We often talk about men’s duties and responsibilities, or their failures to man-up and adequately serve women and society. But we rarely talk about men’s needs, nor encourage them to carve out some self-actualized living.

Abraham Maslow’s model of human needs is depicted as a series of hierarchical levels on a pyramid. At the base are what he calls the deficiency needs (D-needs) which must be fulfilled before moving up to enjoy the higher needs. Any absence in deficiency needs, such as social belonging or having enough to eat, creates a sense of deprivation that motivates people to seek satisfaction of those needs.

D-needs are comprised of the lower four of the following levels of need: Physiological, safety, belonging, and self-esteem.

The guiding principle in this model is that each base-need must be satisfied before moving onto the next level of need motivation, culminating finally in the pursuit of personal ‘self-actualization,’ a flowering of human potential inviting more free-time and the luxury of not being preoccupied with servicing base needs for ourselves and others.

Sadly, catering to the deficiency needs of everyone around them is precisely what most men find themselves doing. Men collectively spend most of their waking hours servicing the base needs of others, particularly female others who are freed to pursue the more luxurious need goals related to self-actualization.

Think of the so called ‘housewife’ or ‘home maker,’ or of women who make the sensible choice of working part time so their work-life balance is not deleterious to their higher order needs nor aspirations for self-actualisation.

Meanwhile, we often fail to ask who is labouring away at servicing the base needs of society; who is growing the most meat and vegetables to cater to human need; who is transporting the food; who is working longer hours to earn the bigger weekly wage to pay for all the foodstuffs that mostly others will eat? Who is building the houses and infrastructure for people to luxuriate within; Which sex is putting themselves on the line to ensure the safety of others? And which sex is pandering to women’s relationship ideals – including the funding of regular holiday packages, latte and shopping money, and big helpings of benevolent sexism to ensure the ‘esteem needs’ of women are fully met?

You guessed it – they are the base needs servicing army.

Alternatively, and on a more personal level, which sex suffers most homelessness, street violence, workplace injuries, health deprivation, safety deprivation, love/belonging deprivation, depression, suicide or early death? Clearly men are not very good at servicing their own base needs – perhaps because they are so preoccupied serving those of others.

Analysed honestly, a picture emerges of men preoccupied their whole lives with catering to base needs of women and children, and in many cases neglecting those very same needs in themselves. And too often women appear reluctant to fill the breach – perhaps because they are preoccupied with enjoying higher order needs and their own creative pursuits toward self-actualization.

Maslow conceptualized his model as a universal path regardless of one’s gender, a human path not requiring sharp distinctions between the big-picture needs of men or women respectively. This however appears far from the reality when we consider that his pyramid today has been carved into distinctly gendered turf, with men relegated to servicing the bottom need-rungs for women (especially physiological and safety needs), or indirectly servicing them via paying taxes to a government who services those same needs, thus allowing women to devote energy to the creative pursuits of romantic love, belonging, self-esteem, and of course the cherry on the top – self-actualization.

Not only do men take care of most physical needs and safety issues, they feel compelled to provide support for whatever higher-need whims their female partners inevitably dream up — “I just do whatever she wants so she can be happy”.

Betty Friedan, champion of the women’s liberation movement and instigator of second-wave feminism called for self-actualization for all women, writing “Only by such a personal commitment to the future can American women break out of the housewife trap and truly find fulfillment… by fulfilling their own unique possibilities as separate human beings.”¹

Friedan cited Maslow’s higher-order description of ‘self-actualization’ as essential for women to achieve this aim – and achieve it they have, in spades.

To-date we are still waiting for the cry to go out for male self-actualization.

To a large extent men, being perpetually stuck catering to bottom order needs is a hangover of human survival roles in which men and women divided labours between themselves in order to ensure survival of the family unit and, with it, the species. Having realized that survival, and living now in societies with far less disease, danger, and with greater material abundance, women have collectively seen fit to “liberate” themselves from traditional roles while men, generally speaking, have not. This is what we call the blue-pill conundrum — one sex is living the liberated dream, while the other remains stuck in a traditional service role.

The idea of men reaching for higher order needs is among the hottest of men’s rights questions arising today: i.e. should we remain welded to our traditional roles of protector and provider and hope that “liberated” women will disavow their multi-option lives and come join us in the trenches? Or do we join them and insist that neither sex should be responsible for the base needs of the other while simultaneously neglecting their own safety and higher fulfillment?

I think the question is self-answering.

Men and boys might now pause to consider they have the option to focus on their own base needs as much as anyone else’s. We also have the option to pursue Maslow’s higher-order needs of self-actualization, described as, “the desire for self-fulfilment, namely the tendency for him to become actualized in what he is potentially. This tendency might be phrased as the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming.”²

Self-actualization is further defined by Dictionary.com as “the achievement of one’s full potential through creativity, independence, spontaneity, and a grasp of the real world.” It entails nothing less than the realization of one’s creative, aesthetic, intellectual, and social potential, but it can only come about by the commitment of the self-determined, red pill man to live a life of freedom. He is the one who opts for being over and above selfless sacrifice and catering to survival needs alone. He is the one builds, dreams, cooks, rides a Harley, has hobbies, visits friends, goes on an adventure.

If we accept that there are no victims in life, only volunteers, that means there is literally nothing standing in the way of a more a fulfilling, self-actualized existence. The choice as always is ours.

Peak Experiences
Another concept presented by Maslow’s is peak experiences –those moments of intense happiness that stand apart from usual mundane experience, something he suggested was more likely to occur with regularity for the self-actualized person.

According to Maslow, feelings accompanying peak experiences included “wonder, awe, reverence, humility, surrender, and even worship before the greatness of the experience.” And he added that reality is perceived with a sense of “truth, goodness, beauty, wholeness, aliveness, uniqueness, perfection, completion, justice, simplicity, richness, effortlessness, playfulness, self-sufficiency” ³

Those humans lucky enough to enjoy the self-actualized life, punctuated as it is with peak experiences, would seem to live a privileged existence.

The following Wikipedia list offers some typical characteristics of peak experiences — experiences which in many ways are comparable to the freedoms described under red pill living:

• loss of judgment to time and space
• the feeling of being one whole and harmonious self, free of dissociation or inner conflict
• the feeling of using all capacities and capabilities at their highest potential, or being “fully functioning”
• functioning effortlessly and easily without strain or struggle
• feeling completely responsible for perceptions and behavior. Use of self-determination to becoming stronger, more single-minded, and fully volitional
• being without inhibition, fear, doubt, and self-criticism
• spontaneity, expressiveness, and naturally flowing behavior that is not constrained by conformity
• a free mind that is flexible and open to creative thoughts and ideas
• complete mindfulness of the present moment without influence of past or expected future experiences
• a physical feeling of warmth, along with a sensation of pleasant vibrations emanating from the heart area outward into the limbs.

Every detail of that list has been described by men who have swallowed the red pill and decided to live life on their own terms.

When men are no longer preoccupied in servicing the needs of Betty Friedan’s liberated women, no longer preoccupied by honey-do lists, the long work hours and the burden of social guilt that accompanies the role of servicing (and ultimately failing) women’s expectations, they can then begin to pursue their own needs as self-actualized men.

Those men who have swallowed the red pill report a new experience of freedom, one that comes with transcendence of temporal time and space as men become less chained to the clock and its plantation-like schedules. There’s far less ‘dissociation or inner conflict’ as blue-pill cognitive dissonance becomes a thing of the past, and self-actualization becomes second nature.

Feminists since Betty Freidan have succeeded in managing all levels of Maslow’s ladder, from physiological needs upwards, for their own self-benefit. They’ve treated human needs as a gendered turf war, with Maslow’s pyramid divided up like real estate on a Monopoly board where all the good properties are owned by women, while men pay rent on their Mayfair and Park Lane stopovers, or go straight to jail. The time to level the playing field is long overdue. 

Sources:

[1] Friedan, Betty, The Feminine Mystique (1963)
[2] Maslow., A. A Theory of Human Motivation, Psychological Review 50, pp. 370-396. (1943)
[3] Maslow, A.H. (1964). Religions, values, and peak experiences. London: Penguin Books Limited

Eric Anderson is Professor of Sport, Masculinities & Sexualities, University of Winchester.

As scientists and rational human beings we like to think of our ourselves as people swayed by hard evidence. However there is another thread in the human experience, one which can sway us to have “faith” in ideas that go beyond science.

By Paul Elam

Recently, Brad Wilcox of PragerU did a video trying to sell the idea that a man is better off yoked to a woman he has to take care of versus life as a bachelor pursuing his own interests and leisure activities.

The reaction from the group of men who identify as Men Going Their Own Way, or MGTOW, was swift, critical and on point.

Now, you might think that the divide between MGTOW and pro-marriage advocates is a relatively new one, born in the internet by a collection of men who made a choice to rebel against the institution of marriage and opened a real-time, public dialogue about it.

In modern times we can trace the kerfuffle back to the early 2000’s, when a group of Men’s Rights Activists created the first internet forum dedicated to men going their own way. An archived conversation with one of the founders was recorded by Rocking Mr. E.

Part of the problem those men encountered was also, in their minds, the solution. Men of this type were fiercely independent. Or, more bluntly put, MGTOW tend not to play well with others. Rather than cooperate with each other, they often went their own way.

That is not a criticism. Quite the contrary, it was MGTOW steadfastness and out-of-the-box thinking that led them to re-popularize the idea of men checking out and taking care of themselves.

Their ideas were subject to quick evolution. For instance, early in the first known internet version of a MGTOW manifesto, they claim to hold the objective of, and I quote, “instilling masculinity in men,” a clear “man up” mandate that would most likely be scoffed at by contemporary men going their own way.

Thus, as far as we know, is when the modern use of the term emerged. Many have assumed that this is a first for western culture, and have even struggled to claim ownership over what “going your own way” means.

There has been a fair amount of infighting over that, from which I have not been exempt. Yet, if we look at history we find that the bickering is like two fleas arguing over who owns the dog. The idea of men going their own way is bigger and older than anyone talking about it today.

Going one’s own sweet way and other variants have been in popular discourse for centuries – including but not limited to men’s freedoms and the right to a bachelor life.

There is a record of men avoiding marriage — the dictates of gynocentrism, and the attempts by those who would shame men from that path that stretches back nearly into antiquity.

One good source to gather more information on this is The Age of the Bachelor: Creating an American Subculture by Howard P. Chudacoff, a 1999 book that chronicles a good bit of the history of misogamy and debunks completely the idea that it is a new phenomenon.

The following excerpt from the volume Medieval Forms of Argument provides more detail about the tradition of men rejecting marriage:

According to a recent poll only 18% of U.S. people consider themselves feminist.¹ On that account we can expect readers of romance novels to comprise not more than 18% feminists, and likely far less due to the fact that feminists disparage traditional approaches to romance…. at least according to their rhetoric.

A more generous National Geographic/Ipsos survey² of more than 1,000 American women found that 29% of respondents identified as feminists. From the study its worth noting, as an aside, the political spread among feminist women, with Republicans scoring low in feminist self-identification, Democrats scoring high, and Independents somewhere in the middle:

In line with these surveys, we can assume that women who identify as feminist represent less than one third of all women in the USA. With this fact in mind, imagine my surprise when I recently discovered that a whopping 60% of readers of romance novels are feminist, which means that almost two thirds of romantic love enthusiasts are…. feminists! This finding is from a survey of 800 people, which discovered the following details about the average romance reader:³

Author of the survey summarised the question and answers in the following way:

“In the survey of romance readers, I asked if one identified as feminist, believed in equality but wouldn’t use the term feminist – or, not at all. 61% of respondents replied in the affirmative to the first option. While many commentators expressed their ire at the believe-in-equality-but-wouldn’t-use-the-term-feminist option, 35% selected this. Just 3% said not at all (“The third option makes me cry,” one self declared feminist wrote).

The more I read from both sides, the more I realized that we’re more alike than we let on. Whether you call it chivalry or manners, we all want someone to open the door for us.”³

Her last sentence proposes a rationale of (the high number of) feminist readers of romance novels: that they still want doors opened for them, whether actual doors, or doors into better jobs, boardrooms and other kinds of feminist power that are gifted to them by the actions of chivalric men. This point about feminist rationale was confirmed in a study by Gul & Kupfer⁴ which discovered that feminists felt the positive sides of benevolent sexism outweighed the negatives even if they believed it was somewhat patronising.

Many feminists believe that romantic love is a subversive trope, a positive one that works to increase the power of women relative to men. Elizabeth Reid Boyd, of the School of Psychology and Social Science at Edith Cowan University, and Director of the Centre for Research for Women in Western Australia with more than a decade as a feminist researcher and teacher of women’s studies, tells:

“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. The word originally referred to the language romanz, linked to the French, Italian and Spanish languages in which love stories, songs and ballads were written. Stories, poems and songs written in this language were called romances to separate them from more serious literature – a distinction we still have today. Romances were popular and fashionable. 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 (Putnam 1970).⁴

Readers of my writings are familiar with the idea that romantic love and feminism constitute a seamless tradition of gynocentrism that first began in the royal courts of Europe.⁵ There have occurred transformations in the campaign strategies of feminists throughout the ensuing centuries, but the primary impulse remains consistent through each new generation of feminist activity: to increase the power of women via the institution of a ‘sexual feudalism’ – ie. the proposition that men should act as a quasi serving-class for women.

The following examples of romantic love in Victorian literature are excerpted from the book Male Masochism by Carol Siegal ⁶. Notice the thematic continuity of this literature with the earlier sexual-relations contract first invented in Medieval Europe:

“A great deal of what [Victorian] women’s literary works had to say about gender relations may have been as disquieting as feminist political manifestos, and ironically so, in that the novels seem most anti-male in the very places where they most affirm a traditionally male vision of love. While women’s lyric poetry tended to reverse the conventional gender roles in love by representing the female speaker as the lover instead of the object of love, women’s fiction most frequently reproduced the images, so common in prior texts by men, of the self-abasing male lover and his exacting mistress.

For example, in Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff declares himself Cathy’s slave; in Jane Eyre, Rochester’s desire for Jane is first inspired and then intensified by his physically dependent position; in Middlemarch, Will Ladislaw silently vows that Dorothea will always have him as her slave, his only claim to her love lies in how much he has suffered for her. In several Victorian novels by women, men must undergo quasi-ritualized humiliation or punishment before being judged deserving of their lady’s attention. For instance, in Olive Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm, the fair Lyndall condescends to treat her admirers tenderly after one has been horsewhipped and the other has dressed himself in women’s clothes to wait on her. Although Victorian women’s novels do explore the emotional insecurities of the heroines, their apparent self-possession is also stressed, in marked contrast to their lovers’ displays of agony, desperation, and wounds.”

The author goes on to say that male masochism and the dominatrix-like behavior of women in much literature is continuous with courtly love literature from the Middle Ages. And whilst some men self-consciously chose their lowly position in relation to women, the men described in Victorian women’s novels lacked such volition and were helplessly controlled by the power of love and beauty:

“These texts also insist that the true measure of male love is lack of volition. While the heroines make choices that define them morally, the heroes are helplessly compelled by love, and not judged to love unless they are helpless. In this respect Victorian women’s fiction recovers the ethos so often expressed in medieval courtly romance that love must be “suffered as a destiny to be submitted to and not denied.” It also departs from the conventions of medieval romance in describing the helpless submission to love as an attribute of true manliness, and thus Victorian women’s fiction directly attacks the degeneration of chivalry into the self-conscious and controlled “gallantry” of eighteenth century libertines.”

Just like their forebears, feminists constitute an army of women working to preserve and extend the tradition of elevated womanhood that has been championed over the last millennium, making the feminist project a remarkably traditional enterprise while putting a lie to its claim to be a forward looking, progressive movement.

The only question left to ask is how, exactly, can this tradition be most accurately characterised? Is it a philosophy, an ideology, human nature, or the slow cultural build-up of behaviorist techniques applied to heterosexual relationships? Its probably a little of all these things, but I’m going to follow the European tradition at the root of romantic love, which saw it primarily as a religion complete with its own guiding Goddess. Her name, as spoken in medieval Germany and through the centuries was Frau Minne.

I have published details about this Goddess before, so rather than rewriting the details I invite the reader to visit the article⁷ and look further into the essential religiosity at the heart of our gynocentric cult. Furthermore, as recently stated by Alison Tieman, divinity has today become associated with every human woman, imparting to her the power of “I am a Goddess” in much the same way as once done to pharaohs or emperors, or divinised mortals, who became God-men in ancient times and received religious devotion due of a God. That is, half the human population has undergone an apotheosis, while the other half stand in awe and service.

The differences between a god-complex arising variously from a psychotic episode, in cases of extreme narcissism, or in a society that has seen fit to elevate an individual/s to God status is perhaps moot. These things more often appear together, in combinations. Whatever the causes, we are safe to conclude that feminism amounts today to a global religion, one as powerful as any that have gone before it, with women collectively representing the Godhead to an enthralled male audience.

References:

[1] Only 18 percent of Americans consider themselves feminists, Vox 2015
[2] Less than a third of American women identify as feminists
[3] Dangerous Books For Girls: The Bad Reputation of Romance Novels Explained.
[4] Elizabeth Reid Boyd, Romancing Feminism: From Women’s Studies to Women’s Fiction, 2014
[4] Gul, P., & Kupfer, T. R. (2018). Benevolent Sexism and Mate Preferences: Why Do Women Prefer Benevolent Men Despite Recognizing That They Can Be Undermining?. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 0146167218781000.
[5] Damseling, chivalry and courtly love (part two)
[6] Male Masochism by Carol Siegal
[7] ‘Frau Minne’ the Goddess who steals men’s hearts

By Peter Ryan

Please read part one of this article before continuing.

From Exploitation To Disposability

In our modern world technological and social change has resulted in an enormous increase in misandry. We have transitioned from male exploitation to genuine male disposability. Our decadent, safe and prosperous societies have lost touch with basic fundamental truths required to sustain civilisation, because technology has temporarily buffered and delayed the consequences of doing so. This is why we have clown world. Only a society completely unconcerned with its own future survival, would tolerate the level of insanity and mass stupidity we see in present day society.

Due to these societal changes, men are now indeed viewed as disposable and are dehumanised to the point their right to even have a place in society is being questioned. Our culture is now filled with messages like, “The End Of Men”¹², “The Future Is Female”¹³,  “Why Can’t We Hate Men”¹⁴ and “The Coronavirus Is Not Killing Men Fast Enough”¹⁵. There are a plethora of examples like this over the last fifty years. These messages are not coming from the margins of our society, they are coming from our mainstream media and our political system. We can also see the routine marginalisation of men in the legal system and the abuses of their fundamental rights. In the education system we can see a complete indifference to the learning needs of young men and boys and the long-term economic impact that will have on society. The list goes on. Men are not actually biologically disposable as I have discussed in my previous writings, but men are certainly treated as disposable in this modern society and there is a general level of indifference shown toward them as a result.

There is no concern for how failing to support men and boys will impact on societies future whatsoever. The cognitive connection of looking after men so they can in turn look after society has been lost. Our culture has lost the logic of survival and neglecting men will inevitably result in a socioeconomic collapse of our societies, which Karen Straughan called the Fempocalypse¹⁶. As I have discussed in my earlier writings¹⁷, men still remain essential to keeping our societies functioning. This is despite all of the social and technological changes that have occurred. In some dimensions we are even more dependent on men today than we have been in the past. However because of the effect that technology and creating massive amounts of debt has had on greatly enhancing the living conditions of society, we have become disconnected from this reality and other realities related to survival.

It is easy to see when you look at history, how the exploitation of men from gynocentrism has led to the emergence of male disposability. Men’s blindness to gynocentrism and the technological and social changes that have occurred over the last three centuries, made it inevitable. If men were not going to challenge their own exploitation from gynocentrism, then the exploitation of men would flourish along the lines of biological sex and it has. The only obstacle that stood in the way of male disposability in the past, was the logic of survival and an understanding of the importance of supporting men so they could support society. Once that logic was lost, any concern for men went with it.

It does not take much for exploitation to transition to disposability, when supporting “human doings” so they can be exploited, ceases to be perceived to be necessary. If society has no concept of men’s humanity and does not regard them as human beings, they become disposable once they cease being perceived to be useful human doings. That is precarious manhood and men’s place in the world is conditional under precarious manhood. As the world has undergone huge changes, men have gradually been losing their place in society and have come under increasing attack and dehumanisation as a result. Of course men are more than human doings, but gynocentrism unlike other forms of exploitation, has never been challenged by men on any substantive societal level and so has been allowed to grow for centuries to become the monster it is today.

 

The Final Outcome Of Disposability

The eventual outcome of treating a group of people as disposable is genocide. This is what Adam Kostakis wrote about¹⁸ in his series on gynocentrism, when he talked about the eventual outcome of feminism. People might dismiss the idea of men being eliminated as they are the “physically stronger sex”. As we can see from war, all it takes is for men to be turned against each other to make androcide possible. When rampant gynocentrism reaches a level where our own institutions regard the majority of men as a threat and a minority of men in authority in a feminist controlled state are given the “honour” of being the “good men” fighting the oppressive force of the “patriarchy”, then those men will do the killing for their female betters.

That might sound brutal and unbelievable and that is understandable, but look at history. Many Jewish people had the same level of disbelief initially before they were sent to the death camps. What Jew would have thought that his entire family would be exterminated only a decade after Hitler came to power? These atrocities happen because good people in society are asleep at the wheel during critical moments in history and remain in a state of disbelief. Yes people really are that insane when insanity is not challenged and yes androcide can happen and it can happen on an industrial scale.

Setting men against each other is gynocentric female proxy violence 101. Now imagine that on a societal scale with the full support and enforcement of our institutions. That’s the eventual outcome of rampant gynocentrism- A society that regards men as subhumans that have to be eradicated and a handful of chosen men are considered to be reformed and “good men” that do all the dirty work for their feminist masters. These are the male feminists and the white knights. The ones that think that killing men in the name of protecting women makes them brave and honourable.

Do I think all male feminists are like that? No. But at the extreme end of any movement you will find people with extreme views and as we have seen, feminism has no immune response to extremists in their ranks. With every year the feminist movement becomes more and more radical and more and more dangerous. We know the genocidal leanings of radical feminism, because they have written about it in their writings. They are not a fringe element of feminism any longer. People may regard such men and women as insane and yet this is insanity has found its way and continues to find its way into positions of power in our institutions and governments.

Can we stop this? Yes we can, but it is going to take a major shift in the way men see themselves and the way society regards men. Perhaps when society truly discovers the dark evil radical feminism presents and looks back at history, there will be a recognition that change in how we regard men is needed. Men need to be taught to reframe their sense of self-worth along lines of intrinsic value and on that of a human being and not a human doing. Men need to be raised to see the duality of power that exists between the sexes and the power women have in relation to men. Men need to be raised to identify the exploitive nature of chivalry. Only if this social programming is overcome, will men be in a position to challenge gynocentrism. When the mask is lifted and men have an empowered sense of internally derived self-worth and men see the gynocentric dynamic between men and women for what it is, then the days of gynocentrism are numbered.

Men going their own way (MGTOW) is all about men finding their own intrinsic sense of self-worth and going in their own direction in life. MGTOW and red pill knowledge is a significant part of the solution to overcoming gynocentrism. Men that go their own way and have an awareness of the exploitative gynocentric landscape of modern society, are in a prime position to challenge gynocentrism.

Feminism is fascism in a dress and the sooner men recognise the threat it presents and the cultural pathology of gynocentrism it emerged from, the better. Keeping men divided and against each other with gynocentric threat narratives¹⁹, is a huge part of gynocentrism and what prevents men from challenging it. For decades we have had a feminist threat narrative that men have oppressed women for thousands of years. There are many other feminist threat narratives, such as the feminist account of domestic violence as an expression of men’s patriarchal tyranny and the feminist rape culture narrative. All of these threat narratives are seeds of hate to justify the demonisation and dehumanisation of men. They have been sown in our society over many decades by feminists. As a result of this, our academic institutions, media, legal system and political systems are now predictably full of contempt for men (particularly academia). At the same time this has occurred, there has been a creeping trend toward authoritarianism, selective censorship and infringements of our civil liberties in so-called Western democracies. Feminism and an emerging authoritarian police state are a perfect marriage of evil cloaked in the supposed feminine innocence that our gynocentric culture glorifies. Feminism is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, or as I prefer to call it- Feminism is fascism in a dress.

The enforcement of gynocentrism, requires men to see themselves as the good guy slaying the evil men and protecting the women (or the damsels in distress). All of the threat narratives from feminism, tap into the psychological dynamic in men to see themselves as the protector and provider of women. All of these feminist threat narratives demand that men redeem themselves by demonstrating a hatred for their own sex. That’s how the seeds for mass androcide are sown. All a feminist police state has to do in such a social environment saturated with these threat narratives over many past decades, is to convince the “good men” in authority to view the men that challenge feminism as a threat. From there feminists can then reframe the rest of men in society as a threat and as an example of toxic masculinity that must be eradicated for the survival of humanity. The “good men” in authority will then do the violent and androcidal bidding of feminists on their behalf. After that, then any “good man” that is not ideologically pure enough for the feminist authorities becomes the new threat to be eradicated and so the mass murder goes on and on from there.

For people that doubt this could happen, look at how easy it is to get other men to vilify and condemn other men for being white or black, with all the threat narratives targeted at white men or black men over the decades and centuries. Look at how divided men are because of far-left ideology and identity politics. Consider how dangerous it is for men in particular, to divide men against each other by race. Feminism has been right up there promoting racial identity politics with the far-left for decades. There are too many sick radical feminist ideas to cite and too many examples of extreme feminist ideology such as toxic masculinity²⁰ being taken up by our institutions, for the real possibility of androcide to be dismissed. People in academia have even written about selectively aborting male fetuses and using genetic engineering to control and subjugate men. It is sick and yet this is coming from people in academia. These people have influence and are not on the fringes of our society. So yes, it is indeed possible for society to head down a very dark road when it comes to the future treatment of men and boys in society.

Remember the men from the Christmas Truce in World War One I wrote about at the start of this article? These were men that despite all of the propaganda, recognised they had more in common with each other than they had with the people that had sent them there to fight and die. Men need to overcome the gynocentric forces dividing them and come together to overcome gynocentrism. It is possible that men can do this. Even during war, men from opposing armies have come together under extraordinary circumstances. If men can come together in war, they can come together to fight gynocentrism. However it will require patience, a lot of effort on the part of men and an unconditional regard for the well-being of our fellow men regardless of race or ideology etcetera (whether they are black or white, or a male feminist or a men’s rights activist). Men have to overcome the gynocentric lines that divide us and identity politics. Love your enemy, because feminism sure as hell does not love a male feminist. Feminism just regards their male allies as pawns to enforce gynocentrism and feminist ideology on society, nothing more.

Feminists have put an enormous amount of effort into preventing men from gathering together to discuss men’s issues, or gathering together in general into any sort of men’s only group or organisation without female supervision. Feminists know the power of men getting together in groups and discussing men’s issues and how it undermines gynocentrism and their power base. That’s why there is so much effort from feminists²¹, to censor the manosphere and disrupt men’s conferences and events. As Prof. Janice Fiamengo said²² at a lecture on men’s issues that was disrupted by feminists, “It’s the signature of a totalitarian ideology to attempt to quash dissent”. Feminism is fascism in a dress.

Time for men to wake up and come to together. Time for society to wake up and recognise men as human beings. Gynocentrism will come to an end in some form or another. Gynocentrism can only end in three ways- socioeconomic collapse, androcide or men peacefully rising up against the authoritarian feminist police state that will emerge from decades of rampant unchecked gynocentrism and passively resisting their own exploitation and dehumanisation. Perhaps we may get all three occurring at once. It all comes down to how much men are prepared to defend their own lives and their own future.

 

References:

12. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end-of-men/308135/
13. https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/real-men-dont-write-blogs/201703/memo-our-sons-and-grandsons-the-future-is-female
14. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-cant-we-hate-men/2018/06/08/f1a3a8e0-6451-11e8-a69c-b944de66d9e7_story.html
15. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxyJq9Hl-jo
16. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w__PJ8ymliw
17. https://gynocentrism.com/2020/01/10/the-nature-of-male-value-and-our-gynocentric-culture-part-one/
18. https://gynocentrism.com/2014/05/25/the-eventual-outcome-of-feminism-part-i/
19. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWw8QmVEK2M
20. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqXCO8ivFf8
21. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jEQYHAFfjg
22. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OciDuhHk2zM

 

By Peter Ryan

Disposability Versus Exploitation

What is disposable? Something is disposable when it has little or no value and can be easily replaced and readily discarded. Disposable cutlery is one example of this. Highly valuable items that cannot be easily replaced or readily discarded, are not something we consider to be disposable. Famous paintings come to mind as one example of what we would not consider to be disposable. I have always had a problem with the concept of male disposability as a generalised description of the state of men’s lives throughout history. People that are truly disposable are exterminated in death camps and dehumanised to the point their very right to exist is challenged. Genocide is what the end result of disposability of a group looks like at a societal level. When society considers a group of people to be disposable, they are disposed of. There is a difference between facing discrimination or being marginalised and actually being considered to be disposable.

Please read this two part article in its entirety before you comment or form opinions about what I am saying. Disposability implies that society considers men to be of little or no value and something to be eradicated. Throughout history it is certainly the case that we have always had some degree of misandry in the culture. I would certainly agree that to some degree male disposability has existed throughout history, however I would not agree it was systemic. The only exception to this would be during war. Opposing armies have certainly regarded each other as a threat to be eliminated and the dehumanisation of men in war has resulted in enormous loss of life and gruesome abuses as a result. We only have to look at prisoner of war camps and the millions of dead bodies on battlefields to attest to male disposability in war.

Male disposability in war dwarfs any other historical example of male disposability by orders of magnitude. However even in war men of opposing armies have demonstrated extraordinary civility with their opposing male counterparts at times. The Christmas truce¹ of World War One being one example of this. Men in an unofficial ceasefire instigated by the soldiers themselves, decided to lay down their arms, fraternise with the enemy and celebrate Christmas with each other. It is even suspected there may have been a football match!

To repeat, I am certainly not suggesting male disposability has not occurred in our history or on a large scale in times of war. However I think there has been a mistake in understanding the true nature of the discrimination men have historically faced, versus what they now face today. Like soldiers that do not value the life of their enemy, society does not value the life of people it considers to be disposable. Disposable people are disposed of and it eventually leads to war or alternatively civil unrest, revolution and then genocide. What I think we confuse as historical male disposability in the manosphere, is actually better described as the exploitation of men. Men have historically faced exploitation to a much greater degree than disposability. For as long as civilisation has existed, society has gone to great efforts to control men and exploit male labour. If men truly had no value whatsoever and they truly were regarded as disposable, then our society would be indifferent toward men and would put no effort into controlling and exploiting them, because doing so would yield nothing of value.

There has been an unchallenged narrative in the manosphere for many years that men are biologically disposable because women are the rate limiting factor of reproduction. This reductionist mindset, rests on the flimsy assumption reproduction and how many uteri a population has, is the sole or overwhelming determining factor for the continued existence of communities. This assumption does not consider the vast multitude of other requirements that must also be met to ensure a community’s survival and future existence and the essential role men have played to ensure that those other requirements are met. This reductionist narrative of glorifying the role of women in reproduction, is itself gynocentric and comes from certain dogmatic pockets of the manosphere that are simply repeating a narrative from our gynocentric culture. I have scrutinised it extensively in my writings², because of how entrenched this narrative has become in the manosphere and because it has remained largely unquestioned for many years. It is keeping the manosphere in a stagnate holding pattern and needs to go.

I think this gynocentric narrative of the golden uterus and male disposability has reality backwards. In reality I think men are not disposable and men actually have tremendous value. In fact, I think men have so much value and society and the aristocracy have been so dependent on that value to survive and build civilisation and expand their empires, that enormous efforts have been put into controlling men and exploiting them. This exploitation has often come at the expense of men themselves and has been used to build and expand empires and nation states for the ruling class. Now before people start muttering “Marxist!”, “Communist!” etc let me be clear- Any civilisation of any kind will have some level of corruption and some level of exploitation.

Human beings are imperfect and the societal systems we create are by extension imperfect. It should be obvious by looking at past and present society, that the assertion that our culture is perfectly aligned with our biology and merely an expression of biology, simply does not have a leg to stand on. Biology does restrict culture, but culture can overshoot biology to a certain degree and aspects of it such as political ideology, can become destructive and maladaptive to evolutionary success. No biological system perfectly constrains culture to maximise evolutionary success. Evolution is not perfect, it is not intelligent design.

I am not suggesting either that human society is best described as being composed of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie that exploits them. Society is a much more complex mixture than that and reality is much more grey than Marxist ideology cares to admit. I am not calling for some communist revolution. History is littered with examples of how badly that turns out. Men have certainly faced exploitation to varying degrees throughout history, but that does not mean that was the entirety of their experience.

There has certainly been some level of disregard for the well-being of men throughout history, because of the desire of the ruling elite to exploit men for their own benefit. However it has not been a complete disregard for men, like what we would see if men were truly regarded as disposable. There was some logical understanding in past society of the need to look after men, so that the value that men can provide can be harnessed and exploited. Men pressed onto ships were given vitamin C, men conscripted into armies were fed, clothed and given shelter and men working in mines were given at least some incentive to work under incredibly dangerous conditions. Even slaves on plantations or that built ancient structures, had to be adequately looked after by their masters to perform the labour they would be involuntarily forced to do. Does this make exploitation acceptable? Of course not. However there is a very dark contrast between a group that is exploited and a group that is considered disposable. It is an important distinction to make when we consider how men may have been treated historically and how men are treated today.

In the past it was known that men had to be supported to some degree and society had to help raise boys so they could perform their role. There used to be a cognitive connection in society of the need to look after men, so they could in turn look after society. Societies that flourished ensured their men were in a good enough condition to perform for society. Societies that treated men as disposable and neglected the health of their men, neglected the foundations of their own civilisation. The armies that took care of their soldiers, had the stronger and fitter men to win the war. The armies that lost the least amount of men, survived to fight and win another battle. This is the simple logic of survival and in our dangerous and volatile past such pragmatic thinking, was essential for the continuation of societies.

This is the logic that our culture has lost because of the technological and debt driven bubble of peace and prosperity we have created over the last three centuries, since the beginning of the industrial revolution. It is a bubble that insulates society from the harsh reality of survival and has led to all sorts of delusional ideologies and belief systems flourishing. This bubble has not eliminated the basic requirements to sustain civilisation, it has merely delayed the time period between the decisions and actions we make today as a society and the future consequences for those actions and decisions. The bubble creates a temporal buffer that allows society to lose perceptual awareness of the connection between action and consequence and reality itself. The consequences will arrive, but when they do it will be the accumulation of consequences from decades of reckless and delusional decision making. That’s the danger. It is a danger that COVID-19 has given us just a little inkling of what to expect, if we keep ignoring basic realities about the nature of the world we live in and the nature of ourselves as a species, as a society and as individuals.

To repeat I am not suggesting men have had it good for centuries. The exploitation of men was a significant trend in historical society, particularly in the lower classes.  Society has placed enormous amounts of effort into controlling men and regulating how men perceive themselves and other men. Men are sold a lie from birth that they can only be considered “a man” and have a place in society, if they perform as human doings. This is what drives precarious manhood³. This cultural message is the carrot and the stick that society uses to keep men in line and keep the machinery of male exploitation going.

Be a gentleman, do your duty, be a man and if you don’t do your duty here is a white feather for you! All of this is psychological blackmail to shame men into their own exploitation. Keeping men ignorant of their own intrinsic value as human beings and beating into them from birth that their masculine value is externally derived, is the key mechanism that society depends on to control men. This form of control works so well because human beings are herd animals and we like to conform to the group to belong and form affiliations. Men that don’t toe the line are ostracised from their community. Remember that men are raised in an environment with this social programming and social pressure to conform to “what a man is”, from the earliest years of their life.

Despite all of these social pressures, men have still fought against their own exploitation. The development of our legal system and the concept of people having “rights” have all followed from men rising up against authoritarianism in one form or another and to their own exploitation. Men have fought revolutions and wars over their own exploitation. The past is a mixture of society giving men the bare minimum concern for their well-being and men pushing back and demanding better treatment from society. In some cases society has treated men fairly and in some cases society has treated men poorly. Often it has been men in the lower classes of society that have been treated the worst and the remainder of men have faced a mixture of fair and exploitative treatment. The lower classes of men have been the invisible workers and the invisible homeless of our societies. They are the men the ruling aristocracy have been able to most effectively exploit, because they are the most powerless in our society to do anything about it. They were the ones sent to the mines and to the trenches during war in the millions.

It would be wrong to describe the system exploiting poor men as the feminist “patriarchy”. This is not a system that privileges men because they are men. Men were only given a partial reprieve from exploitation if they were wealthy and even then they were exposed to unfair treatment relative to women of the same class because they were men. A clear example of this can be seen with the Titanic. Even women in third class had a better chance of survival⁴ than men in first class. In the case of the Titanic we do have a historical incidence of male disposability. When the logic of survival no longer demands that looking after men is conducive to enhancing the survival of a group and men are living in a culture of male exploitation that regards them as human doings and not as human beings, then men predictably will face disposability when society sees no use for them and has a reduced concept of them as human beings.

Historical incidences of male disposability did occur, but outside of war these incidents were exceptional and often noted in our history for the exceptions that they were. Examples like the Titanic do illustrate though, that the discrimination men faced cannot be entirely attributed to class and was at least partly the result of simply being male. The feminist concepts of “male privilege” and “the patriarchy”, simply fly in the face of history. Men were not privileged to die on the Titanic or die in the numerous wars fought over history.

Gynocentrism Is A Sex Based Form Of Exploitation

Aristocratic women have played a key role over the centuries⁵ in developing and codifying into the culture, a system of male exploitation to serve women at the expense of men. We call it gynocentrism⁶. Gynocentrism first emerged 900 years ago and it is not surprising it first originated in the aristocracy. As we know power corrupts and the female aristocracy, like their male counterparts, enjoyed considerable power over society. Gynocentrism spread so effectively throughout society, partly because it came from people of influence and also because there was already some form of male exploitation in society (particularly among the vast numbers of poor peasants). It is predictable that even today, the worst forms of gynocentrism are promoted by the upper echelons of society and felt the worst by the lower rungs of society. Of course gynocentrism exists at all levels of society, but the general pattern that is observed is what I have just described.

Men have fought against all forms of exploitation throughout history, but have been relatively silent when it comes to gynocentrism. The reason for this is because men are raised from birth with another big lie- Men have all the power in relation to women and women are powerless in relation to men. This is the myth Dr. Warren Farrell debunked in his masterpiece, The Myth Of Male Power⁷. Men are agents, women are damsels in distress. That is the narrative feminism rests on and that narrative is ultimately dependent on the myth of male power deeply embedded in our culture.

Feminist ideology depends on maintaining a narrative of female victimhood and male agency. Any mainstream acknowledgement of female power over men and any scrutiny of it, is not permitted in our gynocentric culture. Men don’t want to do hear about it and women don’t want to hear about it (for the most part). Society is uncomfortable confronting the power women have over men and the consequences of that power. Why? Deep down society has a problem holding women responsible for what they do to men. Why? Holding women responsible for what they do to men, would require society to consider men as human beings first and that would undermine the whole societal system of male exploitation.

As I mentioned earlier, men are told a lie from birth that their whole worth is externally derived from how well they perform as a human doing. Men are especially judged and evaluated as well by women on how well they perform as human doings. Women will not date losers or men they perceive to be “weak”. Women don’t generally prefer dating men that earn less than they do, despite all of this mantra about female empowerment. This lie that men are human doings and the social pressure associated with it, demands that men must see themselves as powerful and as agents to protect their own sense of self-worth. Human doings can’t be permitted to be in the vulnerable and powerless position, otherwise their capacity to “do” is questioned. So when you consider these two lies men are told from birth and are socially programmed to follow, we can predict men will be blind to their own exploitation when it comes in the form of gynocentrism. Men will recognise fascism and fight against it, but not feminist fascism in dress.

Men are told from birth by our culture that they have all the power and are told a narrative men have always held the power and are responsible for everything bad that has ever happened. Men are taught to associate power with positions of authority and men see that men do indeed hold all of the positions of authority. So predictably from all of this social programming, men in society form a perception that men have all the power and women are the weaker sex that need to be protected and cared for. Men cannot see themselves in a position of less power in relation to women, because they have not been raised to identify such situations and because their sense of self-worth and finding a partner depends on constantly maintaining a mindset that they are agents with power. Adding to these two dynamics, we then have chivalry playing on men’s desire to perform to earn externally derived worth from women and society. Despite what people may think chivalry is alive and well in the present day and has just taken a different form to what we observed in the past. We identify modern day chivalry in the manosphere as “simping”.

Men do not recognise gynocentrism as a form of exploitation, because men’s sense of self views the exploitive dynamic of gynocentrism as a source of pride rather than a source shame. Men willingly go along with their own gynocentric exploitation because that’s what they think “a man” does. To summarise it is the concept of chivalry, how men’s self-worth is constructed and men’s perception of power, that prevents men from seeing their own gynocentric exploitation. If business partnerships resembled modern marriage, no man would form a business partnership. To paraphrase Dr. Warren Farrell from the Myth of Male Power, men are taught that earning money something else spends while they die sooner is “power”.  Men are blind to how they are being exploited, because of the three factors I have identified.

Yes biology is certainly at play and I will have more to say on that in my further writings. However biology alone does not result in gynocentrism. Gynocentrism is just one pathological manifestation of biology, like murder, racism and every other human vice. Culture is not purely an extension of biology, but a product of a continuous feedback loop between the environment and biology. Culture can become corrupted with certain pathological elements and those pathological aspects of our culture can hijack our psychological drives in maladaptive ways. Paul Elam and Peter Wright have both discussed how gynocentrism can grow from superresponses to superstimuli in Chasing The Dragon⁸ and Slaying the Dragon⁹. Certain pathological elements can arise in our culture, when certain environmental conditions persist for long periods. These pathological aspects of culture, can short-circuit our base biological drives and gynocentrism is one of them.

Gynocentrism can in a way be considered as a type of “mind virus” or germ, like what evolutionary psychologist Prof. Gad Saad describes in his new book, “The Parasitic Mind”¹⁰ and what I discussed in The Normalisation of Gynocentrism¹¹. When men’s perception of power, self-worth and responsibilities in relation to the opposite sex are distorted in the way that they are, men cannot psychologically protect themselves from the cultural pathology of gynocentrism. It is analogous to the immune system failing to recognise a parasitic infection.

Remember that men are conditioned from birth to form a distorted cognitive and perceptual framework around power, self-worth and responsibility when it comes to their interactions with the opposite sex. This social programming has been going on for centuries now, from generation to generation. When you consider the social pressure on men to maintain this blue pill perception, from our institutions, from our culture and from their peers and that this programming is all men are exposed to from birth, it is like coming out of the matrix and just as hard to do.

Like what Morpheus said to Neo about people in the matrix, many men will fight to protect the system that exploits them. Without an identifiable and attractive alternative to forming their own sense of self-worth, many will resist any challenge to their gynocentric programming and even then it is an uphill battle. When men are dependent on gynocentric social programming to maintain their sense of self-worth, they will fight against any challenge to gynocentrism out of psychological self-defence. That’s the hurdle men have to overcome to adopt a red pill perception of the world. That’s why unlike other forms of exploitation, many men fail to challenge gynocentrism and actually fight for it. Men’s sense of self-worth is tied up in gynocentrism, because of those three factors I spoke of earlier and all of the biological buttons they press.

When these factors are combined with a narrative and an image cultivated in our gynocentric culture, that masks female vice and magnifies female virtue at every turn and conversely does the complete opposite in relation to men, we have the recipe for the blind acceptance of the gynocentric exploitation of men. It is the deification of women and the demonisation of men. Women are wonderful, women are powerless but divine, men are human doings and men must act like “men” and be chivalrous and rise above their “animal state”. That is the gynocentric message in our culture. True female power (not feminist female empowerment nonsense) is not only largely unacknowledged in our culture that views women as perpetual victims, even when female power is recognised in society, the image of female innocence cloaks any female abuse directed at men from receiving any significant degree of societal attention and condemnation.

That is the cultural milieu that male exploitation grows in and why it is so hard to combat.

Please read the further part of this article in part two.

 

References:

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_truce
2. https://gynocentrism.com/2020/01/31/gynocentrism-sex-differences-and-the-manipulation-of-men-part-one/
3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6EF00RL88M
4. https://www.anesi.com/titanic.htm
5. https://gynocentrism.com/2013/07/14/about/
6. https://gynocentrism.com/2018/12/04/diagnosing-gynocentrism/
7. https://www.amazon.com.au/Myth-Male-Power-Warren-Farrell/dp/0425181448
8. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VygKQV-hEpY
9. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5WLNMX4COA
10. https://www.amazon.com.au/Parasitic-Mind-Infectious-Killing-Common-ebook/dp/B0853F4VKP/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&qid=1591528227&refinements=p_27%3AGad+Saad&s=books&sr=1-2&text=Gad+Saad
11. https://gynocentrism.com/2018/06/30/the-normalisation-of-gynocentrism/

By Doug Mortimer

If you have ever had a mortgage, you know what equity means.  You own your house in conjunction with your mortgage company.  The relative amount of skin in the game is each party’s equity.  It’s not difficult to understand.  If you put down 20% on your house and the mortgage company foots the rest of the price, then they have 80% equity in your home.  Go ahead and call yourself a homeowner but you’re not.  You’re more like a minority stockholder.

Somehow the concept of equity has been perverted in recent years.  According to wokenik social theory, if half the population is female, then half the cushy jobs should go to females.  This is not equity, it is a quota system.  I still remember a half-century or so ago when the concept of affirmative action was broached and its proponents insisted they were not demanding quotas.  Heaven forfend!

Well, now it’s come to that.  But it’s no longer a bad thing.  Now it’s a good thing.  Funny how that works out, isn’t it?  Is it possible to turn the tables, however?  Could men get away with demanding quotas in certain industries in the interest of equity?

A good place to start is an industry that is so oriented towards the female sex it has all but shut out the opposite sex.  I’m talking about publishing companies that specialize in romance novels.  That particular branch of the publishing industry is more female-friendly than a convention hall filled to the rafters with Xena: Warrior Princess fangirls.

According to the folks at Harlequin Publishing, 99% of the readers of romance novels are women, and most of them are long past nubility.  Perhaps readers isn’t the most apt word for these women.  Women who buy romance novels don’t just read them, they devour them!  To this day I still recall a visit I made decades ago to a shopping mall bookstore where I witnessed a middle-aged woman carefully carrying a towering stack of paperback romances and gingerly placing them on the counter – without spilling one!   She was literally buying them by the yard.

If you ever visit used paperback stores, you know most the stock fits into several predictable categories.  If you check out the space devoted to romance novels, I daresay you will find more square footage than for science fiction, mysteries, westerns, or any other popular paperback genre.  Most romance novels are traditional, but there are also various sub-genres.  Just as pornography caters to an array of fetishes, so do romance novels…interracial, lesbian, cowboys, nurses, time travel – even Amish!

Now I don’t object to the fact that 99% of the readership is female.  Equity in terms of readership would serve no purpose for the manosphere.  Besides, outside of school, you can’t command people to read books they don’t want to read.

But I do think men should demand equity in the writing of such novels.  There’s a lot of money to be made on this stuff.  In 2017, romance/erotica made $1.44 billion.  The second best-selling genre was crime/mystery at roughly half as much, $728.2 million.  So a male scribbler who mastered the formula of the romance genre could greatly enhance his income.

Another statistic says that 90% of the writers of romance novels are women.  It may be a surprise that even 10% of the writers are men, but you could never tell that by looking at the names of the authors.  One must look long and hard to find a romance bearing the name of a male author.

To be sure, pen names are used for a variety of reasons.  Some more high-toned female authors may use a pen name because they wouldn’t want their colleagues in academia to know that they dabble in such a low-status genre (though there are critics who assert that the only reason romance novels are lacking in prestige is because the genre is dominated by females).  So it’s understandable that men who write romance novels would use some sort of female pseudonym.  They don’t want their buddies to know what they’re doing, but more importantly, a prospective female reader might look askance at a paperback romance penned by a man.  How could a male author create a believable heroine?

Well, we could mention Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina), Gustave Flaubert (Madame Bovary), or Henry James (Daisy Miller) for a few, but those are examples of bona fide high-falutin’ literature read by both males and females.  Mass-market genre fiction, is another realm entirely.  So let’s ponder whether or not a male author can write to the romance market.

Except in cases of extreme narcissism, it takes two to tango in a romance novel.  Lesbian romances aside, the heroine must have some sort of man to pair off with.  The female authors have no trouble creating swains for their heroines.  Are any of these male characters believable?  How could a female author possibly create an authentic male character?

Remember, none of the female authors has the lived experience of maleness.  Personally, I hate that phrase “lived experience,” since it is redundant, unless you’re talking about vicarious experience.  Also, I don’t like it because it is almost always employed by someone complaining of having been marginalized.  Human marginalia are inevitable in any society, but you can’t come right out and say that.  Nevertheless, I’m going to wield the concept of lived experience, even though my use of the phrase reeks of patriarchy.  I confess to being an old white male or, if you prefer, a dead white male in training.

To most men, the hero of a romance novel is laughable.  He is almost always the answer to a woman’s prayers.  If he is not rich (though living in a mansion doesn’t hurt), he has great expectations.  If he is not drop-dead handsome, he is rugged and spends his time “doing manly things.”  But they’re the good kind of manly things.  He would never do chainsaw sculptures and sell them at flea markets.

He may have a drink now and then, some sort of expensive imported spirits, but he will never drink himself into a babbling stupor.  And he might enjoy an occasional sports event on the tube but he would never watch football nonstop all weekend, every weekend from September through December – and he certainly wouldn’t waste his time on a fantasy football league.

He will likely have an impressive set of wheels.  No, not a muscle car, but some sort of understated/overpriced import.  His dashboard will not be graced by a quivering topless hula dancer.  No fuzzy dice or air fresheners hanging from his rearview mirror.  And unlike his coarser brethren he would never think of keeping a Big Gulp cup in his car for an emergency piss bucket.

The male romance hero might seem to have it all…except for one thing.  He lacks a good woman (conveniently enough, the heroine) to complete him – his better half, as married folk were wont to say.

If he has some sort of deep, dark secret, so much the better.  I don’t mean that he is a serial rapist in remission or he suffers from chronic projectile diarrhea or seborrhea of the genitalia.  It has to be some romantic deep, dark secret.  Something that he shares with no one…but our heroine, who can help him bear his burden.

One example you might remember from high school English is Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre.  Granted, we’re talking 1847, almost a century before the rise of the paperback, but it is an instructive example.

Jane Eyre’s employer, Mr. Rochester, is a brooder.  He has a good reason to brood, however.  He is already married to a nutter, albeit tucked away, who turns out to be a suicidal pyromaniac!

Brooding and moodiness are good traits for the male lead in a romance novel.  Charlotte’s sister Emily created an equally famous male brooder – remember Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights?  In fact, going all the way back to Hamlet, why do you think Ophelia found the moody Dane so attractive?  Of course, she went nuts in the process, but overdosing (five acts!) on brooding and moodiness will do that to a girl.

In a different medium, consider the case of James Dean.  He became a legend even though he only starred in three movies (Rebel Without a Cause, East of Eden, and Giant).  But the moody S.O.B. brooded in every one of them!  Marlon Brando and Paul Newman deserve honorable mention in any cinematic brood-off, but they lived long enough to exhibit other forms of behavior.  I think Dean was fated to be the cinematic equivalent of a Byronic hero, so-called because the famed poet, George Gordon (Lord) Byron, a leading figure in the Romantic movement, was given to moody brooding.  Why do I say Dean was destined?  His middle name was Byron!

Dean was only 24 when he died; true, the bobbysoxers swooned over him, but they and he were a bit too young for romance fiction.  His fans, however, were future consumers of romance novels and he was on track to be a mature but moody man, an archetypal male lead in a romance novel.  But the brooder is not the only archetype.

Another good choice is the alpha male.  What female reader wouldn’t want one of them for a soul mate?  Think Rhett Butler/Clark Gable in Gone With the Wind.  Scarlett O’Hara sheds two husbands before she finally gets to Rhett Butler, a can-do kind of guy who stands up to her and calls her out on her narcissism.  The more a woman gabbles on about her independence, the more she is begging for a man to keep her in line…but she will never admit that to anyone, and maybe not to herself.  Rhett Butler is such a man.

Whether the male lead is an alpha male or given to moodiness, true love never runs smooth.  There is always some major obstacle keeping the man and woman apart.  Eventually, the obstacle is cleared away and the man and woman are free to get together and commit.  In the case of Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff and Cathy do not consummate their relationship in the flesh, but the tale ends with their ghosts wandering the moors together.  (Interesting to note that a contemporary sub-genre of the romance novel is the paranormal romance novel.)

So we’re not talking about high school sweethearts who never dated anyone else, get married and remain married till one of them assumes room temperature many decades later.  That’s too easy.  Not a bad life, maybe even desirable, but not romantic.

Now it would be great if male authors drew upon their lived experience to create more realistic leading men.  I’d love to see a romantic leading man who plays beer pong, collects comic books, and has indelible skid marks on his underwear.  But would that appeal to the female readership?  Sad to say, I think not.  But that doesn’t mean aspiring male authors should give up.

For example, consider a romance novel about a man with a harridan of an ex-wife who has so haunted the man that he simply avoids the opposite sex…until he meets a NAWALT heroine…with a killer bod and season tickets for the Red Sox.

Or a story about a guy brooding over his inability to advance because his office politics is dominated by queen bees, quota queens, and other parasites, so he has totally soured on women…until he meets a NAWALT heroine…with a killer bod who owns a craft brewery that turns out a scintillating Double IPA.

Or he’s been violated by a divorce court judge and vows he will never get married again…until he meets a NAWALT heroine…with a killer bod and an extensive DVD library – including the complete works of Charles Bronson.

Unfortunately, there is no room for the avowed MGTOW in a romance novel.  Oh, he may be one at the beginning of the novel but by the end must repent and pair off with the heroine.  Riding off alone into the sunset may work just fine in westerns, but not in romance novels.

Considering the income potential of churning out romance novels, I think equity in the authorship of same is a course worth pursuing; however, I don’t think demanding equity in the writing of romance novels will avail us anything.  Remember, women’s rights are human rights but men’s rights usually appear with quotation marks around them (printed when written, air when oral).  So demonstrating/rioting in front of Harlequin Books HQ might get you on YouTube but it probably won’t get results.  There’s more than one way to assault a fortress, however.

Consider the possibility of writing under a female pen name.  If you have a unisex name like Terry or Leslie, you’ve got it made.  If not, then something dignified and mature, vaguely Ango-Saxon…like Nora Roberts, Johanna Lindsey, Julia Quinn, Jessica Bird, Julie Garwood…these are all good, but these names have been taken  Stay away from names like Appasionata or Hypatia.  Certainly not Zsa Zsa.  Nothing too ethnic – no LaKeisha Washington or Sadie Rabinowitz or Agnieszka Kowalski…unless you’re writing for an ethnic niche of the romance market.

It is improbable but not impossible for a man to write under his own name.  Consider the case of Nicholas Sparks, who wrote Nights in Rodanthe, which was filmed in 2008 with Richard Gere and Diane Lane.  A male pen name is not out of the question either.  One such author is Damon Suede.  Great pen name, but he specializes in male-on-male relationships.  If you’re lived experience doesn’t include same, probably best to pass on this market.

Truth to tell, there appears to be something of a homosexual subtext in the covers of romance novels.  Look at how many covers include a chiseled, bare-chested (but oddly hairless) male.  I suppose you could say this is to compensate for all the male-oriented publications that feature chesty females on the cover – “Tit for tat,” as Hardy used to say to Laurel.  But could it be that such covers are made to appeal to a secondary market – the closeted gay male?  (“Oh, I’m just buying them for my sister…she can’t get enough of these things.”)

So if you’re interested in penning a romance novel and, more importantly, getting it published, where to start?  Well, you could buy a copy of Writing a Romance Novel for Dummies, by Leslie Wainger, an Executive Editor at Harlequin Books.  (I assume the author means the dummy is the aspiring author, and is not implying that romance novels are for dummies, but you could read it either way.)

At any rate, here are the five fundamentals:

Just so we’re clear, we’re not talking rape culture.  it’s ravish culture.  Not ravage!  Ravish!  If you don’t understand the difference, you, sir, are no candidate for romance novel author.  Ironically enough, romance novels used to be called bodice rippers, but I wouldn’t utter that phrase today.

So don’t let all that lived experience go to waste when you could profit from it financially while fighting the good fight for equity in the world of romance novel authorship.

Or you could just sit at home and brood about it.