the sexes are the same and that any sex differences that exist are due to socialisation. This is wrong. Feminists are quite happy to emphasise sex differences if it is to women’s social advantage, or helps support a narrative in female superiority. The manosphere needs to carefully evaluate claims of innate sex differences and not just assume there is no gynocentric agenda behind those in the media and academia that promote such claims. The feminist infestation in our academic institutions and mainstream media is extensive these days.

Feminists are quite happy to point out the greater physical aggression of men and erroneously associate it all back to testosterone and argue male violence is innate. This is despite the abundant research showing that aggression in men does not originate from testosterone and that testosterone can actually result in selfless acts. Please watch this short but informative video20 from accomplished behavioural scientist Prof. Sapolsky and this documentary21, on what the research actually shows on the effects of testosterone. Testosterone does not make men violent brutes.

Testosterone acts as a behavioural amplifier and drives men to seek status. The male sex hormone does not actually cause aggression and violence. Testosterone amplifies aggression and violent tendencies that have already been previously triggered by other processes in the brain by the environment under certain contexts. Even then this amplification depends on prior social learning and also the interplay with other hormones and biochemical processes. In contrast testosterone can also promote selfless acts. In reality testosterone amplifies both good and bad aspects of human behaviour to drive men to acquire status. At one extreme you have men like Jesus Christ and at the other extreme you have Adolf Hitler. People cannot acknowledge the worst in men and ignore the good and then claim they are accurately representing men (as feminists do).  Testosterone is not toxic and neither are men. Men are human beings and like women they can be good, bad and everything in between.

A society that treats men as disposable utilities and with no compassion and ignores boys that are physically and sexually abused (including by adult women that abuse boys), will produce male violence and violent men. This will direct testosterone to amplify negative behaviours, rather than positive behaviours. How we treat men and boys and their well-being, has far more to do with male aggression and violence than testosterone. A major contradiction society has with male violence that feminists fail to acknowledge, is that we are actually quite happy for men to be violent as long as it serves societies needs and protects women. We have forced men through conscription to fight each other in wars and then feminists blame men for being violent in wars men were forced to participate in. This is despite the fact millions of men had no choice in the matter.

I also note feminists are silent on the indirect violence women initiate by getting men to be violent for them (like women hiring hitmen to murder their husband’s, which actually happens more often than people think) and the psychological and social violence of women (women and girls often bully each other this way and it can drive other girls to suicide). The misuse of the legal system as a weapon in divorce and family court to marginalise countless fathers and alienate children from their dads, is also a frequent form of female violence in society that is not identified as the violence that it is.

Feminists are also silent on the physical violence of women in intimate partner relationships. This is despite clear research findings22 that female violence is actually a substantial fraction of domestic violence and that women are actually the majority of perpetrators when only one partner is violent in the relationship. This feminist pattern of selectivity with facts, is not limited to violence and aggression. Feminists are quite happy to embrace biological sex differences when transgenderism threatens the exclusivity of female privileges and ignore these same biological sex differences when they are inconvenient. Bigots are selective in the facts they acknowledge and the manosphere needs to recognise that feminism is absolutely okay with emphasising sex differences to pedestalise women.

People need to recognise that for the last fifty years and particularly the last thirty years, feminism has been able to heavily influence our media, academia and educational institutions with little resistance and shape the public perception of how we see men and women. Feminism has not been arguing men and women are the same. Feminists have been arguing women are superior to men. The culture has been saturated with the following messages for decades: Mothers are brilliant and dads are bumbling fools. Women are peaceful and men are violent. Men are inherent rapists and domestic  violence abusers and women are their victims. Adult men are potential pedophiles that cannot be left around children, adult women are always safe around kids. The examples go on like this. Feminism has relentlessly pushed the message that women are better than men and contributed to these bigoted beliefs forming. It is only in areas where it is to the benefit of women to support sameness, that feminists argue the sexes are identical.

Many boys have now been raised with no father and educated in a gynocentric school system and exposed to a gynocentric culture, in which they are told men are obsolete, the future is female and boys are stupid. That is going to impact how boys see themselves and other men in relation to women and not for the better. We can see the impact of this mass brainwashing on society just by asking people on the street like this man did23. Society has been manipulated to perceive women as being above men and that does influence how society treats men relative to women and how men treat themselves in relation to women (especially the younger generations of men, that have known nothing but a consistent cultural message that they are inferior because they are male).

How Gynocentrism Distorts Our Understanding Of The Science Of Sex Differences:

People think that feminism and gynocentrism in academia have not impacted the sciences- They have. Human sex difference biology, psychology and evolution is presented to society through a gynocentric lens. Yet the reality that a gynocentric bias operates in science like it does in the rest of society, does not appear to have been acknowledged by some people in the manosphere quoting questionable research, concepts (like Briffault’s law), books and news articles presenting science on sex differences.

Gynocentrism in the coverage of sex difference science exists. That is why you get books from scientists preaching female superiority such as, The Natural Superiority Of Women24 and Women After All25. It is why you get the willful denial of inconvenient research in academia on sex differences in intelligence26, greater male variability and male genius27 and on single motherhood and the importance of fatherhood28, that does not go with the gynocentric narrative. Stating facts that do not support the view women are superior to men, does not then make someone a male supremacist that supports male superiority. However that is exactly how such researchers are framed in supposedly objective academic circles, when they bring up facts that run against gynocentrism. These same academic thought police, don’t seem too fussed about half-baked arguments women are superior to men though.

So rest assured the gynocentric bias in wider society, is also present in the sciences concerning research on sex differences. Men are persuaded by facts and logic and so gynocentric academics crafting a narrative of male inferiority and supposed male biological expendability, by using cherry picked science and omitting inconvenient facts without acknowledgement29, is a great way to control the male mind and maintain the narrative women are superior to men in the wider culture. As I have written about, our institutions have a vested interest in keeping men down and thriving off their exploitation. Manipulating sex difference research to promote a message in academia and the media that men are genetically defective, inferior and biologically expendable, is a means to persuade people that gynocentric bigotry has some justification and rational basis to it.

It is all about framing facts to paint a desired picture and omitting facts that are inconvenient. Just as in the performance of a magic trick, or the mainstream media editing interview footage to suit an agenda, the manipulation of scientific information to persuade people to accept a narrative in female superiority, requires proper framing so that people do not notice what is not written about and what is left out. This is especially effective if your audience is interested in science and yet does not have much formal knowledge of science and cannot critically evaluate the positions presented or notice what is omitted and ignored (which is a great deal for those making sophist and pseudoscientific arguments to support a narrative of female superiority).

Is the entire scientific community like this? No. However there is a significant gynocentric influence within the scientific community in maintaining the gynocentric narrative that women are valuable and superior and men are expendable and inferior. Some of it is unintentional and just a result of years of gynocentric programming that everyone including scientists have been shaped by. When you are taught to perceive and interpret things a certain way from birth and your gynocentric colleagues validate preconceived assumptions about men and women, that will affect how you conduct research and how you draw conclusions. Such a gynocentric bias applies even for scientists supposedly pursuing objective truth.

Certain cohorts of the scientific community do police how science is presented to the public and make sure it is kept within the gynocentric Overton window of approved discourse. Just look at the example on greater male variability and male genius I cited earlier in this article. Janice Fiamengo has also discussed in a recent video30 , the alarming feminist gatekeeping and thought policing going on in the hard sciences at major universities. I would highly encourage people to watch Janice’s video, it will shock you. The reality is there is feminist authoritarian oversight present in the sciences at universities. The feminist control of academia and academic research, is not just confined to the humanities. I can cite multiple examples of researchers being silenced for going outside the gynocentric Overton window and the authoritarian feminist control of science. These are not isolated incidents, it is a pervasive problem.

There is some level of institutional gynocentric bias in scientific research and there are academics that harbour and espouse such views as maleness being a birth defect31. Just imagine for the moment if an academic dared to suggest being female was a birth defect, or that females were the simpler less enhanced sex. What do people think the reaction would be? Again the common thread with such claims of female superiority, is that those promoting it present only half the facts on sex differences that are convenient (and omit the other half of the facts that are inconvenient) to promoting their narrative.

In part 3 of this article I will examine a case study of gynocentric bias in scientific research, where I think the manosphere has gone wrong with discussing sex differences and what we can do to correct things. I will then present my final thoughts on this subject.

References:

    1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4W3WSJ8F78
    2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0Iq45Nbevk
    3. https://domesticviolenceresearch.org/domestic-violence-facts-and-statistics-at-a-glance/
    4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxpX6IQ3GY4
    5. https://www.amazon.com/Natural-Superiority-Women-5th/dp/076198982X
    6. https://www.amazon.com/Women-After-All-Evolution-Supremacy/dp/0393352315/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=women+after+all&qid=1579516088&s=books&sr=1-1
    7. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSLoiFSpp0g
    8. https://quillette.com/2018/09/07/academic-activists-send-a-published-paper-down-the-memory-hole/
    9. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fD-XfL7wb4
    10. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40806-015-0029-1
    11. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bmgrsvoh_cw
    12. https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2015/04/16/400075715/is-it-sexist-to-say-that-women-are-superior-to-men

Gynocentrism, Sex Differences and the Manipulation of Men (Part One)

This article is in three parts. This is part one.

By Peter Ryan

gynocentrism genes commons

Moving Beyond A False Gynocentric Understanding Of Biology:

As I have discussed in previous articles, there is a widely held belief in our gynocentric culture and even in the manosphere, that women are more biologically valuable than men because they are the rate limiting factor of reproduction and men are supposedly expendable. I have explained in great detail why this is not the case in the following articles and have covered every common argument that is used to justify this false and factually incorrect claim:

This claim is pervasive and is the foundation of the core belief in female superiority that drives gynocentrism in our culture. That is why I have written so much about it. Maintaining the lie that men are expendable and only women are valuable in the culture, is critical to maintaining gynocentrism. The claim of greater female biological value, is sometimes used to explain the origins of gynocentrism and even justify gynocentrism in society. Ironically this claim is actually a product of gynocentrism itself. In reality the two sexes have equal biological value, but biological value manifests itself differently in each sex. In women biological value is generally more focused on reproductive output and in men biological value is generally more focused on survival output. Of course there is considerable overlap (the sexes are more alike than different7) between the sexes and exceptions, but that is the general pattern.

There are some people that erroneously suggest that sexual selection is greater than natural selection and therefore reproduction is more important than survival. This is factually incorrect and can be debunked quite easily. If an organism does not survive long enough, it either does not reproduce or does not reproduce at a frequency that preserves its lineage, or its offspring die and the lineage dies with them. There is an equilibrium between sexual selection and natural selection. If the fitness benefits of sexual selection of a particular trait, are outweighed by the fitness costs of that trait arising from reduced survival, then natural selection will override sexual selection.

It is correct that certain traits can arise in a species that may enhance reproduction at the cost of reduced survival, but this can only develop to a certain degree (and the reverse can occur too where survival is enhanced at the cost of reproduction, in circumstances where the net fitness benefit of survival is greater). Positive feedback loops in sexual selection can occur, this is sometimes identified as Fisherian runaway selection8. However eventually such a process terminates when costs to survival become too high and natural selection pressure begins to exceed sexual selection pressure. In a species where this does not occur soon enough, a species will become extinct (like the Irish Elk). Over billions of years, evolution has eliminated species that reproduced at the expense of their own survival in an unsustainable manner. Sexual selection and reproduction are not biological absolutes that exist in a vacuum. Natural selection can override sexual selection and impacts on survival can be more important to evolutionary success than impacts on reproduction.

Each sex has its own optimal life history strategy to propagate the genome. There is overlap between the sexes, but there are also differences. One key difference between males and females, arises from the greater evolutionary success for males in taking on high risk and high effort challenges and hardships, that have a high return or benefit. A man that risks his life to earn social status or acquire resources, may win big and this may greatly increase his mating opportunities and the frequency with which he passes on his genes. Women thanks to their uteri, are limited to reproducing much more slowly and also incur a cost or risk to their primary reproductive function from taking on such risky hardships.

This basic sex difference, is just one of the reasons why men more so than women, are prepared to take on risks and challenges and engage in hardships. It is also one of the key reasons why men are less able to elicit support and protection from society and why women are more capable in doing so. Taking on risks and hardships requires self-reliance and independence from the support and protection from society. Developing traits that elicit support and protection from society, is at least to some degree (but not in an absolute sense) incompatible with male life history strategy. It is not a supposedly greater biological value of women that is behind society providing greater support and protection to women, it is a difference in the manner in which males and females optimise their evolutionary success that has in part led to this difference in societal concern.

We do have a predisposition9 to show greater concern for female well-being in certain contexts. That it is a reality and it has nothing to do with women being biologically more valuable than men. Eliciting support and protection from society is a strength that women possess in greater abundance than men, because it is more aligned with women’s life history strategy. A certain underlying biological bias toward supporting and protecting women over men does exist. It is important to remember though as I cited before, that whilst sex differences exist, the sexes are more similar than they are different. Both sexes for instance have evolved and display neotenous features. Our sexual dimorphism is intermediate and not huge like some other animals. So whilst an underlying bias to support and protect women over men may exist, it is not necessarily a huge chasm like sex differences in many other species. It is also important to recall as I mentioned in the normalisation of gynocentrism10, that human civilisation has arisen from a capacity to make intelligent decisions and control and where necessary inhibit our instinctual impulses. The biases and impulses that drive gynocentric behaviour can be controlled and overcome to a substantial degree.

We can overcome our biases as a society provided that:

  1. We are aware of them.
  2. We recognise the need to address them as beneficial and worthwhile to our society.
  3. We introduce social and legal measures into our culture and society to keep them in check.
  4. We recognise and counter efforts to undermine those social and legal measures (like addressing attacks on due process and freedom of speech).

Racism has a biological basis to it, as politically incorrect and as troubling as that sounds. Humans are tribalistic by nature and we have in-groups and out-groups. However we have made efforts to address racism in our culture, in our legal system and in our institutions. We are not slaves to innate biological sexism or racism, with no capacity to change our behaviour. We had slavery and legally and socially sanctioned discrimination in the West for hundreds of years based on racist bigotry and we overcame that. What change seems impossible in the present, actually is not so impossible. Slaves thought the same thing centuries ago and look where we are now.

In my previous article6, I mentioned that ironically in some ways feminism has actually demonstrated our capacity to override biology. Feminism has created large numbers of childless women, whose lineage will die with them. Where feminism has taken hold, many societies are pursuing a path that is in contravention to our biological imperative and the populations are failing to replace themselves and continue their lineages. Whilst culture is indeed informed by biology, it is not completely and absolutely restricted by it. Culture also can and does shape biology to some degree (read these articles here11 and here12).

Part of the evolutionary advantage of culture, is to extend behaviour to a certain degree beyond the current evolved biological envelope and allow radical adaptation. Such radical adaptation is not possible if culture is completely unable to go beyond biological predispositions. This is why we can get things like feminism emerging in human society. It is why we can overcome our tribalistic tendencies and overcome racism. It is why we don’t have a society where it is a free-for-all and survival of the fittest. It why we are able invest in activities that are so abstract and distant from the biological activities directly related to genome propagation.

I am not suggesting that there is no biological basis to gynocentrism. What I am suggesting is that the biological basis to gynocentrism does exist and has nothing to do with women being more valuable than men and more to do with the positive and negative effects of our evolved sex differences that arose from each sex having a different strategy in passing on their genes. I am suggesting that whilst certain biases have a partial biological basis to them, like our bias toward female neoteny, we can still manage and overcome these biases. I am not suggesting we can completely eliminate gynocentrism, I am suggesting we can substantially reduce it. Just as we cannot completely eliminate racism, we can and have been able to substantially reduce it. Slavery is no longer a mainstream practice in the West as it was for centuries. Hanging people of a particular skin colour from a tree is not socially or legally acceptable either and racism is not socially or legally sanctioned in society. These are all massive leaps forward that we have taken and positive leaps. Pockets of racism exist, but racism is no longer normalised throughout mainstream society. We can do the same with gynocentrism.

The fatalistic thread of the manosphere, is not achieving anything except keeping men in a perpetual state of learned helplessness. Men are valuable and men do matter. As I mentioned at the start of this article, gynocentrism is based on the core belief women are superior to men. The belief in female superiority ultimately rests on the unquestioned axiom women are biologically valuable and men are biologically expendable, because women have a uterus and give birth and men do not. Propagating this lie is a part of normalising gynocentrism in our culture and is the foundational justification that is relied upon when gynocentric double standards are challenged.

Convincing men that they are expendable with this fictitious lie and using sophistry and twisted interpretations of biology to change men’s perception of themselves from a human being to a human doing, is a core means through which men are controlled in society. When men see themselves as expendable, then they willingly go along with their own exploitation. Even when they do not, men with this perception will not support any organised resistance to the exploitation and marginalisation of men because they perceive it as futile. The gynocentric programming has done its job in such cases- Men become paralysed in a mental prison of learned helplessness.

Briffault’s “Law”:

The notion that females determine all the conditions of the animal kingdom (or Briffault’s Law13), is part of this programming and demonstrably false. Women are not omnipotent. Rape gangs exist, female sex slaves exist, female genital mutilation occurs, the murder and abortion of female infants occurs, arranged marriage exists, millions of Jewish women were exterminated along with men in death camps and the genuine marginisalisation of women exists in parts of Africa and the Middle East (and no I am not talking about Iran). Even in highly traditional theocratic cultures like Iran, where both men and women are restricted, women cannot do as they please. Don’t believe me? Watch this documentary14 on women and divorce in Iran. Women do not call the shots in Iran and neither do men, the theocrats and the family do. Plus one for a restrictive culture and minus one for female omnipotence. Even in the West women do not always get their way. Trump got elected despite feminists and even the democrats don’t entirely follow female interests. These are not just exceptions to the rule, there are too many exceptions to count. These are chasms that cannot be explained with such an absolutist, monolithic and simplistic so-called “law”.

In dating and relationships we can see men that pump and dump women wanting marriage, or men that opt out of relationships entirely and go their own way. I have often heard women are the gatekeepers of sex, but men are far more selective when it comes to getting married and having a relationship than they are with sex. Women might only prefer the top twenty percent of men, but those same men have little incentive or desire to settle down with them. These men have an abundance of women that want them and many men in the top twenty percent can and do simply pump and dump them.

At the same time, whilst women are complaining about where all the good men went and men not earning enough and pretending like feminism has nothing to do with it, less and less men are interested in marriage and relationships. Men are becoming aware of the bias in divorce and family court and steering clear of marriage. They are also steering clear of certain women in the metoo# climate and domestic violence climate and refusing to be alone with female co-workers or mentor them. Then there is the wall, where women over 35 experience a sharp drop in their sexual mating value in contrast to the rising sexual mating value of their male counterparts. So no, women do not control every aspect of dating, relationships and how the sexes interact in the workplace. Ultimately women cannot force men to do anything and men do act at least to some degree on their own self-interest. There are too many exceptions to make the generalisation women control everything. They do not.

There is a big difference in suggesting women influence society and taking the absolutist position women control all the conditions of the animal kingdom and by extension society. Do women control every political and economic decision made by our governments? Did women cause Trump to launch an attack on an Iranian general? Did women tell the US government to bail out the banks? The reason modern evolutionary biology does not cite Briffault’s Law as a “law” or established theory, is because the facts and evidence do not support the absolutist position of female omnipotence it rests on. Evolutionary biology and psychology recognise female mate choice exists, but they also recognise male mate choice exists too and that other factors unrelated to female influence, also influence the conditions of society.

Gynocentrism And The Psychological Manipulation Of Men:

Like the Earth not being the centre of the solar system or universe and the Earth not being flat, modern 21st century science recognises that it is a bit more complicated than women being at the centre of everything. Why does such an outdated and questionable concept like Briffault’s Law gain traction within sizeable communities of the manosphere? Men have been programmed from birth to see female approval as the mark of their worth. Mothers, sisters, female teachers, the wider culture and their female friends and partners, all inform men that their worth is tied to living up to whatever women’s preferred definition of what a man is. That’s why. It is another form of manipulation and control. In my previous article6 I wrote about precarious manhood and the social pressure on men to prove they are a “real man” and cited a video15 on the subject by Tom Golden. What was the “white feather”16 during World War One? What are messages like The End Of Men17 in the modern day? All methods to condition male identity around female approval and use precarious manhood to control men.

Naturally men have developed a perception from this programming, where they see women as the centre of the universe. This is the programming they have received their whole lives from every corner of society. That’s where this thinking comes from and the manosphere is not immune to sliding into this fatalistic line of thinking that women are the centre of everything. It is why junk concepts like Briffault’s Law still gain traction even in the manosphere. So when men like myself start writing about the fact that females do not control all the conditions of human society, some men in the manosphere perceive it as a denial of their lived experience and of their twisted and seriously flawed understanding of biological reality (which they almost never scrutinise).

It is your lived experience, it is my lived experience and the experience of every man in this gynocentric culture. I do not deny that. However even a casual observation of society shows Briffault’s law to be false. Women do not control all the conditions of society. It ain’t that simple. The fact men are conditioned from birth to assign their worth to what they do and think of themselves as expendable, does not then make them an expendable human doing any more than conditioning a human being to act like a dog makes them a dog. All it proves is that you can control how people perceive themselves by using social approval and operant conditioning. It just highlights how powerful the effects of social and psychological manipulation can be, especially when done from a young age on the target group (men and boys in this case). People are social learners and we are a social species and are susceptible to manipulation (especially when that is all we are exposed to from birth).

Men need to recognise the extent to which the lies they have been told about themselves influence their perception of themselves and of reality. Female omnipotence and male expendability are illusions our gynocentric culture uses to control men. Whilst the Myth of Male Power18 was an excellent book, an equally important book is The Manipulated Man19 by Esther Vilar. How do you convince the physically stronger sex to subordinate themselves to the physically weaker sex? Manipulation. That is the nature of the mechanism of control over men at work. How do institutions and governments exploit men whilst simultaneously relying on men to operate the system of their own exploitation? Manipulation.

Please continue on to part two of this article.

References:

  1. https://gynocentrism.com/2019/04/29/gynocentrism-and-the-golden-uterus-part-one/
  2. https://gynocentrism.com/2019/05/02/gynocentrism-and-the-golden-uterus-part-two/
  3. https://gynocentrism.com/2019/08/19/gynocentrism-and-the-value-of-men-part-one/
  4. https://gynocentrism.com/2019/08/19/gynocentrism-and-the-value-of-men-part-two/
  5. https://gynocentrism.com/2020/01/10/the-nature-of-male-value-and-our-gynocentric-culture-part-one/
  6. https://gynocentrism.com/2020/01/10/the-nature-of-male-value-and-our-gynocentric-culture-part-two/
  7. https://gynocentrism.com/2018/03/03/jordan-peterson-on-psychological-differences-similarities-between-the-sexes/
  8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisherian_runaway
  9. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1948550616647448
  10. https://gynocentrism.com/2018/06/30/the-normalisation-of-gynocentrism/
  11. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20140410-can-we-drive-our-own-evolution
  12. https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10456
  13. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Briffault#Pseudo-Briffault’s_law
  14. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYaRb070r8E
  15. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6EF00RL88M
  16. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_feather#World_War_I
  17. https://www.amazon.com/End-Men-Rise-Women/dp/1594488045
  18. https://www.amazon.com.au/Myth-Male-Power-Warren-Farrell/dp/0425181448
  19. https://www.amazon.com.au/Manipulated-Man-Esther-Vilar/dp/1905177178

Tradwives, Modwives and Feminists

anchor-couple-fingers-friends Commons

There’s been a lot of discussion lately on a return to traditional gender roles as a way to reverse the ill effects of feminism. We see it promoted by advocates for traditionalism, in which men and women are called to adhere to strict ‘gender roles’ – eg. he is head of household who goes out and earns the money and protects her, while she makes babies, apple pies, and keeps the house clean. Its what many people refer to as the ‘two-spheres doctrine’ in which men and women are apportioned sovereignty over different realms – he over the political and social realm, and she over the domestic realm. This, argue the advocates of traditional gender roles, creates a delicate but eminently workable balance that has stood the test of time.
He put her up on a pedestal July 1958 P012629
The fantasy of a return to the ‘good old days’ when men were masculine and chivalrous, and women were feminine and ladylike, has run strong through the manosphere and beyond, whether promoted by Anthony “Dream” Johnson and his traditionalism-promoting convention, or women like Suzanne Venker who specialize in promoting traditional roles for women.

I note Mike Buchanan of J4MB recently posted a link on his blog titled Tradwives – women who are bucking feminism, which leads to an article with the byline ‘Submitting to my husband like it’s 1959?: Why I became a #TradWife:

And inevitably, it has become a ‘thing’ for a woman to actually admit that she wants a role as full-time housewife and mother. It’s being called a Tradwife, short for traditional wife, though it was only ever a short-lived tradition for most people… Search the hashtag ‘#tradwife’ on social media and you’ll see images of cooked dinners and freshly-baked cakes with captions like, “A woman’s place is in the home” or “Trying to be a man is a waste of a woman”.

There is a lot to that last statement, just as it is a waste of a man trying to be a woman. As Sweden has discovered, the more you try making men and women the same, the more they will emphasise their differences.1

I have also witnessed an occasional media article showcasing a woman who has decided to quit a stressful job to live like a 1950s housewife, insisting she’s happy to spend her day cooking and cleaning because ‘men should be spoiled by their wives.’

One such story in the UK Daily Mail describes a 30 yr old Oregon woman Katrina Holte as follows;

A woman who was stressed out by her job in a busy payroll department, decided to quit the rat race and also turn back time – deciding to live like a 1950s housewife.

Transforming her suburban home in Hillsborough, Oregon, into a working shrine to the era, Katrina Holte, 30, now loves keeping house for her engineering manager husband, Lars, 28 – cleaning, cooking and making dresses using 1950s patterns.

Spinning vinyl discs by stars of the era like Doris Day, she flits about her business, making sure dinner is on the table when Lars gets in, saying: ‘I feel like I’m living how I always wanted to. It’s my dream life and my husband shares my vision.

‘It is a lot of work. I do tons of dishes, laundry and ironing, but I love it and it’s helping to take care of my husband and that makes me really happy.2

For most working men its a no-brainer that she would be more happy in a traditional roleplay of that kind. It is, as she points out, much better than working a stressful job as required of men’s traditional role.

Whatever the trend for women to become tradwives, it is not the only alternative to feminist prescriptions, and it may not be the ‘best’ of the available alternatives either.

Here I’d like to introduce the phenomenon of “modwives” – women who have embraced multi-option lives over trad roles, and who allow, nay encourage multi-option lives for their husbands. Of course I just made up the term modwife, but they exist and are possibly also growing in number.  Both tradwife and modwife eschew feminism which is geared only to female privilege, and not to partnerships based on reciprocal labor and devotion.

Over 150 years of feminism has bequeathed to women the famed multi-option lives, a sword which shattered the more narrow traditional roles with sure and mighty strokes. But the big question is this; are women today willing to renounce their multi-option lives in favour of single-option traditional roles?

I would say not a snowfalke’s chance in Hell. And to invite them to do so today can be construed as coercive and even an abusive act. I submit that few women today are going to genuinely trade in multi-option lives for traditional roles, other than a limited few who like the idea of free time and cosplay, and who can rely on husbands to bring home a healthy wage.

This unlikelihood that women will embrace roles of yesteryear with any real commitment leads to another option mentioned above – the modwife. At best, today’s multi-option women can invite their men to do same. The modwife’s modus operandi is based on personal liberty within relationships, extending a true freedom of opportunity to her partner such as society has championed for her, even though it goes without saying that the loaded gun remains in her draw, same as it sits in the draw of the tradwife.

Yet few multi-option women today are willing to extend that multi-option liberty to men, preferring instead to pocket the advantages extended by women’s ‘liberation’ while expecting their boyfriends and husbands to remain in the mismatched role of protector and provider. There are women however, limited in number as they are, who lean toward the model of commensurate liberty for both men and women in relationships — some of them you will recognize among the supporters of the men’s rights movement.

That libetarian spirit is usually understood as belonging to the political sphere, but it is accepted by the modwife as a guiding principle in her relationship with men. It emphasizes individual choice, relative autonomy, voluntary association, individual judgement, free will, self-determination, and free labor-sharing arrangements and agreements. In a word; freedom.

Applying the concept of freedom to relationships may seem odd, especially when we consider the entrapment traditionally associated with marriage, not to mention the dangers and the restrictions on freedom that come with strict, prescribed gender roles of yesteryear.

Psychologist James Hillman speaks to the topic of freedom in his paper Marriage, Intimacy, Freedom:

Yet what does the soul want with that word Freedom which sets off such expectations? What sort of preposition accompanies and influences Freedom? Freedom from – from fear, want, and oppression, such as enunciated by the Charter that established that established the United Nations after World War Two?  Or is it Freedom of – choice, opportunity and movement, or access to today’s political language?

Or, is it Freedom to – to do as I like, to hire whom I want, to tell the boss to shove it, to go where I want, to marry whom I please–freedom of agency in the empowered and recovered adult of therapy?

Or, fourth, is it possibly Freedom in? This seems moronic or oxymoronic, for the fantasy of American, epitomized by Texan, freedom is “Don’t fence me in.” “In” means within limits or constraints of any place, time, situation, condition, such as the kitchen, in an hour, in a conversation, in a marriage.

This forth preposition,”in,” rather than freedom of, to and from, suggests that the joyful expectation arising from the soul when the bell of freedom rings is nothing other than living fully in the actuality of this or that situation, as it is, which gives to that situation wings, freeing it from a desire to be elsewhere, to escape from it, to want more, thereby sating the soul’s desire with the fullness of the present. How do I say it  “I love what I’m doing… I’m fully in it.” “I’m really into tex-mex cooking; my new computer; re-painting the house.”3

Freedom ‘in’ as Hillman puts it, allows for creative negotiation on how to set up relationships that bypass the narrow choice-dichotomy between traditional relationships and feminist-informed ones.* For example, a man wishes to cook the food or be a stay-at-home father? So be it. She wants a career? Done. A bit of role sharing with him and her — both taking on part-time childcare, cooking and wage earning? Consider it done. This is the kind of freedom that comes with the multi-option couple, and it stands as a viable alternative to the traditional roles that we so often look back to with nostalgia.

The message of the men’s rights movement has been consistent in its commitment to more options for men and boys. That call for more options, for more rights and privileges, turns out to be a good match for the liberties most women enjoy today. Whether we use that freedom to choose life with a tradwife or a modwife – or to reject wives and relationships with women completely – the choice is ultimately ours.

References:

[1] Tradwives – women who are bucking feminism, J4MB (Jan 2019)
[2] Siofra Brennan, Woman quits her stressful job to live like a 1950s housewife, UK Daily Mail (2019)
[3] James Hillman, Marriage, Intimacy Freedom, Spring Journal of Archetype and Culture (1997)

*Note: The terms Tradwife and Modwife – and by extension Tradhusband and Modhusband are used in a lighthearted way to designate the different ways people can set up a relationship. Following on from that its probably relevant to give a name to the third area which is dominated by feminist thinking – the one that insists the woman or wife should set the tempo of all relationship matters and the man should simply fall into line instead of mansplaining etc. these can be called the Gynowife & Gynohusband who has no will of his own. By contrast, Tradhusbands and Modhusbands don’t need to defer to wives on all matters – they have some agency. Agency – options for and during the relationship, is the central point.

Two-Factor Attractiveness Scale for women

The following is an attractiveness rating scale based on the two factors of 1. sexual attractiveness and 2. pairbonding attractiveness, instead of the popular single rating factor of sexual attractiveness.

Preamble

Freud/psychoanalysis: “What decides the purpose of life is simply the programme of the pleasure principle.” (romantic & sexual gratification)

Object relations psychology: “The primary motivational factors in one’s life are based on human relationships, rather than sexual or aggressive triggers.” (pairbonding)

The above quotes imply two different kinds of male attractiveness, for women, and a need for two separate rating scales: 1. sexual attractiveness, and 2. pairbonding attractiveness. Sexual attractiveness is based purely on romantic attraction: a man’s status, power, looks, wealth, confidence, his overt sexual desirability & unpredictable excitement. Pairbonding attractiveness  implies the guy-next-door stereotype, more attractive for company, stability, ability to commit, pair bonding and if desired, his ability to invest in building a family.

Rating a man as  9/10 in sexual attractiveness is misleading as the only qualifier of a high quality partner, as he may be only 1/10 in the pairbonding attractiveness (or it may be the converse scores). Not that I’m into rating men, but for those who are I recommend using both scales mentioned here and adding the scores together to gain a more accurate, overall rating.

Two-Factor Attractiveness Scale

A two-factor attractiveness scale would work like this, and examples are arbitrary, e.g.

(Example male – who?):
5/10 for sexual attractiveness
0/10 for pairbonding attractiveness.
Score: 5|0 = total 5 

(Example male – who?):
5/10 for sexual attractiveness
1/10 for pairbonding attractiveness
Score: 5|1 = total 6

(Example male – who?):
5/10 for sexual attractiveness
7/10 for pairbonding attractiveness
Score: 5|7 = total 12

(Example male – who?):
7/10 for sexual attractiveness
5/10 for pairbonding attractiveness
Score: 7|5 = total 12

(Example male – who?):
7/10 for sexual attractiveness
6/10 for pairbonding attractiveness
Score: 7|6 = total 13

(Example male – who?):
9/10 for sexual attractiveness
-5/10 for pairbonding attractiveness
Score: 9|-5 = total 4

* Highest possible score is +20… Lowest possible score is -10.
 

 

SEE ALSO: TWO-FACTOR ATTRACTIVENESS SCALE FOR MEN

The nature of male value and our gynocentric culture (part two)

By Peter Ryan

Please read part one of this article before continuing.

The Gynocentric Obsession With Asserting Men Are Inferior:

I understand the desperate need of gynocentric bigots to justify their own double standards of prioritising women above men, with the reductionist concept that reproduction is all that counts to propagating your genes, and that having a uterus makes women more biologically valuable and that men are more expendable. I understand the lengths and the efforts they will go to, to assert their falsehoods and silence any dissenting opinion. Gynocentrism requires rationalisation for bigots to make their bigotry more palatable and acceptable for society. Distorting science to provide a supposed empirical basis for their bigotry, is a key method that they employ. This is why I have spent so much time writing on the subject of male value to set the record straight and it really does not help when the manosphere repeats the lie that men are inherently biologically expendable. As we saw in the phrenology scene10 in the movie Django Unchained, junk science has been used to make all sorts of claims about group superiority.

The rationalisations and sophist claims that men are expendable because they lack a uterus, and that women have to be elevated above men to preserve the species, are just a different flavour of the same bigoted logic from that scene in the movie and just as ridiculous. The same claim that men are destined to be the more disposable sex because they lack a uterus, is analogous to the reasoning that African-Americans were destined to remain slaves because of supposed dimples in their skull. The key difference is that we now at least recognise one of these beliefs as bigotry.

Why Do We Believe Men Are Less Than?:

Why is the lie men are ‘less than’ so widely believed? People will look for simple ideas that justify their emotionally preferred worldview and appease their conscious. This applies to the manosphere as well. It is a comforting lie to believe that the sexism men face is an unavoidable and immutable facet of biological reality and the manosphere is no exception. However this gynocentric society is not comprised of people that are slaves to their biology. No, no, no, people do not get off that easily. People are wilfully and consciously going along with the marginalisation and exploitation of men and boys. The reason for this is not some innate biological mechanism, but the reality in our modern gynocentric culture that there is no incentive to care for men and every incentive to exploit them. Men that do not value themselves cannot expect society to care for them. Men that do not enforce boundaries with women and stand up for themselves, cannot expect women to not take advantage of them. The way men are treated by society, is a reflection of the way men treat themselves. The way men treat themselves is a reflection of how men perceive themselves.

The reason why society gives a shit about women, is because women give a shit about women. The reason why society does not give a shit about men, is because men do not give a shit about men. Ultimately society cares about women, because women give them an incentive to care and a disincentive not to. In contrast men simply place most of their sense of self-worth in what they achieve or do. Men place very little value in their physical and mental being. Society reflects that perspective right back at men in how men are treated. Men who regard themselves as human doings are treated as human doings. If men really want this to change, then they will need to change their perception of themselves from human doings to human beings.

Social stagnation is the norm for society and the social status quo prevails, because most people will not change without an incentive to change. Slavery was not abolished until sufficient numbers of people were incentivised to abolish it. The absolute rule of monarchs was not questioned until sufficient numbers of people were incentivised to challenge the established order. Every significant evolution of society has been preceded by a change in the mixture of incentives and disincentives in society. Things have to reach critical mass for major change to occur.

For centuries men have performed for society, because their own survival and the survival of society depended on it. This often meant that substantial numbers of men made sacrifices and died. What we have in the modern age, is a situation in which the fruits of what men provide are taken for granted. Technology has allowed apathy, short term thinking and decadence to dull our senses. Society has forgotten the true value of men and even men have forgotten their own true intrinsic value. Men cannot “do” for society, without caring for their being first. This is a basic reality that society and men have forgotten because of our decadent materialistic mentality, which has become divorced from reality and our long-term survival interests. Men are human beings first and the doing part comes from their being. Society has descended into a mass delusion, where we have forgotten that men are human beings and that their value emerges from that.

Why has male value been forgotten? Male biological value is more fluid in its form than female biological value. The reproductive role of women does not change much from one environment to the next. How men contribute to the survival of society, does vary to a much greater degree from one environment to the next. The result of this is that male value is not as fixed as female value and as a consequence there is more scrutiny placed on men to prove their value. It is harder to assess male value than female value and requires men to demonstrate their capacities. When you hear people say things like “man up”, “be a man” and someone define what a man is, you are hearing people call upon men to prove their biological worth. This is a social pressure women do not experience to anywhere near the same degree as men. No one dares to tell women to “woman up”.

Social scientists call this social pressure on men to perform to prove their worth as men, “precarious manhood”11. A positive side to the greater fluidity of male value, is that men have many paths they can take to express their biological value to society. For women their biological value is more fixed on motherhood. Women have greater stability and certainty in their biological value, but men have more freedom and scope in the expression of their biological value. Men rising to the top of their profession and pursuing a career or a talent or natural interest, will have a greater impact on their evolutionary success than it will for women. This biological difference does at least partly inform our societal attitudes and culture.

I do believe that this asymmetry between the sexes, is part of the reason why feminism has emerged and demanded all of these changes be made to our institutions and workplaces to empower women to pursue employment or other interests over having children. I understand, respect and support the need of women to find meaning in their lives outside of having children and to be valued for more than just their uterus.

Whilst we clearly do not have a 50:50 gender representation in all aspects of our economy and society and never will, it is a reality that there are no barriers left holding women back. Whilst evolved biological sex differences in interests and abilities do exist and do at least partly explain these differences in gender representation in society and why they will always remain, we have overturned the social and legal barriers that may have existed for women in pursuing a pathway outside of motherhood and being valued beyond motherhood.

The challenge I have for society, is that if we can clearly overcome our fixation on associating female value solely or primarily to motherhood, then we can do the same for men and their provision and protection for society. We can overcome our knee-jerk reaction to assign value to men based on what they “do” for society and how they perform. We can overcome and move beyond precarious manhood. As Dr. Warren Farrell has written about, if women are sex objects, men are success objects. If we can address one biologically informed cultural bias against women in regarding them as sex objects, then we can address the other bias against men in regarding them as success objects. If we can remove barriers for women, we can remove barriers for men.

There is another factor at play here as well. The male role in contributing to the survival of the community can obstruct our capacity to have concern for the well-being of men. When the community is dependent on men for survival, it becomes harder to see the need to support men. The nature of male value means that it essentially gets in the way of societal concern for male well-being. Men naturally want to take risks and they want to challenge themselves and take on hardships and society often benefits because of the extraordinary things that men do. Just as before, there is a positive flipside. Freedom for men is one of the most important things you can give them. Whilst there is less concern for male well-being from society, there is also less inhibition in allowing men to expose themselves to challenging and risky pursuits that can be highly rewarding both financially and otherwise. Men often find fulfillment and are naturally drawn to these pursuits. Men literally skydive from the edges of space and go to the bottom of the world’s oceans, because they have a passion to push the envelope of possibility.

Whilst there are certainly psychological and physiological sex differences that at least partly explain sex differences in the representation of risky, challenging and dangerous work that has high personal and financial reward, it is also correct to observe that men have had greater freedom to take on risky and challenging pursuits in the past. Both factors are at play. Whether it is exploring the world on sailing ships, pioneering on the frontier of new territories, undertaking expeditions to find the Northwest passage and go to the North and South Pole, mining in the gold rush, flying prototype aeroplanes, or going into space, society has historically given men more latitude to pursue these rewarding but dangerous endeavours. Women have traditionally been protected from risky and challenging work and this has come to some degree at the expense of part of their freedom.

Just as society has had less concern for male well-being, there has been less concern for women’s freedom outside of getting married and having children. Just as society has relied on men for survival, society has relied on women to produce the next generation. Just as male value has partly obstructed societal concern for male well-being, female value has partly obstructed societal concern for women’s freedom. The concern for men to provide for society got partly in the way of society caring for men’s well-being and the concern for women to produce children got partly in the way of society caring for women’s freedom.

Again this asymmetry is no doubt partly why feminism has emerged for women and I understand, accept and fully support the need for women to have the freedom to be more than just a mother. The second challenge I have for society though, is that if we can overcome our protective fixation on making sure women stay at home and raise children, then we can overcome our reservation in caring about men’s health and general well-being.

Despite what feminists claim, both men and women have faced discriminatory practices throughout our history and both sexes have had different types of “privilege”. It has not been a man’s world and an “oppressive patriarchy”, it has been a world where men and women struggled for thousands of years to subsist and continue society. When faced with the risk of death, disease and starvation on a semi-regular basis, men and women had much less choice on how to live and the roles the sexes were to play in society.

Technology which mostly men invented, has given us the opportunity to escape our traditional biological roles and opened up options that simply were not possible before. We have the capacity to go beyond our basic biological programming and ironically society has demonstrated this with feminism. If we can overcome our societal reservations on women being something other than a mother, than we can overcome our reservations on addressing male well-being and recognise the intrinsic value of men as human beings. If one sex can be freed from the confines of their biological mandate, then so can the other sex. This is because the biological mandate of each sex (the rate limiting factor of reproduction versus the rate limiting factor of survival) is interconnected and interdependent.

Some say that feminism is merely entirely an extension of biology and from a reductionist lens that position may seem tenable. Certainly there are biological factors at play driving feminism, to at least some degree. However when we consider how antithetical feminism is to female fertility and the net evolutionary impact that has on the continuation of communities and lineages within a population, the absolutist position feminism is entirely biological and driven by evolution, simply has no empirical leg to stand on. Feminism has created countless numbers of childless women that will not directly pass on their parent’s genome. If reproduction for the individual is “everything” from a skewed (and wrong) evolutionary perspective and women are the rate limiting factor of reproduction and biology is supposedly inescapable, then feminism in its present form should not have happened and yet it has. There is more to human evolutionary psychology and culture, than just reproduction and biology.

I wrote in part 2 of Gynocentrism And The Golden Uterus12, that men are not biologically disposable. I wrote that male disposability is a pathological expression of a society that has abandoned concern for male well-being and now takes them for granted and exploits them. I made the point that society has historically had to possess at least some concern for male well-being to minimise avoidable losses of men, to ensure its own existence and prosperity. Whilst there has indeed been some gut level inhibition that society has had in showing concern for male well-being, society in the past has also had an understanding at a cognitive level that we must look after and support men to at least some degree, so that men can in turn support society.

A king may not have had much concern for the individual well-being of his soldiers at a gut level, but cognitively he understood the need to adequately feed, pay and train them so they would effectively fight. We have recognised this need in our past culture to support men not a gut level, but at the cognitive level. Another example of this can be seen in how our educational institutions in the past were established to educate boys, so that they would then be equipped as men to support society and families.

What has happened, is that technology has delayed the need for society to think about the long-term consequences of neglecting male well-being (we have lost our long-term perspective on many other things in general as well, like private and government debt for instance). So we have gradually slid into a mode of perceiving men as human doings and not as human beings and on assigning value to what men do, but not to the men themselves. We have lost our cognitive connection between caring for men as human beings, so men can in turn support society. It is a cognitive connection we must restore before we are too late to realise what is happening in time to save society. Our current social and economic prosperity cannot be sustained in the long term without caring for male well-being. It is only through the massive resource surplus of our civilisation (which is gradually diminishing), that there has not yet been mass awareness of the decline of our societies and its link with the issues facing men. We are in a cycle of decadent short term thinking, where the concerns for the future of our civilisation has become an afterthought and so has concern for men and what made our society great. We must snap out of this cycle. Every civilisation reaches this decadent stage of decline in its final stages before it collapses.

This is a glimmer of hope though. People are waking up. People are starting to notice what is happening to men and boys. Is it happening slowly? Yes, very slowly. All social change happens very slowly initially with few exceptions. Even the mainstream media now though13, is starting to pay attention and show some genuine concern for men. So yes things are changing. If feminism can push back against the rigid expectations and attitudes that were directed at women, so can men when it comes to the rigid expectations and attitudes that have been directed at men.

However to accomplish this goal, men must first change their perception of themselves from human doings to human beings and men must help each other and boys achieve that. We need a new cultural narrative on masculinity. A narrative that focuses on men as human beings before paying attention to what they do. The movie Joker14 is one example of this new type of narrative. Its popularity is no doubt at least partly the result of the film’s storyline filling a void in our gynocentric culture in recognising the humanity of men and men’s pain. Into The Wild15 is another brilliant film that focuses on men as human beings and their pain, vulnerabilities and inner world. Society is in need of a change to our narratives on men and masculinity. Not a feminist inspired change that tells men they are “toxic” or “obsolete”, but a change that tells men they are human beings first and foremost and have intrinsic value.

From 1848, it took more than a century for feminism to achieve many of the goals it set out to achieve. Men face a similar wait. Social change happens slowly at first and it can slow and speed up at various stages over time. Just because change may not be immediate and may be slow, does not mean men’s place in society is biologically immutable. Our major hurdle in my view in the manosphere, is getting over the belief that men are biologically less than women and actually biologically disposable, as opposed to considering male disposability a pathological expression of a society that exploits men and has forgotten their value. Gynocentrism is built on and dependent upon maintaining the lie that men are less than women. Only when this lie is unlearnt, can gynocentrism really be challenged.

The Self-Fulfilling Cycle Of Learned Helplessness

The claim women are more valuable than men, has been put forward multiple times directly and indirectly in the culture over the last fifty years and in various ways even before then. We have all been raised in this lie from birth and have lived in a gynocentric culture saturated by it. This false claim has also unfortunately been propagated in the manosphere as well and often used to explain the origins of sexism against men. The major difference of course between female supremacists/radical feminists and the people in the manosphere that put forward this idea, is that female supremacists consider it to be vindication that their worldview is the natural order of things and treating men like shit is the way it should be.

In contrast proponents of this idea in the manosphere that women are more biologically valuable, either avoid the implications of what it means (including the implied futility of what they are doing in the manosphere to get society to pay attention to men), or alternatively adopt a black pill fatalistic view16 that there is little scope for any substantive mainstream change for society to address the discrimination, hatred, marginalisation and exploitation of men and boys. This mentality is one expression of the learned helplessness factor I described in my article on the Normalisation Of Gynocentrism17 and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy for men. Men deserve better. We should recognise biology and our limitations, but we should be cautious not to resign ourselves to a fatalistic worldview, or to fall into a reductionist line of reasoning. Things are not as simple or as set as they seem. The manosphere has to move away from this fatalistic perspective and recognise the true intrinsic biological value of men, if it is to move forward in any substantive way.

One example of propagating the idea women are more biologically valuable than men in the manosphere, comes from a video from Karen Straughan called, “Neoteny!”18. Now before people start thinking this is a hit piece on Karen Straughan, let me assure you it is nothing of the kind. Karen has done some excellent work for men and boys and continues to do so. It is also worth noting that Karen is not the only one that has propagated this idea in the manosphere either. There are plenty of other examples from other people (men and women, mgtow and mra’s, both high and low profile) I could have cited over many years.

It is because the idea that women are more biologically valuable than men (and that men are biologically expendable) is so widespread in the manosphere and never questioned, that I am addressing it so thoroughly in this two part article, in my series of articles on gynocentrism and male value and in my earlier series on gynocentrism and the golden uterus. Karen was inviting criticism of her video and so I will provide it. I can be wrong, Karen can be wrong, we all can be wrong. The danger is not in being wrong, the danger comes when people remain silent when they know people are wrong. That is when rigid ideology forms and we stagnate and divorce ourselves from reality.

In her video Karen makes an argument that the sexism men face is at least partly innate (as she says we can see from sex differences in neoteny and the social reactions that invokes) and that this innate sexism arises from the fundamental reality that women are more valuable than men. Her reasoning is essentially that women evolved neotenous features to a greater degree than men to elicit protection from the community and that we protect the more valuable and so women are more valuable than men.

Neoteny is certainly a trait that women have to a greater degree than men, although in our modern environment women exaggerate their neoteny. The innate sex difference in neoteny whilst still substantive, is considerably less pronounced once you take away female cosmetics. Prehistoric women were no doubt more weathered, hairy, dirty and adult in appearance, than many women appear today. Neoteny certainly can elicit help from the community, but as with many characteristics, there are multiple suggested causes for the sex difference in neoteny.

One explanation19 is that female neoteny was sexually selected by males, as female fertility markedly decreases with age. Men find more youthful looking women more physically attractive as younger women are more fertile and so more neotenous women pass on their genes. Sex differences in neoteny don’t necessarily reflect women having a greater biological value than men. Female neoteny can function as a biological marker to attract males to signal fertility. I do not think we should ignore the likely possibility that this dynamic could at least in part be at play in explaining the sex difference in neoteny. Of course certain people (cough feminists) and even some corners of academia (yes scientists can be biased and less than objective), rally against such explanations because it does not suit their narrative of female superiority.

Greater female neoteny is the result of differences in the manner in which each sex can maximise the propagation of their genes, rather than because women are more valuable than men. As I have discussed in the first part of this article and in part 2 on Gynocentrism and Male Value20, the male and female sex manifest their biological value differently- One sex derives value by investing more heavily in reproduction and the other sex derives value by investing more in survival. I specifically singled out in my writings the greater intrasexual competition of males, as one of the ways male value manifests itself. There is an inverse relationship between the level of reproductive investment by a sex and intrasexual competition, which is what Bateman’s principle describes21.

Whilst competition is certainly not the sole domain of men, the biological reality is that men stand to gain far more from competition than women. The male sex can produce far greater numbers of progeny per unit of time, because males do not gestate or lactate and are thus more freely available to derive benefits from the mating opportunities arising from competition. The male sex also has the capacity to invest far more in activities related to acquiring status, competing and that are high risk/high reward or high effort/high reward, because they do not have to gestate or lactate.

Now let us consider the sex difference in neoteny and the presumption that neoteny has at least in part evolved to a greater degree in women to elicit protection. Will an individual be more successful at competing with others if he or she has to rely on the support of others to compete? How will that affect their status in a socially competitive hierarchy? Will an individual be more successful in acquiring status and engaging in high risk, high effort and high reward activities, if they have to rely on the support of others? Competition, status seeking, taking risks and undertaking challenges, all require one thing- personal agency. Personal agency requires independence and self-reliance rather than eliciting protection from the community. It is true that men have not evolved to elicit protection from the community to the same degree as women. However that is not the result of men being less valuable than women. It is because the life history strategy through which men manifest their biological value and pass on their genes, is different to women and requires different sets of traits.

The greater agency shown by men, is the reason why it is inevitable modern civilisation will be led by men. In order to lead in our modern complex world at the highest levels, you must accept high levels of responsibility and with that responsibility comes a large amount of sacrifice, hardship, risk and the need to be highly self-reliant and independent. This is what feminism does not understand or want to accept and why a “matriarchy” cannot scale to modern civilisation and is bound to fail with horrible social and economic consequences if it is forced on society.

The fatal flaw in Karen’s reasoning, is the implied assumption that we always protect what is valuable and we only do not protect what is expendable. We do protect what is valuable, but not always. There are valuable things in the world that we expose to risk and hazards, because that is how their value is harnessed. Sometimes we do not protect what is valuable, when the source of value is protection itself, or the value is harnessed by exposure to challenge, hardship and risk. We spend billions of dollars on valuable military hardware, race cars and spacecraft and expose them to risks and hazards, because that is how we harness their value. Value alone does not determine whether or not something is protected. There is a duality to value that exists between the sexes that Karen has missed in her video. The duality of survival and reproduction and the interplay between the two in a complex life history strategy to perpetuate the human genome. One form of value that requires protection and another form of value that actually manifests itself as protection.

We also need to remember that both sexes died performing their biological roles. It is not as if women were so biologically valuable that nature protected them from hardship and put it all on men. Women risked their lives in their reproductive role and did die or suffered chronic health conditions from pregnancy and giving birth. Men risked their lives protecting and providing for society and died and suffered from injury as well. The deaths of men and not just women, cost their communities in terms of both reproductive capacity and survival capacity.

There is a duality between the sexes to sacrifice and the cost of their sacrifice to the community. Women have not escaped biological hardship because they are more valuable, they just have experienced a different form of hardship. We can argue over which sex has had it “worse”, but really any sex difference in the degree of hardship comes down to the differences in the environmental and cultural conditions pertaining to their different biological roles and life history strategies, rather than differences in biological value.

The problem with gynocentrism and feminism, is not that they focus on female hardships or female sacrifice or female needs, but that they focus solely on those things and ignore male needs, male sacrifice and male hardships throughout history and in the present day. The problem with female superiority, is that without fail those that purport to claim women are superior, will selectively report only those strengths women have over men and consistently ignore or dismiss any evidence of male strengths and male value.

There is never any genuine recognition of all of the facts by either feminists or female supremacists, just the facts that are convenient. Ultimately it is one-sided gynocentric reductionist thinking, that consistently leads people to perceive only one side of the biological and social equation when it comes to the sexes. They ignore the duality of biological value and the duality of sacrifice between the sexes. The manosphere must try not to repeat those same mistakes.

I have a final point to make on Karen’s video regarding her initial comments on fatherhood and the long developmental period of human offspring and her suggestion that it is has been the monogamous egalitarian model that has allowed prolonged development in humans, rather than paternal investment alone. I would suggest that monogamy and the levels of paternal investment in offspring go hand in hand. Monogamy reduces paternity uncertainty, which in turn results in greater paternal investment. The more monogamous pair bonding there is in a population, the greater the levels of paternal investment.

Yes a species can have paternal investment in offspring in a polygamous community, but it will be at a reduced level in comparison to a monogamous arrangement. Whilst some people beat a drum that humans are a polygamous species, we are actually only weakly polygamous and monogamy has been present to a substantial degree in both our prehistory and in our current societies. We don’t really have one fixed mating mode we cannot escape from and human courtship is heavily influenced by culture and has been for many tens of thousands of years. Indeed cultural practices of marriage with only low levels of polygyny22, are found to go far back into our hunter-gatherer prehistory.

Even in polygamous societies, only a small fraction of the population is actually engaging in polygamy and a substantial degree of monogamy still takes place in these societies. One only has to ask why monogamy has become so widespread, if we are supposedly so hardwired to be polygamous (as some claim). I could go into further detail on this point, but I will leave the discussion on polygamy in humans for another time and return to Karen’s discussion. The reason I expanded on this point, is because there are some people that incorrectly assume monogamy has had no impact on our evolution and that monogamy is a modern invention. This is scientifically and factually incorrect.

Karen discussed in her video, an example of the marmoset monkey in which only one pair is mating in the group and the father invests more than the mother in raising offspring. Karen suggested that the failure of the marmoset to acquire a long period of maturation and exhibit high intelligence, shows that fatherhood alone is not sufficient to lengthen the developmental period of offspring. My response to that, is that only one marmoset male in the group is invested in raising offspring and the rest of the male and female population is providing intermittent alloparental care. Whilst paternal investment within the mating marmoset pair is high relative to the maternal investment, paternal investment in the population as a whole is actually relatively low in comparison to humans (It is also worth pointing out that the paternal investment of a male marmoset is not even close to that of a human male, which I am sure Karen understands.).

In a human population there are many mating pairs (not just one) and thus much higher overall numbers of fathers investing in the raising of their offspring (rather than just one lucky marmoset male with one lucky marmoset female). Greater numbers of monogamous mating pairs, provide the opportunity to have a slower individual rate of reproduction to replace the population. The paternal investment in offspring, harnesses this opportunity to provide the conditions to support a longer developmental period for offspring.

So I would agree that both the monogamous egalitarian model and paternal investment across the population (outside of just one exclusive mating pair), are both involved in lengthening the human developmental period. However it is paternal investment that has actually directly played a role in human development and allowing it to be lengthened. The spread of monogamy just permitted paternal investment to become widespread. That clarification is important to add to what Karen said in her video. Fatherhood is particularly important in human adolescent development and particularly important in respect to raising sons whom fully mature at an older age. These realities indicate that fatherhood is indeed connected to supporting the longer development of our offspring (Particularly with teenage sons!).

 

Conclusion:

In closing I would like to draw attention to the massive fires that are currently burning across Australia. Firefighters whom are mostly men, have been battling these blazes whilst the country has been enjoying holidays and New Year’s Eve. It is funny how society on the one hand really needs men in a national emergency, but at the same time the mainstream media has no problem in telling men they are obsolete23 and telling people why it is okay to hate men24. Despite men risking their lives fighting the fires, feminists somehow think it is appropriate to make claims from highly questionable feminist “research”, that some men will come home from the fires to beat up their wives (yes you read correctly, watch this link25 and this link26). We live in a culture and a society, that is dominated by an authoritarian feminist ideology that spreads outright hatred toward men with impunity and attempts to demonise men even when they risk their lives for their community. That is how threatened feminism is by male value. Any expression and recognition of the good men do for society, even when men are risking their lives in a national emergency, is to be quashed by feminists.

Society does not want men to know their own value, because if they did this whole parasitic gynocentric system of exploitation would grind to a halt. It is the fear of men discovering their own intrinsic value as human beings that drives male disposability in society, remember that.

I will finish this article with a link27 to a speech by Charlie Chaplin. He made this speech in a movie called The Great Dictator in 1940 during World War 2. With our growing geopolitical tensions with China, Russia and now Iran, remember this speech. It is as relevant today for men, as it was back then. Make no mistake, war is a men’s issue and may become the greatest issue men face this century. The rejection of male disposability and the recognition of men as human beings with their own humanity, is the antidote to war and violence. The machine minds of our world will stop at nothing to snuff that out of men’s hearts and lead men astray with false promises of glory. Take heed of that warning.

“You are not machines, you are not cattle, you are men!”- Charlie Chaplin, The Great Dictator, 1940

How men perceive themselves will determine the fate of their lives and also the fate of the world. Reflect on that reality and what I have written in this article.

 

References:

  1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQM4ebFILv4
  2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6EF00RL88M
  3. https://avoiceformen.com/gynocentrism/gynocentrism-and-the-golden-uterus-part-two/
  4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0wCBFNTVhk
  5. https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/joker_2019
  6. https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/into_the_wild
  7. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHcPQ0pJ8_M
  8. https://gynocentrism.com/2018/06/30/the-normalisation-of-gynocentrism/
  9. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C46rSIfTum4
  10. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249179177_Sexual_Selection_Physical_Attractiveness_and_Facial_Neoteny_Cross-cultural_Evidence_and_Implications
  1. https://www.avoiceformen.com/gynocentrism/gynocentrism-and-the-value-of-men-part-two/
  2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bateman%27s_principle
  3. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0019066
  4. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end-of-men/308135/
  5. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-cant-we-hate-men/2018/06/08/f1a3a8e0-6451-11e8-a69c-b944de66d9e7_story.html
  6. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TgON5oYZvI
  7. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CwQcIn2Pgo
  8. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7GY1Xg6X20

 

The nature of male value and our gynocentric culture (part one)

shutterstock value paid

By Peter Ryan

This article is dedicated to the multiple men that I have known who have committed suicide or attempted to commit suicide. Men always have value and something to live for, even when they think they don’t, or how they are treated by society convinces them they don’t. 

Introduction:

The value of a human life is something that is not truly quantifiable. There is no one answer to the question on how much a human life is worth. It is a reality though, that each human life cannot be replaced and is in a sense priceless. The consciousness of a human being is unique to each individual human life. This article will be focusing on the biological value of men, but it is important to remember that all human life transcends biological value. We do not treat the disabled with less dignity or with no dignity because they are disabled. We understand that the value of human life that really has the ultimate meaning to us, does not come from the utility of the human body.

Every man and woman regardless of their abilities, has a unique a mind and a personality that conveys a unique contribution to the world. That is what we really miss when people die and that is what really forms the basis of human love. We acknowledge the real basis of the value of human life, when we consider brain death to be the death of a person. It is consciousness and not the utility of the body that ultimately matters to us. There will not be another person like you again. Our consciousness and the essence of who we are cannot be replaced.

We often do not realise the value of what we have until it is gone. Death can clarify the relative importance of many things for people (including me). A number of years ago, I watched two parents bury both their two sons. It was the saddest thing I have ever witnessed and understandably the parents were inconsolable. The sons died in an accident on their holiday in their mid-20s in the prime of their life. All of the hopes and dreams that their parents had for them, died that day. I can still remember the horrible wailing of the mother and the father, as two coffins proceeded to leave the church. I can still recall the upset I felt seeing someone I went to school with and knew had a promising future, being moved away in a coffin right past me and the finality of it all. You do not forget a tragic experience like that.

What do you say to parents that have just lost not one, but both of their two sons in a horrible accident? They can never be replaced. How many families have lost their sons at too early an age from suicide, from the effects of divorce, from fighting a war or fighting fires, or from an early accidental death or illness? The pain and sense of loss cannot be measured. Whilst we certainly can create abstract ways of measuring the value of both men and women in biological terms or otherwise, ultimately the value of human life is greater than the sum of its parts. The pain people feel from losing people they love, can be a powerful reminder of that reality.

Ultimately whether you are a man or a woman at the bottom of the distribution of utility and biological value, remember that your value as a human being transcends your utility and your biology. As I have said before, civilisation requires that we move beyond valuing human life based on its utility and biological characteristics. How quickly would civilisation descend into violent chaos if we began murdering the sick, the disabled and the elderly? Not long. We have seen how that turns out and the genocidal horrors that have unfolded from such thinking. Civilisation requires a basic unconditional level of respect for the sanctity of all human life, in order for it to function and be sustained.

So whilst I will be discussing the biological value of men in detail, please take the time to reflect on the reality that the value of human life is more than just what comes from biological value. Please take the time to reflect on how lucky you are to be alive and to simply exist, because we will all be dead one day. All of our problems and ideologies will mean little in our minds, when we face death in our final moments and are fighting for our last breath and we consider how tiny the length of our passage in this universe actually is. This is a large article and is divided into two parts, part one and part two. There is a great deal to discuss because of the amount of distortion of the truth and of the facts surrounding male value. I make no apologies for the length of this article, men deserve it.

The Biological Equality Of The Sexes:

In order for a phenotype of an organism to have value in biological terms, it must ensure sufficient copies of the genome that encoded it persist in future generations. A phenotype that results in greater copies of a genome existing after a thousand generations (or any other number of generations) than an alternative phenotype, is of a greater biological value to that genome and will be conserved to a greater degree. Biological value must also be defined in reference to the organisms investing in a phenotype and the payoff they receive from that investment.

Sex is a phenotype and parents invest in the male and female phenotype by producing male and female offspring. After any number of generations, each sex produces an exactly equal total number of copies of their parent’s genome. Consequently, males and females have exactly equal biological value. This is why there is an almost equal sex ratio of males and females produced at birth in the human population and many other species. It does not pay for parents to invest in one sex over the other, because neither sex has greater biological value for the parents investing in them. This reality is explained by Fishers principle1. I have described the underlying evolutionary framework behind the equal biological value of the sexes at length in part one of Gynocentrism And The Value Of Men2.

It is telling how gynocentric our society has become, when even significant numbers of people in the manosphere are convinced that women are more biologically valuable to the species because they have a uterus and think biology revolves solely or primarily around reproduction. If this truly were the case, then there would be a selective advantage from producing daughters instead of sons and female infants would outnumber male infants in the population. If reproduction was the sole or primary source of biological value, then humans and our hominid and mammalian ancestors would have eventually reverted back to asexual reproduction, or would not have evolved to sexually reproduce at all. Alternatively, our ancestors could have evolved to sexually reproduce as hermaphrodites (where all individuals of a population could gestate the fetus and fertilise each other’s eggs), or at the very least would have devolved into small mammals with high rates of reproduction. None of this has happened.

As I discussed in part one of Gynocentrism And The Value Of Men, the empirical evidence, established evolutionary theory and our evolutionary history, all point in the opposite direction to the assertion that women are the more biologically valuable sex because of their uterus and that reproduction is the overwhelming driver of evolutionary success. We have literally had hundreds of millions of years for a selective preference for the female sex to win out and yet it has not. Why? Reproduction is one event in a series of events required to propagate the genome and the uterus is just one organ required to ensure continuation of the lineage. In the complex two sex biological system our genome encodes to propagate itself, there are many other requirements that must be met to ensure continuation of the genome aside from reproduction and the uterus. Reproductive success does not ensure evolutionary success and they are not synonymous. I discussed all of this in detail particularly in part one of Gynocentrism And The Golden Uterus3 and in my further writings in part one and two on Gynocentrism And The Value Of Men.

The Sex Differences In Biological Value:

The biological value of men extends far beyond just their reproductive and genetic value in allowing sexual reproduction to occur. Males exist in our species in the form they do and contain half the human genome, precisely as a result of having equivalent biological value of their own and because reproduction is not the sole or exclusive source of biological value. The difference between males and females is not in the degree of overall biological value of each sex. The two key sexual differences in biological value, lie in the different manifestation of biological value in each sex and in the distribution of biological value among individuals of each sex. The sexes do not have to be the same to be equal in overall biological value and they do not have to be unequal in biological value to be different. This is a reality that feminists who assert that the sex differences are entirely due to socialisation and female supremacists that assert innate female biological superiority (and yes some people in the manosphere strangely hold the same belief), both fail to appreciate and understand. These principles can be illustrated with two simple analogies from modern life-

  1. Two houses can be of the same monetary value and be vastly different.
  1. The total wealth of two families can be equal, but the distribution of that wealth between individuals in each family can be different.

Whilst it would wrong to simply assert the lack of a uterus makes men less valuable than women, it would certainly be correct to identify this basic sex difference, as the ultimate source of the majority of all other biological sex differences. This would include the sex differences in the manifestation and distribution of male biological value compared to female biological value.

The greater rate of reproduction of the male as a result of lower reproductive investment, ensures the male population has a greater variance in biological value than the female population. The individuals that produce the greatest numbers of copies of their parent’s genome are male. The individuals that produce the lowest numbers of copies of their parent’s genome are male. Whilst feminists may be envious of the apex males in our society that are at the top of the social ladder that have the greatest evolutionary success, it is about time we showed some compassion for the forgotten men at the bottom of the social ladder (like the male homeless). The true value of a human life goes beyond biological value and all men regardless of their inherent biology, are deserving of being treated with dignity and respect. We afford this treatment to women and we can do the same for men.

Whilst the distribution of biological value between individuals is different for men and women, there is no difference in the total and mean biological value of each sex. Greater numbers of individual females may pass on their parent’s genome, but the males that pass on their parent’s genome do so at a greater rate per individual than the females do and consequently leave behind more genome copies per individual male than individual female. Despite this pattern, it is a mathematical reality that neither sex as a whole, can pass on more copies of their parent’s genome than the other sex.

Men and women face different sets of selective pressures to propagate their genes as a result of only one sex being capable of gestation and this consequently results in different manifestations of biological value. Men have faced sexual and natural selective pressures women have not faced and vice versa. It would be correct to say that solely in reproductive terms, females convey greater value to the species than males. It would not be correct to say that then means females are more biologically valuable than males overall. Men and their male hominid ancestors have been shaped by millions of years of evolution to convey a survival value to the species that women cannot match. If women are the rate limiting factor of reproduction, men are the rate limiting factor of survival. Survival does impact evolutionary success, not just reproduction.

Investment in both survival and reproduction together drive evolutionary success. Activities related to survival and reproduction can often conflict with each other. Activities related to survival can often involve risks and hardships and take away energy and resources, that may conflict with the requirements of pregnancy and early child rearing. In the modern world this is less of a problem of course. However this basic life history trade-off4 between investment in survival versus investment in reproduction, has existed for most of our evolutionary history and the evolutionary history of our ancestors. We evolved under conditions without birth control, mechanisation, electricity or modern medicine and it is a relative luxury that today the sexes are free to live differently to the paradigm our ancestors lived in for millions of years. The reality is that given the harsh selective pressures of our evolutionary past, there was a selective advantage to developing two sexes that were physiologically and psychologically adapted to specialise in either reproduction or survival, rather than being generalists that are far less effective at both.

There is especially a selective advantage, when the two sexes work together synergistically to combine their specialist abilities to perpetuate their lineage in a community, as two components in one biological system. Evolutionary gains that cannot be achieved alone by the individual males and females within a community, can be attained when males and females work cooperatively and synergistically with each other within a functional social system. This property of systems is called emergence5 and is something which is overlooked when we reduce all of biology down to the rate of reproduction and individual reproductive success and ignore the multitude of other factors driving evolution.

Specialisation of function and the development of systems that contain components that specialise in various functions, drives efficiency. These factors have driven the evolution of multicellular life, it is why your body has multiple systems (respiratory, circulatory system etc) specialising in particular functions. It is why our economy and the superorganism known as civilisation, is driven by specialisation to maximise economic and social efficiency. Why have only one sex gestate the fetus? Efficiency from specialisation. Why have men been specifically sexually and naturally selected to contribute to the survival of their family and community? Efficiency and specialisation. Having males that contribute to survival, allows for greater investment by females in reproduction and vice versa. Having one sex specialise in survival and another sex specialise in reproduction, maximises the survival and reproductive output of the species. When men and women pool their biological capital together cooperatively in a community, this dynamic results in an emergent evolutionary success.

What Male Value Looks Like:

Male biological value does of course have a reproductive component to it and women to at least some degree, have contributed to the survival of their family and community. Whilst there is of course overlap between the sexes, with both sexes contributing to reproduction and survival, substantial sex differences do exist in their relative contributions to survival and reproduction. Each sex has its own set of adaptations that they have acquired over evolution as a result of one sex investing more in reproduction and the other sex investing more in survival. Male biological value is focused on contributing either directly or indirectly to survival. Male biological value and the male contribution to survival, manifests itself in four main ways:

  1. Competition: Men are by nature competitive, they are driven to strive for status and compete. The result of that competition often leads to innovation and social and economic developments that further the survival of society. Of course we only hear of the negative and destructive aspects of male competition and never about the positive aspects of male competition. The reality is that we would not have a functioning economy or even civilisation without competition. It is also worth reflecting on the basic fact that the world is a harsh place and playing it safe and playing it nice, does not always led to the required outcome. Even the more destructive aspects of male competition can have a positive output when applied correctly.
  1. Collaboration: Men cooperate with other men to develop, run, maintain and protect civilisation and to make the discoveries and drive the innovation and exploration to further civilisation. It is frequently overlooked that the “patriarchy” or the social dominance hierarchy that men live and work in, functions only because men cooperate with each other. Patriarchy is not all about competition. Men compete but they do so within a system of male cooperation and within established rules and norms. Men work in teams in sport, in business, in the military, in science, in emergency services and a multitude of other domains. The combined efforts of thousands of men have built cities, civilisations, all of our modern infrastructure, won wars and driven humanity into space.
  1. Protection and Provision For Family: Men contribute to the survival of the family. Men have been sexually selected to protect and provide for their progeny and partner. For most of human history and prehistory, male provision and protection has frequently meant the difference between their progeny and their partner living or dying, or at least thriving versus struggling to survive.
  1. Paternal Investment: Men contribute to the raising of children. This is frequently overlooked in our modern culture which pretends that fatherhood conveys no benefit, despite the overwhelming empirical evidence to the contrary.

All of these four dimensions of male value produce an enormous emergent benefit when the value of individual males is pooled collectively. An emergent benefit that civilisation depends on for its continued existence. Think for a moment about the combined intergenerational consequences of all the fatherless households in Western civilisation, on the future social stability and the economy of our countries. The description of these four dimensions, is by no means exhaustive and I could go into much greater detail describing all the ways men contribute to the survival of the species and civilisation.

The reality is that males are driven by testosterone and other factors to strive for status and to engage in behaviours that enhance the survival of their families, their communities and their civilisation. Men have acquired physical and psychological traits and developed specific biological strengths from a combination of sexual and natural selective pressures, to contribute to survival. These are biological facts and no matter how hard ideologues attempt to smear men and demonise them, the good in men and the value in men will keep rising to the surface.

Of course contributing to survival is not exclusive to men and neither is contributing to reproduction exclusive to women. However the reality is that men do contribute to community survival to a much greater degree than women, just as women contribute a great deal more to reproduction. The difference in the investment each sex makes in survival and reproduction is interconnected and interdependent. The male investment in survival supports and allows the greater female investment in reproduction and vice versa. These are realities that feminists will never acknowledge: Women in general do not make up the majority of workers that are doing the bulk of the risky, hazardous and dirty work, the work done in remote locations or night work and working the 50+ hour a week jobs. Despite more than 50 years of feminist social engineering, none of the following realities have changed:

  • Men design, build, maintain, renovate and demolish the vast bulk of the thousands of physical structures (buildings, infrastructure, housing, roads, rail etc) that comprise our towns and cities.
  • Men run the vast bulk of our essential infrastructure that supplies our towns and cities with electricity, water, gas and petrol.
  • Men design, build and repair the majority of our machines, cars, planes, trains, boats, spacecraft and electrical gadgets etc.
  • Men are running and maintaining our farms, abattoirs, fishing industry and dams and making sure our towns and cities remain adequately provisioned with food and water.
  • Men are running and maintaining our oil rigs, mines, refineries, factories and warehouses.
  • Men are the majority of our plumbers, electricians, mechanics and technicians.
  • Men run the vast bulk of our waste management that ensures our towns and cities remain clean and healthy. Men make sure we have a working sewage system, recycling, hard rubbish and garbage collection.
  • Men ensure the continuous transport of goods between towns and cities. Unseen men work on our container ships, on freight trains and on planes shipping goods all over the planet. They are on the road driving our trucks and keeping our supermarkets stocked with food.
  • Men are the majority of our military, coast guard, police, firefighters and emergency service workers.
  • Men remain the spearhead of innovation. Men are the majority of our inventors, Nobel laureates and Fields medallists. The major technological innovations, scientific discoveries, the majority of patents and the majority of the political, economic and social developments of our time, are the result of men. It was men that invented the light bulb, the aeroplane, the car, the radio, the television, the modern computer, developed the internet, developed most of our machinery and electrical gadgets and discovered antibiotics etc. It is male genius that is the reason why we have a population of 7 billion people living in electrified cities and not a couple of 100 million people living in caves. The reality is that the bulk of the intellectually gifted are men (men dominate the upper ranges of the IQ distribution), just as the bulk of the strongest and fittest people are men. Male intellect is a reality that feminist infested academia has tried to ignore, whilst asserting men and boys are somehow defective. I do not know how long this video6 will remain up before it is taken down by feminist and sjw censors, but every person that has been told men and boys are stupid and bought into that lie, should watch it.
  • Men are the majority of our leaders. They are the majority of our entrepeneurs, business leaders, thought leaders, leading scientists and politicians. Men have largely been responsible for starting the majority of new industries and academic disciplines (and subdisciplines), including social media platforms on the internet now taken over by feminists. Men are prepared to take massive risks, take massive responsibilities, present new revolutionary ideas that do not conform to established peer consensus at the risk of ridicule and work long hours often at the expense of the rest of their lives. This is the reality that feminists will not accept when it comes to acknowledging the cost of leadership on the individual and the personal cost of extreme feats of creative brilliance and the relative dearth of women in such pursuits.
  • We could then look at the male contribution to music, writing, art, drama, philosophy and sport. I do not think I have to list the names of every man and their contribution. Imagine if there was no Shakespeare, no John Lennon, no Michelangelo and no Socrates. Men have shaped our culture in ways that have lasted thousands of years (like Jesus Christ and Buddha). Men have also invented new forms of art, music, drama, philosophy and sport and our society is much richer, more developed and more civilised because of their contribution. The male contribution to these areas in the last 50 years is staggering on its own.
  • Men pay the bulk of government taxes and are the bulk of our full-time employed workforce. Men work in industries essential for maintaining GDP and that support service sector industries and government sector occupations the majority of women work in. Men either directly or indirectly finance the bulk of female consumer spending, by either providing women with the household finances directly, or indirectly through government welfare, or by working in industries that make female dominated occupations economically and technologically possible.
  • Finally men are our fathers and are critical to raising physically and psychologically healthy children, with a prosperous and bright future. Fatherlessness and the breakdown of the family in the last 50 years, has done nothing but provide ample evidence for the importance of fathers.

The reality is that these differences in representation between men and women that I have just described, do at least in part reflect innate physical and psychological strengths men have over women in terms of their biology. Just as I mentioned in the previous description on the dimensions of male value, this list could be pages long and we could go through a similar list for men with our prehistory. Think for a moment about the huge impact the male contribution to survival in our history and prehistory has had on our evolutionary success and the capacity to pass on our genes.

Men have done and continue to do the work that women either cannot do or do not want to do. That is the unspoken taboo which our gynocentric society will not acknowledge until it is faced with a crisis of unimaginable proportions from placing female well-being above male well-being for decades and throwing men under the bus. Men are not superior to women and women are not superior to men, but we need to recognise that each sex has its own unique contribution to society and respect the value of both sexes and not just pedestalise women.

How many women are going to work in a sewage treatment plant? Let us be honest here. How many women are going to work on powerlines and in mines? How many women are going to work in garbage collection? How many women are going to risk their lives in actual combat or fighting fires? Men often do these things for their family and for their society, with little recognition or reward and while they are being told they are obsolete7. Many of the men keeping society running are invisible to society, but if they stepped away from their jobs for just one day, society would grind to a halt. That is the scary reality that is one of the factors that drives society out of fear, to con men into believing they have no value when it is the exact opposite.

The simple reality is that men do have strengths relative to women, just as women have strengths relative to men and men do things that women cannot or will not do, just as women do things men cannot or will not do. This man-hating culture does its very best to either ignore, downplay or attack these realities when it does not conform to the gynocentric overton window of female superiority. I could go through the list of valuable physical and psychological attributes that men possess to a greater degree than women, but that should not be necessary.

Yes in certain traits men are better equipped than women and can engage in particular activities with greater performance. We can also say the same about women in certain respects in relation to men and yet only that reality is politically correct to say in this gynocentric culture. Men are not allowed to be better than women at anything, but women are allowed to be better than men at everything. You can see this double standard play out socially on the street8 and even politically9 with President Donald Trump (the supposed “misogynist”). It is socially taboo to state men are better than women at anything of meaningful value in this gynocentric culture, which revolves around worshipping anything female and belittling men.

Whether people like it or not, there are certain biological realities we cannot deny and if we do continue to deny them, reality will eventually assert itself at our peril and threaten the economic and social future of society itself. Whatever social and legal barriers that may have held women back, have been removed and women have had at least 50 years to make use of all of the same opportunities men have had. Women and girls have also benefited from numerous affirmative action programs and policies in employment and education, that have placed women and girls above men and boys. Despite all of that and the massive preferential treatment women and girls have been given for decades, women have not overtaken men in any of the areas I described earlier and there is no sign that is going to change. We need to accept biological reality at some point. The sexes are biologically equal in overall value and equal before the law, but the sexes are also different. Neither sex is superior or inferior, just different.

If we want to understand and identify male biological value, we don’t have to go through the long list of valuable physical and psychological attributes men have in greater abundance than women (again for the insecure nit-pickers, women have their own set of strengths). Just open your eyes and look at the world and reflect on what happens if men disappeared for a day and we had a day without men. If male strengths offend some women, they may want to consider that women at the very least have played a role in sexually selecting men with such strengths and that ironically women have partly themselves to blame if they are offended by male competence. You selected such males as mates for millions of years! Male competence is attractive to women and sometimes like female beauty, it can intimidate some members of the other sex (and sometimes members of the same sex, like feminists who seem to have a problem with both male competence and female beauty).

There are those that will assert that technological automation and robotics will make men redundant. The same logic can be applied to women. Technology can make women just as redundant as men. Artificial uteri and artificially induced male eggs, can eventually replace female reproduction. Artificial intelligence, automation and robotics can also replace female dominated work. However this reasoning fails to account for a regular pattern observed throughout history. With all technological change new work has emerged. Men have shifted to new work and new economies multiple times over the decades and centuries.

Rather than technology making men redundant, men will simply contribute to the survival and prosperity of their communities in other ways as they have done before. Men have demonstrated a robust capacity to shift to new activities throughout history and often have been the ones pioneering new lines of work and new economies and industries. Women have been the ones following male ingenuity and pioneering, not the other way around. The capacity of men to adapt to a shifting environment and still contribute to their community, has been demonstrable throughout history. Even today despite all of this “end of men” female supremacist chest beating, we can see that it is men that comprise the majority of those that are at the spearhead of new lines of work. Regardless as to what the future may hold, as I mentioned at the start of this article, the value of human life for both men and women is greater than either their survival or reproductive utility.

Please continue now to part two of this article.

References:

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%27s_principle
  2. https://www.avoiceformen.com/gynocentrism/gynocentrism-and-the-value-of-men-part-one/
  3. https://www.avoiceformen.com/gynocentrism/gynocentrism-and-the-golden-uterus-part-one/
  4. https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/life-history-evolution-68245673/
  5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence
  6. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSLoiFSpp0g
  7. https://www.amazon.com/End-Men-Rise-Women/dp/1594488045
  8. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxpX6IQ3GY4
  9. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmY5LmaZImk

 

Mythologies of the men’s rights and feminist movements

Have you ever thought of Men’s Rights and feminism as competing mythologies? In what follows I will do just that, while paying special attention to the fact that the feminist myth has triumphed in capturing global imagination. By ‘mythology’ I mean those guiding stories that provide meaning and direction to the lives of all who follow them, including the men’s rights story, and the feminist story. While myth may or may not be scientifically true, it is true in the sense that people actively believe in myths and act them out in their daily lives.

In his 4-volume work1 surveying the history of world mythologies, Joseph Campbell gives a snapshot of the evolving history of mythology from the earliest days of ‘Master Bear god’ painted on cave walls, until the present day.

Campbell demonstrates that, over and over, dominant mythologies get replaced or absorbed by newer mythologies, and such changeability appears to be the only constant in the long sweep of history. There were periods of mythological stability in all cultures, but without exception every traditional mythology was modified or replaced as forces within the culture reached critical mass.

Catalysts for myth revisions are numerous, with examples being foreign invaders who overrun a traditional culture and implant their own mythology, or alternatively it may happen that a new mythology lurking in the back waters of a culture begins to gain grassroots appreciation, leading eventually to its ascendancy and a concomitant decline of the previous mythological setup.  By yet another route the change in mythology may be instituted by a ruler who adopts a new religious belief and then mandates it as the official belief of the masses, examples being;

  • Indian King Ashoka promoted Buddhist mythology across ancient Asia;
  • Emperor Constantine promoted the Christian story as religion of the Roman Empire;
  • Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine and her daughter crafted the mythos of romantic love and chivalry which was disseminated throughout Europe and the world.

In some situations the dominant myths did not give way to a revision for a considerable time, usually because there wasn’t a compelling mythology jostling to replace it. Even when the prevailing mythology has become somewhat stale and uninspiring, the human mind will not reject it in favor of a story vacuum: to be without some kind of guiding mythology leads the human mind into an existential paralysis, and for the most part nature refuses to tolerate such a void.

Now lets consider all of this in the light of feminism, a movement crafted from florid imaginings of the mythic imagination. To get to the heart of this myth we need to start at the medieval beginnings of those accreted layers of story that constitute the end product we know as modern feminism.

In his volume Creative Mythology,2 Campbell documents how stories of chivalry and romantic love during the Middle Ages formed a new mythology that not only competed with the Christian religion for social legitimacy, but eventually surpassed it in cultural importance. Today romantic love saturates popular media, song, cinema, dance and the arts, and is the number one selling genre of literature, outselling the books of traditional religion, ie., the Qu’ran, Bible, Vedas, Bhagavad Gita, Tipitaka, Tao Te Ching and so on. Romantic love is, as Campbell states, the world’s current leading mythos.

So what does all this have to do with men’s rights and feminism?

Well, everything.

Feminists freely admit that chivalry and romantic love form ground zero of the feminist enterprise, constituting something of a Genesis Story of women’s improved social position, pedestalization and ongoing increases in power. As told by feminist Dr. Elizabeth Reid Boyd of the School of Psychology and Social Science at Edith Cowan University, romance writings can be called the “first form of feminism”:

“I muse upon arguments that romance is a form of feminism. Going back to its history in the Middle Ages and its invention by noblewomen who created the notion of courtly love, examining its contemporary popular explosion and the concurrent rise of popular romance studies in the academy that has emerged in the wake of women’s studies, and positing an empowering female future for the genre, I propose that reading and writing romantic fiction is not only personal escapism, but also political activism.

Romance has a feminist past that belies its ostensible frivolity. Romance, as most true romantics know, began in medieval times… Love songs and stories, like those of Lancelot and Guinevere, Tristan and Isolde, were soon on the lips of troubadours and minstrels all over Europe. Romance spread rapidly. It has been called the first form of feminism.”3

Reid Boyd, like so many other feminists before her, makes clear that romantic-love mythology provides bedrock for the development of feminism. Faced with that fantastical adversary, men’s advocates can argue they have excellent data demonstrating a growing narcissism among women and a neglect of men, facts that should lead right-thinking people away from the grip of feminism. However, those facts are only in the beginning stages of being woven into a story, one that might, in time, become an epic like the Bible or Mahabharata.

Axiom: ONLY STORY CAN DISPLACE OR ABSORB OTHER STORIES.

Facts be damned.

Until a new mythology rises to challenge the hegemony of feminist myth, non-gynocentric men are destined to wander the planet like lost souls in search of a place to call home.  For many men, the dominant mythology of our time has erased our story, and with it our existence in the world. Campbell talks to this problem when he declared “Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths,” concluding that when your personal understanding of life doesn’t align with the dominant public myth, your path in life will be painful:

“If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of the society, you are in good accord with your group. If it isn’t, you’ve got a long adventure in the dark forest ahead of you.”4

While that sums up the experience of red-pill men today, all is not lost. A growing number of voices have declared the mythology of feminism overripe for change, that it is rotting to the core as a guide to civilization, and there are in fact compelling stories poised to replace it. Before we look at alternative stories that have potential to help men and women live more harmoniously, lets first survey how the feminist mythos coincides with other mythological traditions.

As with the great civilization-building and sustaining mythologies of the past, feminism has narrated; 1. an Eden story of how ancient men and women co-existed and organized their society; 2. a fall from grace, 3. a set of laws to guide humans away from their fallen ways, and 4. liberation and future utopia.

Each of these four elements, which could be expanded to dozens more, appear in feminist mythology as follows:

  1. Once upon a time, much of European society was matriarchal, peace-loving, agrarian, and Goddess worshiping, with men serving as the labor force.5,6
  2. Patriarchal tribes from the North invaded and suppressed this idyllic Eden, supplanting it with a hierarchical, patriarchal, and woman-oppressing culture.5,6
  3. Proto-feminists of the Middle Ages, followed by modern feminists, rebelled and challenged the grip of ‘the patriarchy’ and its institutions to allow women out of the wilderness and into the center of society. They created romantic love, and instituted laws, one by one, that would not only give women equal power to men, but would “compensate” women for previous losses of power.
  4. Women would once again rule, as a female aristocracy, with men learning to be obedient, loving and dutiful servants, inaugurating a golden age.7

While these beliefs sound fanciful to the rational mind, they are documented and widely believed myths underpinning the feminist movement. With the enormous currency of feminist mythology in modern society, it constitutes ‘the story’ that we are all, to some extent, ‘in.’

Indeed there’s no outside of mythological perspectives — culturally we are all living inside them in one way or another. Those of us with a bent for factual accuracy prefer to align with stories that are truer to science, with narratives that are compatible with the facts without departing from them as myths often do. But whether we enjoy them, or rail against them as childish fantasies, the fact is that mythologies full of kooky flat-earth ideas have guided civilizations for millennia without being based on facts at all, and yet the societies they governed continued to flourish regardless.

Mythologies clearly don’t need to be factually correct to guide societies. They need only provide a shared operating system that glues people’s otherwise separate minds into one harmonious whole.

Those of us with a penchant for scientific fact can hope that a new mythology incorporates more factual data than the flat-earth science of the current gynocentric mythos — one eminently more suited to the scientific age in which we live, and one that many more people could believe in.

To prepare ourselves for inevitable new mythologies, it helps to first become aware of the dominant myths already governing our society. And as Gianni Vattimo once advised, the post-modern paradox of social-mythology is to wake up and realize that we have been dreaming, and yet continue dreaming anyway;7 ie. we realize we still need stories to live by but we can consciously choose the guiding narratives we wish to align with instead of going along with them unconsciously.

As men’s rights advocates, that raises questions about our own ‘mythologies.’ What are they? Have we sufficiently developed and articulated them? In light of the four elements of religious mythology listed above, lets list a rudimentary, rough sketch of the MR story to date. Before I do that, I hasten to add that this sketch is not prescriptive and may be at odds with narratives already held by devout Christian, Muslim, or XYZ-believing MRAs. However this mythological sequence focuses solely on the gender relations problem as it has been articulated by many MRAs today:

  1. A strong candidate for an MR ‘Genesis story’ is the story of human evolution, a compelling mythology about our remote past and how we clawed our way out of the jungle to build the wonders of modern science and civilization. That story comes with scientific observations and anecdotes about human biology in action – how early men and women displayed different sexual and survival strategies, and how human offspring were protected due to biological imperatives. Its a story of cooperation between men and women as they dreamed the human adventure forward.
  2. The ‘fall’ took place as that delicate equilibrium between men and women was unraveled by the arrival of the new gender relations mythology called romantic chivalry, AKA gynocentrism. This period marked the moment of enslavement to a sexual relations model designed to tilt maximum power to women, with men slaving as Moses did for the Egyptians, and it presided over the destruction of the delicate family unit.
  3. Over the centuries men (and women) of iron will and good conscience mounted a resistance to gynocentrism and a desire for Exodus – to wanting to walk away from gynocentric-feminism as free men;
  4. Finally, men and women began to live the GOOD NEWS of the MR Testament: liberty, equality of opportunity, compassion and multi-options for all – this time including men.

These four sub-narratives form a larger corpus that we might call a mythology, one that would improve on the current toxic mythos of feminism. As mentioned it is given for illustrative purposes only and is not prescriptive; any new mythology will arise organically like a nighttime dream and flourish within the culture, and like dreams we never know when it will arrive or exactly what shape it will take. But the dream, the myth, will arrive…. of that we can be sure.

If we continue to expand this collection of stories, elaborating them in greater depth, continuing to tell them, and telling them again, more compelling with each recitation, then just maybe our society will have a necessary stone to jump to.

References:

[1] Joseph Campbell, Masks of God (4 volume series) (1959 – 1968)
[2] Joseph Campbell, Creative Mythology, volume 4 of Masks of God series (1968)
Occidental Mythology, volume 3 of Masks of God series (1959)
Transformations of Myth Through Time, (1988)
[3] Elizabeth Reid Boyd, Romancing feminism: From women’s studies to women’s fiction (2014)
[4] Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth (1988)
[5] Cynthia Eller, The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why an Invented Past Won’t Give Women a Future, (2001)
[6] Lucy Goodison, Ancient Goddesses, (1999)
[7] Peter Wright, A new Aristocracy, published at gynocentrism.com, (2018)
[8] Richard Kearney, Poetics of Imagining: Modern to Post-modern (1998)