Rebutting Colttaine’s Nonsense: Thinking Beyond Notions of Female Omnipotence

This is a response to a video¹ by Colttaine regarding Briffault’s law. I would encourage people to watch Paul Elam and Peter Wright’s video² on this subject and then watch the response video from Colttaine. People can also read my previous articles here³ and here⁴ on Briffault’s law as well. I don’t have an issue with Colttaine personally, what I have an issue with is ideological dogma posing as science and the arrogant narrow-minded thinking behind it. With my past scientific background, I cannot just sit back and say nothing on this subject and surrender to the groupthink surrounding Briffault’s law.

Absolutism And Categorical Thinking

This is how Briffault’s law is written when it is discussed in the manosphere:

“The female, not the male, determines all the conditions of the animal family. Where the female can derive no benefit from association with the male, no such association takes place.” ^5,6

Firstly it is not a logical fallacy to argue that Briffault’s law is inconsistent with genuine red pill philosophy and men going their own way. Briffault’s law is written in absolute terms. Females we are told⁵^,6, control all the conditions of the animal family. Not some of the conditions, not in general and not on average. As if this absolute meaning was not clear enough, Colttaine has said Briffault did not go far enough and that “women control all the conditions period”⁷. People can watch his entire video where he said that, it was not taken by Paul and Peter out of context. His commentary on Briffault’s law is about as absolute as you can get.

Briffault’s law is routinely presented from pockets of the manosphere that promote it as an absolute law of nature. It is not written or conveyed with any exceptions or limitations, just with extensions describing female opportunism. Female omnipotence is written into the very basis of this so-called law of nature and it is reasonable from how the law is written and presented, for someone to form the view that this law is to be taken as an absolute rule.

It has taken Paul and Peter Wright’s video for Colttaine to make a response video and explicitly state that Briffault’s law should not be taken as an absolute law of nature. If we all agree on that, then the law itself needs to be either dismissed, reworded or elaborated on because it is written in absolute terms without any further clarification. More importantly it should have never been conveyed to men in such absolute terms in the first place and the people questioning the absolute nature of the wording of the law should not be derided for it.

Briffault’s “law” was, in any case, aimed explicitly at non-human animals as confirmed by Briffault in the same passage, saying “There is, in fact, no analogy between the animal family and the patriarchal human family. The former is entirely the product of the female’s instincts, and she, not the male, is the head.” -citation, The Mothers⁶. How about we consider the context of what Briffault was actually saying, instead of spinning it to mean something else.

Even the generalisation Briffault assigns exclusively to animals is highly questionable, given the numerous examples in the animal kingdom of male social dominance and its influence on animal behaviour and evolution. We should also consider monogamous species where both sexes invest in offspring like humans do and other species where the sex roles are reversed and it is the males primarily investing in offspring and selecting mates while the females put in the bulk of mating effort. Life is extremely diverse and applying generalisations about animal behaviour can have limited application.

The reality is that you cannot on the one hand argue that men can go their own way and rise above our gynocentric culture and on the other hand argue women control all the conditions of society. By definition women would control the very psychological condition of all males absolutely, if Briffault’s law was operating as it is written and conveyed. Briffault’s law leaves no room for male choice or for men to exercise any power over their own lives. The only logical fallacy here is the delusion Briffault’s law is red pill knowledge and not just an overly simplistic and outdated statement referring to animals from a book saturated with gynocentric bias and written almost a century ago when biology and psychology were still in their infancy as scientific disciplines!

Colttaine at least has the intelligence to concede that Briffault’s law is not an actual scientific law of nature. Excellent! Then we should stop calling it a law. It is absolutely ridiculous to compare the universal acknowledgment of the law of gravity with the acceptance of Briffault’s law. We have centuries of scientific theory and empirical evidence for gravity.

Briffault’s law is not even close to the standard of proof we have for gravity. Gravity is also the weakest of the fundamental forces and our basic equations for gravity recognise that it is not an absolute force and it has a quantifiable strength. In contrast, Briffault’s law acknowledges no limitation to the degree of female influence in society and its adherents instead double down and tell us the law does not go far enough in conveying the degree of female social omnipotence.

Just as the force of gravity at the center of a black hole does not resemble the force of gravity across the entire universe, neither does the claim of women controlling all the conditions of society accurately reflect reality. Anyone with a functioning brain that is not infected with ideology and dogma, can conclude that we live in a complex world where neither sex alone really has complete control over all or even most of the conditions of society.

Not even as a general rule is it the case that women or men on average control the conditions of society. As gynocentric as our culture is, society is not some monolithic matriarchy where women call all of the shots. When we consider history and the third world, the lack of female omnipotence is even more stark and more apparent.

Feminist patriarchy theory makes exactly the same mistakes as Briffault’s law when making broad generalisations of civilisation and history. These sorts of simplistic descriptions of society tend to breakdown when you look at society and history in detail. Just as patriarchy theory is presented like it is an actual testable scientific theory (which it is not), Briffault’s law has a false cloak of legitimacy embedded in its name with the use of the word “law”. Both ideas frame society in fairly black and white categorical terms. This is what Prof. Sapolsky called in his first lecture on behavioural biology, “categorical thinking”⁸.

Adherents of both sets of ideas suffer from serious confirmation bias and selectively rely upon facts and evidence they think support their perspectives and omit inconvenient facts and evidence that do not. They make bold leaps and interpretations of the evidence and facts they present and then confuse their interpretations as the actual evidence itself. Their twisted interpretation of science is not evidence, it is sophistry warping legitimate research to convey nonsense.

Contrary to Colttaine’s opinion, we can’t just simply ignore the gynocentric bias of Briffault and his upbringing, because this bias may have impacted what sort of research and arguments he put forward and what he omitted. Sapolsky went through numerous examples in his first lecture on how the ideological leanings and biases of certain prominent scientists, led to the propagation of half-baked theories throughout the early 20^th century in Briffault’s time. Many of these theories have subsequently been disproven and had terrible outcomes.

Colttaine has argued⁹ men are mentally and physically superior to women. Perhaps he should read anthropologist Ashley Montagu’s book, The Natural Superiority Of Women¹⁰ and the one-sided reporting of the scientific research Montagu cites, if as per his video Colttaine truly thinks we should just focus on the validity of the arguments, facts and evidence people present and not give any consideration to the biases or prejudices of a scientist and consequently not be alerted to look for the research and evidence they may omit in their work.

I don’t think we should just ignore the clear gynocentric bias evident in Briffault’s work or his mother issues. The lives and upbringing of people affect how they think, how they conduct research and report information and the conclusions they draw about the world. That includes scientists and especially applies to scientists like Briffault from the early 20^th century that were working in disciplines still in their infancy!

There is a reason there are often conflict of interest statements in scientific papers. Unfortunately the evidence in studies and the conclusions that are derived from the evidence collected, can be distorted by bias and prejudice. Evidence or studies can be omitted from papers and literature reviews, or even rigged or fabricated. There have been plenty of examples of that in science throughout history and also in the present day. Even entire fields can ignore legitimate science because of deeply engrained biases in that area of research.

For the record neither sex is in an overall sense superior, both sexes have their own sets of evolved strengths and weaknesses. That reality has not stopped people with a strong prejudice doing selective reviews of the scientific literature and arguing otherwise though. Female supremacists will argue women are superior citing women’s greater immune system, lower susceptibility to X-linked chromosomal diseases and higher academic achievement and ignore or dismiss everything else. Male supremacists will cite men’s greater physical strength, aerobic fitness and the IQ literature reporting a higher average male IQ and ignore or dismiss everything else.

Neither group dispassionately reviews the whole picture, which clearly shows a mixture of the two extremes with neither sex really being superior in an overall sense to the other. Claims of one sex being superior to the other, are classical examples of what categorical thinking leads to. Science is only as scientific as the level of impartiality of scientists will permit. Sometimes unfortunately what we get as a result of bias and prejudice from researchers, is junk science rather than actual science.

You have to really sit back and wonder about the mindset of someone arguing men are mentally and physically superior to women in one video and then arguing in other videos how something as gynocentric and female supremacist as Briffault’s law is generally valid and a useful explanation for male and female behaviour!

I had planned to cite a plethora of research debunking this ridiculous notion that we should regard females in our society as omnipotent. Whilst I have cited some of the research I had originally planned to discuss in this article which I will get to later, I gave it further thought and realised the futility of spending weeks writing a much larger article and going through all of the research I actually have.

I cannot convince people that have made up their mind and subscribed to dogma. I cannot convince people who religiously believe those with a pussy make all of the rules that this is not the case, any more than I can convince someone who believes in flat Earth that the Earth is indeed round. All I can do is appeal to the basic reason and commonsense of those people that still have an open mind on the subject.

The reality is that men set the boundaries they will accept and if men start with the belief that women essentially control all the conditions of society, then the logical result of that absolute belief is learned helplessness. That is not an opinion, it is just basic logic and what would be expected to occur in a social environment where Briffault’s law is perceived to operate. What other eventual conclusion could men reach with such an absolute statement?

Unfortunately some men do, to a degree, develop a form of learned helplessness from such beliefs, just as many feminists develop a mentality of perpetual victimhood from patriarchy theory. Could it be perhaps that the truth might be somewhere in the middle between Briffault’s law and patriarchy theory? No that is heresy to the ideologues!

Not adhering to Briffault’s law does not mean you deny gynocentrism exists. Gynocentrism is indeed a powerful force, but it is not absolute and it is not unassailable. I have been quite emphatic about that fact in my writing (again see links here³ and here⁴). Other forces in our society can and do influence the direction of society and the actions of governments, corporations and the behaviour of the public. Gynocentrism often has very little relevance to decision making in a number of domains and there are numerous examples of this.

It is hardly the case that women control all of the conditions of our society, or men as a group for that matter! It is also the case that gynocentrism itself is often used for purposes other than women’s interests. Corporations have enjoyed enormous financial gain from funding feminism and ensuring both sexes are working like rats on a treadmill and consuming. Was that funding all because corporations were genuinely concerned for women, or was it because they wanted to drive female consumer spending and virtue signal ultimately for financial interests? Let us get real here.

Some societies in different places of the world and at different times in history are very gynocentric and some have relatively little or no gynocentrism. Even in very gynocentric societies, there are often pockets of such societies which are devoid of gynocentrism. Gynocentrism can also be overridden by more powerful forces, and there are plenty of examples of that also. One example out of the many I could cite, has been the recent feminist and traditionalist temper tantrums over the establishment endorsements of transwomen participating in women’s sports, and the crackdown on gynocentric transphobia.

Despite these gynocentric protests, the advance of transwomen into women’s spaces, along with the deplatforming and silencing of transphobic feminists holding a gynocentric agenda continues. Gynocentrism is a powerful force in society, but let us not emulate the feminist fantasy that the social influence of the opposite sex is the sole or primary determinant for the current state of our society!

Not even as some generalisation or average is Briffault’s law even remotely correct of human societies. The state of society and the conditions within society, are far more complicated than a simplistic concept like Briffault’s law or patriarchy theory can accurately predict. At the end of this article, I will propose an alternative principle to Briffault’s law which I think is far more accurate and useful for men.

Male Mate Choice Is Not Trivial

Not a single scientist cites Briffault’s law as a valid theory or a law of nature. That also includes the prominent scientists Colttaine refers to with pictures of them in his video. It is widely recognized¹¹ in the scientific community that male mate choice exists and plays a substantial role in human behaviour. Contrary to what Colttaine suggests, male mate choice is not just exercised primarily by a handful of the top men in a tribe. Most hunter-gatherer societies as I will discuss later, are only mildly polygynous and most of the women in these societies are actually in monogamous relationships with men. Most men in general exercise some substantive level of male mate choice and place some significant level of sexual selection pressure on women.

Whilst we can argue about the relative degree of choosiness of mates by men and women, the reality is that male mate choice does impact the social dynamics between the sexes. Female intrasexual competition in our species exists, so does female jealousy with respect to mates and so does the sexual selection of females by males. We can measure the effects of male mate choice on social behaviour and observe the signs of its influence on female biology and psychology. Often we underestimate rather than overestimate these effects because they are different from what we see in males. The more covert form of relational aggression between women vs the more overt physical aggression between men is one example of this.

The influence of male mate choice is not trivial or something that is dwarfed by female mate choice. The evidence of its impact is of high significance to explaining female behaviour and biology. It is certainly the case that when we look at short-term mating females are more choosey than males, although that difference is quite small relative to the sex difference in height. However, male mate choice increases dramatically when we start talking about long-term mating dynamics and relationships, where males become a lot more choosey than they are with casual sex.

The papers by Prof. Steve Stewart-Williams (linked here¹², here¹³ and here¹⁴) which Colttaine flippantly dismisses, are hardly obscure articles. They have been cited many times and the papers themselves cite numerous studies from the fields of evolutionary psychology, anthropology and the wider life sciences. The papers are not referring to a single study or to a single set of evidence, and that is clear if you actually read them. The author has more than adequately addressed criticism of his original paper in his follow up article¹³.

Essentially as Stewart-Williams successfully argues, there is no actual disagreement with his original paper and the wider literature on the significance of sex differences (which is what most of the criticism was directed at). Just because the psychological sex differences in humans are relatively small compared to our physical sex differences and the sexual dimorphism of other animals, does not then mean they have no importance and Stewart-Williams never argued otherwise.

Aside from that, the popularity of a paper or an area of research does not make it any less accurate. There was a time not long ago, when most people in the scientific community did not believe in plate tectonics or even the theory of evolution. Our scientific understanding is constantly evolving and our present understanding of biology should not be taken as unquestioned dogma. I would have thought this would have been learnt from the pandemic and how off the mark some of our early modelling was.

Hyper Female Hypergamy And Hookup Culture

Online dating websites and the skew we see in finding a match on some of those sites between males vs females, is not just purely a function of female hypergamy. Modernity and the access we now have thanks to social media, has had the effect of amplifying many underlying psychological drives. That would also include the pattern of hypergamy we see in women. What we are observing to a degree, is a form of hyper female hypergamy.

On top of that, we have an education system and a work environment that discriminates against men and boys and preferences women and girls. The logical end result of that is fewer men meeting the same levels of income and employment relative to women than they did decades ago. Women want men to earn more money than them and then at the same time demand we close the gender wage gap and implement quotas in the workplace for women. The point I am making, is that the mate choice mismatch we are observing is not exactly entirely a result of innate female hypergamy.

Our modern environment is behind a lot of it. Just consider the effect of birth control alone on female sexual behaviour and the long run effect that has on female mate choice and dating. We are way beyond talking about just natural levels of female hypergamy being able to explain the disparity between men and women on dating sites where it concerns the level of choosiness of mates.

One has to also point out the reality as well that quite a few of these dating websites are just used by people to garner attention and have casual sex, rather than make serious attempts to find an actual person for a relationship. We know the relative choosiness of the sexes is considerably more similar where it concerns long-term mate selection for relationships.

Many men looking for relationships and that have actual standards, are not using the websites Colttaine refers to in his video. The pool of men using those sites and arguably the pool of women also, are not necessarily representative of the wider population. Many men are not even looking anymore for a relationship and have pulled out of dating entirely because what is on offer from women is simply not good enough.

That leaves a skewed pool of men with lower standards still looking on these sites, many of whom are not attractive to women for the same reasons their standards for women are so low. Often the men are just looking for a casual fling on these sites, not an actual relationship and so are less choosey.

In contrast many of the women using these sites are doing so primarily for attention and often overvalue themselves without ever realising that is why they are single and on these sites in the first place. I would exercise some caution in just automatically assuming we can generalise data from these dating websites onto the general population.

Many young men are actually single now by choice. They want to be single when they look at what is on offer and many of them do not even know MGTOW exists. Men are figuring it all out without even knowing about MGTOW. For every incel there are 10 men opting out of dating and enjoying the bachelor lifestyle. Then women complain in the media about where all the good men went.

All the modern hookup culture and hyper female hypergamy does in the long run, is concentrate the power in the dating market into the hands of alpha male Chads. Women chase these men and expect them to enter into a relationship with them and eventually marry them. The alpha Chads have no interest in this and have their casual fling with them and then go onto the next woman.

Sure, it can certainly backfire for these alpha Chads and I certainly would not recommend having a rotating buffet of female partners with all of the risks involved. However for women chasing these men, they waste all of their time chasing them in their twenties, then want to settle down with them in their thirties and get to their forties and then wonder why they are still single. Meanwhile the alpha Chads are out with their younger female counterparts! See how that works? They reap what they sow. Tom Leykis laughs and talks about this pattern all of the time.

Our Ancestral Heritage

As for the genetic research Colttaine cites allegedly claiming twice as many women passed on their genes compared to men in our prehistoric past and the implied assertion that this automatically means female mate choice was fierce, male competition for mates was high and on average only 1 man reproduced for every 2 women (or at times 17 women for every 1 man), modelling can be wrong. We have seen how wrong modelling can be during the pandemic and from past research claiming the Y chromosome was going to eventually disappear. Much to the ire of radical feminists, the claim that the Y chromosome was disappearing was later shown to be wrong^15,16, and I would encourage people to do their own research on the claims about how lethal COVID was at the start of the pandemic and what it actually turned out to be.

This sort of analysis that Colttaine cites of our prehistoric past is tentative at best and needs to be regarded with at least some level of caution. Modelling our ancestral past from 10,000s of years ago with genetic data is difficult and fraught with issues. We cannot go back in a time machine and verify the results of the modelling. What we can directly observe though is modern hunter-gather communities, specifically the marriage practices in those cultures and also in societies around the world both in the present day and throughout history, and our relative levels of sexual dimorphism. We can also consider other genetic research which has been done which appears to be more consistent with actual field observations.

I notice Colttaine had a picture of Sapolsky in his video. I would suggest people watch Sapolsky’s second lecture¹⁷ on behavioural evolution from 1:19:00-1:36.14. He clearly states our current knowledge on where humans fall on the spectrum of sexual dimorphism and mating when it comes to monogamy and pair bonding vs polygamy and tournament mating- “We’re right in the middle”.

As Sapolsky explains, even in polygynous cultures there is only mild polygamy going on and the majority of people are in monogamous relationships. In modern monogamous societies many of us usually have more than one partner over the course of our lives and lifelong monogamy where a person has only one sexual partner is fairly rare. However we normally only have one partner at a time in such societies. Yes of course there is some level of cheating, but it is generally not something most men or women will socially accept, and neither will many cultures accept such behaviour without exacting punishments, often leading all the way to death.

As Sapolsky clearly explains in the lecture, whilst we are not purely a monogamous species, we are not a tournament species like Baboons either where only a handful of males mate with the majority of females. That is a good thing too, civilisation would not have formed with that level of male intrasexual aggression.

Other genetic analysis (the research is linked here¹⁸ and here³³)of our prehistoric ancestors, suggests that the numbers of ancestral females to males breeding was indeed somewhat skewed in favour of females, but generally at the lower end of estimates from other research. It was found that the breeding ratios of ancestral females to males from different regions of the world, were still within the range of monogamous societies and do overlap with polygynous societies as well to an extent¹⁸. Humans are a bit of a mixture, but we are not strongly polygynous.

As the scientist’s papers discuss, based on all of the available evidence and the body of scientific literature, humans are quote, “mildly polygynous or monogamous with polygynous tendencies”^{18, 33}. The findings from the researcher’s genetic analysis, was in agreement with the wider literature that humans are indeed mildly polygynous. The authors go on to explain a range of demographic factors that can affect estimates of the breeding ratio of females to males other than just the levels of polygyny, such as sex biased migration, sex differences in generation time and also population bottlenecks¹⁸.

Less than 20% of males in 87% of 190 surveyed hunter-gatherer societies existing in the present day, have been reported to be married polygynously^19,20. Similar observations have been recorded from previous anthropological studies, with less than 5% of men in half of societies identified as polygynous having more than one spouse^21,22. Even in polygynous societies the reproductive variance of males and females can be very similar and this is in part due to the reality that most marriages in polygynous societies are actually monogamous^21,22.

One detailed analysis²³of 36 hunter-gather communities, reported a mean average across all 36 societies of 20% of married women being in polygynous marriages with 12% of the married men, approximately 80% of marriages being monogamous and 11% of men being single. The median figures for polygyny from the communities observed in the study was even less than these mean averages and there was also considerable variation in the levels of polygyny observed.

The bottom line is that based on direct observation of present day hunter-gatherer communities that most likely resemble our prehistoric ancestors, the claim that only 1 man reproduced for every 2 women is not what we observe on average in such communities and furthermore such generalisations ignore the considerable variation we see in the levels of polygyny.

If we compare the relatively low levels of sexual dimorphism in humans to the sexual dimorphism of primates that are tournament species, where only a handful of males reproduce with the majority of females, the difference in sexual dimorphism is quite stark. Humans do not show the typical level of sexual dimorphism we see in primates that exhibit a tournament form of mating.

The high levels of sexual dimorphism observed in such species are not just restricted to specific traits like muscle mass or levels of body fat, they are found in broad overall differences in overall physical form like body weight. The body size sexual dimorphism in humans by body weight just to cite one example is only 1.15 (human males are 15% heavier than females on average), compared to 2 or more for our far more polygynous Gorilla counterparts²⁴. The sexual dimorphism of humans in body size is closer to monogamous Gibbons whom are at 1.07 in body size sexual dimorphism²⁴.

The conclusion that only a handful of men reproduced with the majority of women over our evolutionary history, is at odds with the hard physical evidence of our relatively modest levels of sexual dimorphism, other genetic analysis and our direct observations of hunter-gatherer communities and traditional societies in the present day.

It is certainly still possible though, that the model allegedly supporting the claim we are descended from twice as many women as men is correct. Even if that is the case, overall each sex as a group has contributed exactly the same share of DNA to our present genome. The female share may come from more ancestral females, but the males had a higher contribution to our current genome per individual ancestral male than any ancestral female did individually.

It could be that there are other explanations other than the implied assertion males were socially excluded from mating by choosey women. An assertion that the research Colttaine cites does not entirely make, if at all. As alluded to earlier, demographic factors such as war and disease, sex differences in lifespan and speed of sexual maturity, the migration of primarily men into new environments, or conversely the movement of primarily women, could even at modest levels over long time spans of tens of thousands of years, result in a large skew in the numbers of female vs male ancestors passing on their genes to the present day. Just think of how even modest levels of compound interest can result in a large increase in debt after a sufficient period of time.

There could be genetic factors at play as well that explain the relatively lower numbers of male ancestors. The genes on the Y chromosome are highly conserved because even a minor mutation can result in infertility. It might be that over tens of thousands of years only a handful of Y chromosome lineages made it to the present without incurring a mutation resulting in infertility. It could also be the case that Y chromosomes facilitating more fertile sperm production, began to dominate the gene pool and displace other less fertile Y chromosome lineages over such a long evolutionary timescale.

What I have just suggested has in fact been put forward²⁵ as one key explanation for why relatively less ancestral male DNA has made it to the present and why the Y chromosome has reduced genetic diversity. Deleterious mutations that make some males infertile, leading to high levels of purifying selection on the Y chromosome and beneficial mutations that increase fertility in other males, may explain the pattern we observe. Over long evolutionary timescales of tens of thousands of years, high levels of selection on the Y chromosome combined with demographic forces, may result in a handful of male ancestors dominating the future gene pool. Rather than simply more females mating than males due mate choosiness, genetic and demographic forces may be at work.

Unfortunately because such explanations proposed by the scientific community do not generate the same level of gynocentric hype of claims that 1 man reproduced for every 17 women at some point thousands of years ago, they do not get as much media attention. Consequently they do not pop up on the radar of people like Colttaine. People read from such research what they want to think, even when the research does not support what they are thinking it supports. Research that generates headlines gets reported and more plausible explanations get ignored. That pattern is especially the case if the research validates the gynocentric bias of our mainstream media.

I could keep going with more alternative explanations that may explain why we have more female ancestors, but the reality is the conclusions we form about our prehistoric past are mostly conjecture. We just don’t know with any real certainty and we can’t go back in a time machine and find out. Even if only one male was reproducing for every two females, that does not automatically mean that women were calling the shots and female mate choice was the dominant force in prehistoric communities. Generally in a tournament species the alpha male is socially dominant over the harem of females he mates with, as are the males competing with each other for the alpha male’s position relative to the females in the group.

We have numerous observations of male social dominance in our primate counterparts that have a tournament mating pattern. Female mate choice is not the exclusive force driving mate selection in such instances. Male competition, itself independent of female influence, has a considerable sway in deciding which male reproduces. The males compete to become the alpha male and the alpha male then mates when and with whomever he wants. That is a generalisation of course, but an accurate description of what tournament mating in our primate counterparts looks like.

We see this in humans too where polygyny is practiced and male social dominance is often quite apparent. Polygyny is not exactly by default a predictor of gynocentrism. Extremely patriarchal societies can practice polygyny and the harems of women in such cultures are treated not far above being chattel. The feminist fiction of course is that such a dynamic then represents all of human civilisation in general throughout history and in the present day and that all men have known is privilege and not their own extreme hardships and injustices.

Arranged marriage was common place for most of human history in many cultures and still is prevalent in many traditional cultures today. Arranged marriage has been observed to be the dominant form of marriage in hunter-gather communities. A comprehensive anthropological survey, found that arranged marriage was the dominant form of marriage in approximately 85% of a sample of 190 hunter-gatherer societies around the world and only mild levels of polygyny were observed in most of those cultures^19,20. The high frequency of arranged marriage in the majority of hunter-gather communities in the present day, in past societies over thousands of years of history and in present day traditional cultures, has prompted scientists to undertake genetic analysis of our ancestors to reconstruct marital systems.

Based on phylogenetic analysis¹⁹ using data from present day hunter-gatherers and mitochondrial DNA, it was concluded that arranged marriage has had a substantive prevalence and impact in these communities since the migration of humans out of Africa at least 50,000 years ago. The analysis also found that low levels of polygyny was most likely the state of ancestral marriage in past hunter-gatherer communities. It has been shown²⁰ as well with arranged marriage, that parental control on selecting a partner for marriage is particularly strong for parents of daughters and that fathers have a greater influence than mothers in choosing a suitable partner.

This same paper which again looked at 190 hunter-gatherer communities, also stated that we may be overestimating female mate choice on sexual selection and underestimating the influence of parental mate choice on human evolution during our prehistory²⁰. The study reports that whilst parents consult with their offspring, consent from their sons and daughters is usually not required and they usually comply with their parent’s choice^20,26. Furthermore, virtually all reproduction in these communities was found to occur whilst a woman is married²⁰.

We can see numerous examples of patriarchal influence by fathers in arranged marriage practices across many cultures throughout history. It is not just limited to modern hunter-gatherer communities. Another study²⁷ examining arranged marriage across 543 different ethnographies around the world, found that parents and their offspring in all areas of the world were very frequently in vast disagreement on the choice of partner and on the relevant traits of the right partner. The parental choice of mate often strongly disagreed with the offspring’s choice of mate. The authors note that sometimes extreme methods were used to enforce the choice of mate.

These realities are part of the truths behind the half-truth of feminist patriarchy theory. Female mate choice has not been some dominant force exclusively dictating the social structure of society. The jokes about fathers with their baseball bats sizing up their daughters’ partners, comes from a long history of parents and particularly fathers regulating who their daughters mate with.

Of course it would be correct to point out that male mate choice has also been curtailed to a somewhat lesser degree by the same system of arranged marriage. Before the advent of modernity and the luxury of modern technology, what was good for the prospects of families has often been regarded as more important than the wishes of the bride and groom. Marriage was used to form alliances and this no doubt had a direct benefit on social cohesion, resource sharing and ultimately the propagation of genes for familial lineages over multiple generations and for multiple kin.

Briffault’s Warning

I could keep going debunking the dogmatic rubbish of Briffault’s law, but what I have written in this article and in previous articles (see this link³and this link⁴) should be sufficient for people to at least question Briffault’s law and whether the arguments put forward allegedly supporting it have any merit. There is so much research I could have kept going through.

Human behaviour is incredibly complex and anyone that puts the actual effort in to review the scientific literature, can see the obvious fallacy in prescribing a universal absolute law of behaviour like Briffault’s law to human beings. Even applying basic commonsense and everyday observation of the world exposes the falsity of Briffault’s law. There is an arrogance to the type of dogmatic thinking supporting Briffault’s law and a lack of humility in acknowledging the obvious limitations in making such a bold statement about human behaviour.

Here is an alternative principle for Colttaine and like-minded individuals to consider:

Briffault’s warning-

“In a gynocentric social dynamic, the female not the male primarily influences the conditions governing the social interactions between the sexes. Where the female can derive no benefit from associating with the male, no such association exists.”^5,6

That to me whilst a bit wordier than Briffault’s law, seems far more accurate than suggesting females universally control all of the conditions of humans and animals on average or absolutely. As Paul has pointed out, men have the power to set personal boundaries with women and avoid such a gynocentric social environment. Men can and are removing themselves from gynocentric social environments and institutions like modern marriage. Men are filtering out women who want a one-sided gynocentric relationship where they are pedestalised. Men are in a substantial number of instances deciding to opt out of dating entirely because of our gynocentric culture. The activities of numerous bachelor movements over centuries and millennia are a testament to men setting boundaries and asserting their preferences^{28,29,30,31,32}.

Briffault’s warning is not a universal law of human behaviour. It is a warning to men that if you are prepared to accept a gynocentric social dynamic in your interactions with the opposite sex, then these are the consequences. Men and society are in this position because they made concessions on their personal boundaries and the principles that made our society thrive, and chose instead to pedestalise women. Now we are paying the price for that.

Beliefs like Briffault’s law serve only to push men in a direction away from taking responsibility for enforcing personal boundaries with women. It is time to wake up and throw out the trash. Notions of female omnipotence have no place in a red pill environment. Women are flawed creatures just like men and men pedestalise women at their peril.

Now I could keep going on ad infinitum back and forth in response to Colttaine after this article, but I am not going to do that. It would be a waste of my time to respond to any further Gish gallop from Colttaine. At a certain point you just have to accept that you can lead a horse to water, but you can make them drink it. The research I have gone through in this article is just the tip of the iceberg on what I can cite to support the arguments I have put forward. Reductive categorical thinking has its value to a degree, but it also stops people from seeing the forest for the trees!

References

Gynocentrism and its Cultural Origins

Rebutting Colttaine’s Nonsense: Thinking Beyond Notions of Female Omnipotence

Leave a Reply Cancel reply