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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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 21^st 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 Men”¹⁷ 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)