The following brief exchange appeared in the comments under an article titled C.S. Lewis: The Feudalisation of Love. In it I give a brief comment about how women’s cultivation of childlikeness contributes to gynocentric attitudes, and how this appears to be a more forceful influence than sexual and reproductive pressures.
TEXT:
2cyar wrote:
“The primary ‘something’ that was biologically there to leverage is the child archetype in women, an innocence and moral purity feigned with cosmetics, clothing, gestures and fragility and held up as a fetish for men to worship and protect. Sexual factors do come in but are secondary in strength.”
The next question is how do we turn it off? They certainly aren’t going to self regulate, so we have to figure out how to turn off the impulse within ourselves (and all men) to render it ineffective. ___________________________________
Peter Wright wrote:
Turning it off can happen by no longer believing that women are children deserving indulgences at men’s expense – ie. seeing it as artificially manufactured and that in reality women are grown adults. It’s the same process as no longer viewing the Santa Claus in the shopping mall as real – he’s doing theatre.
The result of that awakening is that men find themselves saying “No” to every bit of theatrical childishness put before them, realising that it’s a supernormal bait and a grift. Such a man is no longer caught in the gynocentric machinery of his mind.
This is where I part ways with a few honeybadgers and men’s advocates who believe gynocentrism is more ‘natural’ than I do, even as they accept gynocentrism as sometimes extreme and unfair to men. The “gynocentrism is natural” stance is built mostly on belief in the power of women’s sexuality and reproductive functions, while omitting more powerful & more artificial ruses such as feigning childlikeness: i.e. women may have breasts and uteri, but they are not children.
It’s self-defeating ideology to believe sexual politics is totally unfair for men, while simultaneously believing gynocentrism is “natural.” It results in a learned impotence. Most advocates of this theory end up promoting the familiar parental lifestyle for men under the nostalgic euphemism of “honouring masculinity.” That approach pretends to free men while ultimately keeping them trapped – compliments of an unexamined and unchallenged child archetype, combined with a cultural ideology that pedestalizes women as a higher, quasi-noble class.
The importance of Lester F. Ward’s ‘Gynæcocentric Theory,’ presented first as a speech to a group of feminists in the year 1888, and subsequently as an essay in 1903, cannot be overstated. There were numerous writers promoting gynocentric ideology prior to Ward’s effort, however he was the first to use the term for a complex biological theory that has generated thousands of subsequent academic and newspaper articles promoting female superiority, and likewise many protests against the incoherence of his theory – including by early men’s human rights activist Ernest B. Bax (see below).
Ward’s gynocentric theory exerted a major influence on feminist thought, while also circulating in popular culture and in universities where, as one account from 1920 reveals:
“While a comparatively small number of people read this theory from the original source, it is still being scattered far and wide in the form of quotations, paraphrases, and interpretations by more popular writers… College reference shelves are still stocked with books on sex sociology which are totally oblivious of present-day biology. For example, Mrs. Gilman (Man-Made World), Mrs. Hartley (Truth About Woman) and the Nearings (Woman and Social Progress) adhere to Ward’s theory in substantially its primitive form, and not even sociologists like Professor Thomas (Sex and Society) have been able to entirely break away from it.”
The following selection of articles directly mention Ward and/or his gynæcocentric theory.
The following essay exploring archetypal transsexual archetypes appearing in traditional mythology was first published in Spring – A Journal Of Archetype And Culture, in the edition titled ‘Pink Madness’ (1995). The essay is republished below by permission of the author.
A wise man once suggested that when it comes to marital discord couples fight more over one issue: who is going to play the child in the relationship and who is going to play the responsible parent.
His comment rings true on its face, with men historically being the ones who take on the parental role in marriage. It’s witnessed in the centuries of men taking responsibility for the financial and other security concerns of wives, and also hinted at in the relationship age gap. Males marry younger females — not to control their sexuality (as we are frequently misled to believe) – but because women seek an older male to place in the responsible, paternal role, to enhance the child theme they intend to play out in the relationship.
Women collectively spend billions annually to neotenize their appearance, enhancing their efforts to assume the infantilized role.
We see the same theme appear in our language when men are shamed for being ‘Peter Pans’ or ‘man babies’ along with the injunction to ‘man-up’ — which has no counterpart for women; they are phrases intended to jolt men out of any inclination to regress to a childlike state of dependency. Never do we hear women being chastised as immature Wendys, woman babies, nor do we hit them with the demand to ‘woman-up.’
To be fair we may see the occasional man playing a full-time child to his female partner, and we can say that all men experience occasional moments of regression to boyishness in their relationships. However, society frowns upon men indulging too much of the child within. And such indulgence is roundly met with sexual rejection by women. The child role is reserved exclusively for women within the relationship context.
The stresses that this dynamic places on relationships and especially on men cannot be overstated; the catering to a child within an adult’s body is exhausting and ultimately demeaning to both the infantilized woman and the parentified man. Standardizing childishness in one partner and hyperagency in the other prohibits any sort of relationship between adult peers. Instead, it breeds contempt and conflict.
The structure of this type of arrangement ultimately results in an assured relationship killer. Hostile dependency. It is impossible for the infantilized partner to maintain respect for, or a healthy emotional connection to, her chief enabler. And it is impossible for the chief enabler to maintain respect or a healthy emotional connection to what amounts to a financial, emotional and familial parasite. Self-respect in both parties is also a casualty of this arrangement.
Before getting more into the dynamics posed by this dysfunctional relationship, we’d like to elaborate a bit more on the concept of the adult child which is something quite different from the literal child we look after when they are small. The ‘child’ is also one of the fundaments of the human psyche, operating equally in biologically mature adults and in children, thus the popular qualifier of ‘the inner child.’
The great 20th century psychologist Carl Jung wrote a paper on the inner child, or what he preferred to call the child archetype,1 where he outlined its main psychological features which include 1. growth toward independence, 2. vulnerability, and 3. a state of innocence.
1. Growth toward independence (but never reached)
This aspect of the child archetype is concerned with futurity, and is captured in the phrase ‘what I want to be when I grow up.’ It reflects the ongoing state of becoming without ever arriving at the destination – it remains an eternal child. In this respect the child archetype differs from the archetype of individuation, a more heroic path that does eventually culminate in mature autonomy and self-reliance.
The ambition for perpetuated childhood, as we commonly see in modern women (and enabled by men), is the inevitable outcome of the child archetype. As men and women collude to remove the destination of adult autonomy from the life-map, they effectively kill the archetype of mature individuation – the path of true potential for growth. And instead they give birth to the child of static permanency. Individuals dominated by the child archetype will always position themselves as eternally incapable of personal agency, even relying on the chief enabler to help fabricate a web of denial about their true nature.
This is reflected in the spiritual, financial, or relationship ‘growth’ workshops attended largely by women, who appear to pursue adult goals but who are in reality only participating in a charade. The true goal is more dependency and more childhood. These pursuits are often funded through the hard labor of the hopelessly paternalized male.
We also see this acted out in the psychodrama of the modern housewife, “taking charge” of such matters of household finances and other matters of home and hearth, without any responsibility for creating wealth, taking the risks that come with those efforts, or any other matter of real consequence. The perpetuated child chooses the colors but cannot buy the paint or climb the scaffold with brush in hand.
2. Vulnerability
Vulnerability is one of the main guises of the child, and so the woman dominated by this archetype is constantly signalling threats to herself from the surrounding environment. She is in danger of getting lost, hurt, abandoned and frightened, and just like the child of fairy tales she projects herself as lost in the woods with snarling bears and wolves, or afloat on the river Nile in a flimsy basket where she is in danger of getting lost or going under.
She is “at risk” at all times, including the risk of exposure to her chief enabler’s frustrations or his wishes for her to realize adulthood.
The vulnerable, permanent child, communicates with the wider world through these threat narratives2 which most everyone is familiar with through the archetypal damsel in distress — tied to the railway tracks, the locomotive of adult agency barreling down on her, or being held prisoner by a dragon from which she must be freed by your parental, sacrificial rescue.
3. Innocence
The child’s way of defending its perpetual dependency is to project its innocence: “I don’t know”, “I didn’t realize”, “I didn’t mean anything”, “It just happened”, “I got carried away by my feelings.” Yes, her own emotions can be the villain in her threat narrative. And the understanding of a hyper-responsible male is required to save her from it. Because she claims ignorance she divests herself of all responsibility for what happens, leaving others to pick up the tab – most likely her male partner if she has one.
We see this even in women’s general predisposition to gravitate toward victim politics, supporting male candidates who offer enabling paternalism from the state, and the vision of woman as perpetually in distress.
Moving on from Jung, perhaps the best conceptualization of the child archetype comes from Eric Berne, whose transactional analysis shows three possible relationship dynamics:
A child relating to a parent
A parent relating to a child
An adult relating to another adult.
The first of these – child to parent – encompasses all that we’ve said so far about the child archetype and its exploitative style of relating with others. The second – parent to child – represents the parental relationship to a child. And the last one – adult to adult – represents a healthier mode of conducting relationships based on steering a middle path between the more extreme demands of both parent and child. This latter is where we might hope to be along with anyone we might choose for pair bonding.
The perpetual child, however, demands that the default relationship setting be parent to child, an emotionally incestuous arrangement that affords some comfort to the irresponsible child, but that does so at the expense of a healthy adult connection.
Eventually, and we think invariably, this results in the parentified male viewing the infantilized female as inept, incapable and deserving of pity over respect. It can also breed a lot of anger that goes both ways, from the frustrated, overburdened male, and the dependent, irresponsible female whose life is a constant reminder of her lack of meaning.
The parental brain
Juvenile characteristics have long been known to evoke in caretakers a neurological state known as the ‘parental brain.’ Children’s faces and various other child gestures provoke hormonal changes that prime parents to be more sensitive towards infant cues and needs, resulting in nurturance, caretaking and protectiveness.
Adult women who learn to mimic child features through cosmetics, and the feigning of childlike behaviors of innocence and vulnerability, evoke in their male partners a very similar parental response. Like parents of literal infants men can be seen to respond with care-taking and protection, and if women are skilled at peppering the routine with threat-narratives she gains the ability to prompt him like a philharmonic concert conductor. Such is the obedient, reflexive state of readiness to rescue that defines the lives of so many men.
Listeners are probably familiar with this charade being played out between men and women, one which was not lost on Esther Vilar when she gave a sardonic description of it in her 1971 book The Manipulated Man. There she writes:
Woman’s greatest ideal is a life without work or responsibility – yet who leads such a life but a child? A child with appealing eyes, a funny little body with dimples and sweet layers of baby fat and clear, taut skin – that darling minature of an adult. It is a child that woman imitates – its easy laugh, its helplessness, its need for protection. A child must be cared for; it cannot look after itself. And what species does not, by natural instinct, look after its offspring? It must – or the species will die out.
With the aid of skillfully applied cosmetics, designed to preserve that precious baby look; with the aid of helpless exclamations such as ‘Ooh’ and ‘Ah’ to denote astonishment, surprise, and admiration; with inane little bursts of conversation, women have preserved this ‘baby look’ for as long as possible so as to make the world continue to believe in the darling, sweet little girl she once was, and she relies on the protective instinct in man to make him take care of her.”3
Vilar hits the nail right on the head; that many women have been taught they will be protected while having every whim catered for by simply playing the child.
This parent~child dynamic, perhaps more than any other theme, captures the dilemma most men are wrestling with – a theme more central than sexual attraction, more central than pair bonding, and more than romantic love and all the other social mandates. The biological urge to care for children is king, and it’s also an Achillies’ Heel for those who abide by it unconsciously.
The good news is that our vulnerability to abuse is corrected in one move: by men refusing to play parent, whether indulging or trying to correct women who are perpetual children. Instead we have to insist that female partners woman-up right alongside men, showing reciprocal responsibility between two adults. Or be prepared to show them the door once it’s apparent that the task is too much for them to take on.
Esther Vilar’s comment that a woman’s greatest ideal is ‘a life without work or responsibility’ requires someone to facilitate it, and that someone is almost always a man. But men need not play the role of parent and they do have the option to seek a relationship between adult peers: two responsible adults supporting each other in the walk through life. Such a woman may be a unicorn but unicorns do exist. And success, if you are lucky enough to get it, will be more likely tied to the women men reject than the woman they seek.
*The following is a Q & A interview by Jewel Eldora – PW
Peter Wright is an Australian researcher and writer who has published research and analysis on the history of Gynocentrism since 2007. Wright has written books, interviews, and academic research articles on chivalry, gynocentrism, human attachment, and cultural mythologies. In addition to being the unofficial historian of the Men’s Rights and MGTOW movements, he’s also a contributor and editor of A Voice For Men.
JE: How many years have you been writing about Gynocentrism?
PW: Around 15 years.
JE: How many books and articles have you written, edited, published?
PW: 150 or so articles and ten books.
JE: What was it that gave you the motivation to start writing this work?
PW: Like most men I’ve experienced various forms of anti-male bias. However my interest in gynocentrism resulted more from observations of a cultural over-valuing of all things female, and the devaluing of all things male, which raised the question of which social tropes might be contributing to this mindset.
While feminist derogation of men was an obvious provocateur, the roots of the problem seemed to go much deeper and prior to feminism. After a survey of European history it became apparent that a quixotic version of male chivalry was responsible for the evolving fetishization of women, and not the usually-cited bogeymen such as Marxism or feminism, which only compounded the trend. Having discovered cultural roots for this tendency I thought it might be helpful to document a history of sexual relations starting from the period of romantic chivalry, providing a kind of road-map for how we got here and, in theory, a road-map for how we might walk back some of the more malignant outcomes.
JE: In the nearly 5 years since my first article, you and I have had some lively, private debates. I think we agree that men have been devalued to the point where it’s beginning to hurt women. I think that we also agree we’re witnessing an incredible mass hysteria. We have some different points of view on how we got here and what might be done about it. I’d like to see if I can state my argument and steelman your argument. Correct me where I’m wrong.
My General Argument (80% Nature | 20% Nurture):
I’ve posited that 50 years of propaganda, ideological class war and social movements, exploiting biases and human group and valuation has a tendency to increase stress. That stress is exploiting evolutionary biases and rendering the humanity of men invisible behind the enforcement of cross-cultural taboos. This has been made possible by effective Class War propaganda, State force, and benefits replacing men within the family, combined with increasing stress from social media/technology.
PW: I have found most of your arguments compelling, arguments that you previously published as a series to a large readership who were both bemused by their novelty and genuinely intrigued by their potential explanatory power. With a plethora of one-dimensional explanations on offer for the deteriorating relations between men and women, many people hunger for something more substantial – and your series provided precisely that; depth.
You took findings from evolutionary psychology and biology and repackaged them for a mainstream consumption, and gave them your own twist. For example your work on female ingroup preference, parasite stress, and associated disgust mechanisms has helped to highlight how biological reflexes are exploited by nefarious actors who aim to stir up social panics – of which the final result is, too often, a form of male outgroup derogation. As you mentioned a moment ago, all of this ends up hurting women too as they find their own lives and intimate interactions with men become paranoid, stifled, and essentially poisoned.
JE: Me Steelmanning Your General Argument (80% Nurture | 20% Nature);
Beginning in roughly the Middle Ages, the concepts of Chivalry and Courtly Love began to shape the moral and legal landscape to advantage women and to disadvantage men. Through a man made process, incremental changes in the cultural, media and legal systems have led us to where we are now.
As evidence you present different cultures that still value masculinity and appreciate men for their inherent strengths, complexity management and boundary maintenance attributes and skills. Obviously, you have an enormous body of research and work that doesn’t fit comfortably in a paragraph. Where am I Wrong? And What Am I Missing?
PW: That’s a fair synopsis of my position, with the only quibble being with your characterization of ‘80% Nurture | 20% Nature.’ I appreciate that your percentages here refer to a relative influence I’m ascribing to cultural signifiers (nurture), vs. the influence of unmodulated biological reflexes (nature) in the formation of our moral views about men and women today – a.k.a. the skewed gynocentric worldview of the Anglosphere.
In that scenario the 80/20 description reflects the fact that biological imperatives, as expressed by an individual, will always be subject to customs of the body politic along with being subject to punishments for transgressing social norms – even to the point where an individual can be put to death for taboo expressions of sexuality, hypergamy, unacceptable expressions of disgust and the like. In such cases we see a win for cultural conventions, and a loss for the selfish gene impulse expressed by a given individual.
More broadly speaking, I prefer to characterize my position as 100% nature and 100% nurture – you’ll never see a human environment without biology, and you’ll never see biology without a facilitating environment, even if it’s hard to know where the center of gravity lies between the two forces.
JE: What was the most unexpected discovery or set of discoveries you’ve made in your research?
PW: Being somewhat of a reductive biological-determinist in my former outlook, I was surprised to learn just how wildly human cultures and associated human behaviors changed from era to era, and from place to place. In one culture you can see sexual license, in another sexual repression; or in one culture you can witness a parasitic-disgust response toward men’s beards, and in another you witness the exact opposite disgust for the smooth-skinned faces of men who don’t sport beards – beards which are seen as pure and divine features gifted by God. Such flexibility of human behavior forced me to make big adjustments in my thinking.
JE: What is the most disturbing discovery or set of discoveries you’ve made in your research?
PW: I’m in awe of how human societies display a kind of organic flow, possessing inbuilt homeostatic mechanisms that steer us in the correct direction when societies go a bit wacky.
The disturbing thing I’ve noticed is that owners of mass media such as newspapers, radio, television, and now internet tech, can censor the organic voices calling for homeostasis. That action takes us into a mechanistic and anti-human direction that I think is soul destroying, both for the individual and for the culture. I think some of your work touches on examples of this in action, particularly in the State of Minnesota.
JE: My target audience are lawyers, Intellectual Dark Web types, and Unwoke Minnesotans. What message would you like to send to them?
PW: I would encourage Minnesotans to read your work and follow you to get up to speed on the tendency of Minnesota to be a generator of global panics. The choice you offer between being woke and awake is critical.
JE: What message would you send to your fellow Australians?
PW: Count your blessings that you live on a massive island with no border crises to suffer.
JE: What gives you hope?
PW: What gives me hope is to remember that culture always changes.
Hey guys. From time to time I have the pleasure of collaborating on a piece with Peter Wright of Gynocentrism.com. Though it is written in first person, this is one of those pieces. My sincere thanks to Peter.
* * *
“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.”
Or so said Robert Briffault, an English surgeon, anthropologist, and novelist back in the day. And sure enough, if you listen to all corners of the manosphere, there’s no shortage of agreeance with this so-called, “Briffault’s Law.”
“Them there’s the rules,” you’ll hear, with absolute conviction and certitude, “and their ain’t nothin’ you can do about it.”
That outlook is roughly confirmed in a small poll taken by Peter Wright, offering four different interpretations of what Briffault’s Law actually means. One, that it is 100% true as written. Two, that it applies to only nonhuman animals. Three, that the law is accurate, but that it applies equally if the sexes are reversed. And four, you don’t much care about Briffault or his law to begin with.
The results were pretty clear. As you can see, 61, or 91% of those who responded see Briffault’s law, down to the last dotted i and crossed t, as 100% accurate about the female of the human species. By any measure that is an impressive amount of unanimity.
And we certainly see backup for this mentality from the more prominent MGTOW voices out there on the interwebz.
Stardusk titles a remarkably unremarkable talk, linked below, with, “Briffault’s Law – The Most Important Thing You Can Know as a Man”
Sandman opines in more personal fashion in one of his talks, linked, with the following. “I know from my own personal experience that I have two modes of operation with regards to my life,” he says, “Either I’m waiting for a woman to choose me to have a relationship, or I typically don’t care for them – like I do now.”
Finally, we have Colttaine, who expands the definition of Briffault’s Law with the same practiced acumen a feminist employs to expand the definition of rape, linked below “From where I’m sitting,” he asserts, “the problem with Briffault’s Law is that Robert Briffault didn’t go far enough with his definition. Women don’t just determine all the conditions of the animal family, they determine ‘all the conditions’ – period!”
Setting aside my desire to shame these public displays of learned helplessness, well, ok, partially setting aside that desire, I still want to focus on what these guys are saying and why I think it’s a learning opportunity for red pill men.
I know the online red pill community pretty well by now. And one thing is for sure, that community is above average in intelligence. Way above, in my opinion, which makes the 91% who subscribe to an obvious fiction with such religious fervour all the more perplexing.
At this point, some qualifying is necessary, though I wish it weren’t. Saying I disagree with a single prevalent MGTOW belief isn’t the same thing as disagreeing with the idea or practice of men going their own way, which I do support wholeheartedly. If you’re too obtuse to see that and appreciate the difference, this is my piss off in advance. Feel free to leave your butthurt in the comments.
That said, let’s start the conversation with a little common sense. I know, they grow ‘em big and dumb in Texas, but we do learn the difference between shit and Shinola early on in life. That predisposition, that stubborn Texas insistence to get 4 when adding 2 and 2 leads me to one inescapable conclusion about the idea of perception of benefit, a perception on which Briffault’s Law is totally reliant.
I don’t blow my nose, or even scratch it for that matter, without a perceived benefit. I don’t take a leak, put on socks, or do, literally anything you can think of, without perceived benefit. That’s true for the smallest, least significant things I do, or that I can even imagine doing. As human beings, acting on perceived benefit is pretty much all we do. By the time we’re talking about intersexual selection and pair bonding, there’s wheelbarrows full of perceived benefit on both sides. Anyone who can’t see it could perceive some benefit from eyeglasses.
And I know what some of you may be thinking. That we are socially conditioned to see the perceived benefit of the woman as what really matters. And that the weight of that social conditioning means that Briffault was right, “The female, not the male, determines all the conditions of the animal family.”
And to be fair, just pointing to the obvious fact that human behaviour, generally speaking, is driven by perceived benefit, isn’t a thorough enough rebuttal to Briffault’s widespread acceptance across the manosphere.
Before we dig into precisely the meaning of Briffault’s claims, let’s take a moment to consider Briffault the man. What do we know about him? Well, we know that he was raised by a strict, fundamentalist mother from the age of eleven after his father’s untimely death.
In short, Briffault was the product of an abusive, single-mother home. From accounts of biographers, we know that Briffault resented his mother’s controlling nature, but nevertheless went on to write about mothers at enormous length and extolling their superior status in the human scheme.
That alone is undoubtedly prima facie evidence of learned simpery, but let’s go on.
In his most famous book The Mothers, Briffault argues for the importance of mothers over and against fathers. The editor of the same book introduces him as a man without a loving bond with his mother, but with loving and fond memories of his deceased father. About Briffault from the intro, we read:
“It is not unreasonable, when a man has devoted seven years of strenuous work to arguing the importance of mothers as against fathers, to ask whether he betrayed any marked attitudes towards his own parents. Mrs Herma Briffault informs me that he had little apparent attachment to his mother, but often spoke of his father. (He seems, nevertheless, to have had a picture of his mother in his room in the last decade of his life). His mother was evidently a reserved, ‘canny’ Scots-woman, of strict views, whose capacity for personal warmth seems to have been limited, and perhaps he felt, as an infant, denied the acceptance he desired. He certainly rejected violently his mother’s strong religious beliefs and teaching. Clearly there was strong ambivalence here, and the attacks — which suggest narcoleptic stupors — which assailed him at the time of his mother’s last illness seem consistent with the idea of a powerful love-hate relationship.”
The biographer then goes on to conclude;
“It is not difficult to see how natural such attitudes were to one whose outlook had been conditioned by the experiences just described. I have observed elsewhere that, when a child has one parent who is easy-going and affectionate and another who is severe and apparently unloving, it identifies itself with the former and is preoccupied throughout life with its relationship with the latter… when it is the mother who is unloving, this leads the male child to a preoccupation with women and with incest. This was certainly the case in Briffault’s great contemporary, Havelock Ellis, for instance. It seems to have been equally true of Briffault.”
If we take this as true, the influences that led Briffault to his gynocentric conclusions, as well as his personal weakness with women, come into clear focus. Inadequate, abusive mothers and absent fathers. The results of that toxic combination are now sprawled across the cultural landscape in form of legions of young men who become obsequious lapdogs whenever in the presence of women.
It’s that instilled powerlessness that leads many, even if indirectly, to seek solutions in PUA, MGTOW and other red pill venues. And I argue that we still see the remnants of that same learned victimhood in the widespread acceptance of Briffault’s Law.
Moreover, it appears that many have taken hold of Briffault’s Law and applied it exclusively to human relationships in a way that Briffault didn’t even intend. Briffault applied his Law toward non-human animals, and the chapter in which he announces his Law is titled ‘The Herd and the Family Amongst Animals’ under this subheading ‘The Female in the Animal Group.’
The chapter is five pages long. In it he mentions tigers, elks, lions, zebras, gazelles, buffaloes, deer, monkeys, beavers, lions, birds and other animals, and only references humans briefly in order to contrast human behavioural patterns from those of animals.
Although Briffault appears to have intended his Law for animals, he also presented human sexual relations with the same exaggerated gynocentric framing, demonstrated throughout his book ‘The Mothers The Matriarchal Theory Of Social Origins’ which is chock full of cringeworthy claims of female superiority and male inferiority.
Whatever the merits of his observations, it is only fair to say that he was writing a century ago and his speculations were a product of the thinking of his day, and perhaps the personal pathology of his life. His work is replete with the flattery of and deference toward, women. It’s possible his thinking was even shaped by ideology of first wave feminism, which was running rampant in the culture during the time of Briffault’s writing.
Fast forward to contemporary research and we have a wealth of information to test, and quite frankly dismiss, Briffault’s hypotheses.
Steve Stewart-Williams, PhD in psychology and philosophy, wrote a now famous paper distilling the literature of evolutionary psychology on questions of intersexual human dynamics. Notably, he reiterates findings from the field of Evolutionary Psychology that males are also very choosy in selecting mates, which debunks the view that Briffault’s assumption concludes that only females choose. Williams states, and I quote;
“According to a common understanding of sexual selection theory, females in most species invest more than males in their offspring, and as a result, males compete for as many mates as possible, whereas females choose from among the competing males. The males-compete/females-choose model applies to many species but is misleading when applied to human beings. This is because males in our species commonly contribute to the rearing of the young, which reduces the sex difference in parental investment. Consequently, sex differences in our species are relatively modest. Rather than males competing and females choosing, humans have a system of mutual courtship: Both sexes are choosy about long-term mates, and both sexes compete for desirable mates. We call this the mutual mate choice (MMC) model.” 1
Stewart-Williams goes on to conclude that men, throughout our evolutionary history, have crafted women into the creatures we want – Pygmalion style. In other words, modern woman, in all her inglorious splendour, is, like it or not, the Stepford Wife that men actually chose to build. How’s that for patriarchal choosiness?
Pygmalion creates Galatea
He states, for example, that “human males have a number of well-documented, species-typical mate preferences. These include preferences for physical traits such as a low waist-to-hip ratio, facial and bodily symmetry, neoteny, and youthfulness. They also include preferences for psychological traits such as intelligence, emotional stability, and sexual fidelity.” 1
Imagine that – males throughout evolutionary history having a preference for intelligence and emotional stability. It’s almost as though he’s saying that men are exercising a personal choice, not only about whether to pair bond, but also about the type of woman they choose.
Not only does this bitch slap common manospherian ideas of Briffault as human gospel, it also destroys the cliché that ‘all men want is sex’ and will take anything that moves – providing the female “selects” them. It’s also worth noting that male mate preferences have left their mark on female physical morphology – again quoting Stewart-Williams:
“In some domains, women are more sexually selected than men; one… example can be found in the domain of physical attractiveness. Women are typically rated as better looking than men, by both men and women (Darwin, 1871; Feingold & Mazzella, 1998; Ford & Beach, 1951). The difference is plausibly a consequence of the fact that, although both sexes care about good looks in a mate, on average, men care somewhat more (Buss, 1989; Lippa, 2007).
This means that, since this sex difference first evolved, there has been a somewhat stronger selection pressure on women than men for physical attractiveness—the opposite of what we find in peacocks. To take a more specific example, the fact that adult human females have permanently enlarged breasts is plausibly a consequence of male choice. Contrary to popular opinion, enlarged mammary glands appear not to be necessary for milk delivery. The vast majority of mammals deliver milk without them, and there is little correlation between the size of a woman’s breasts and her capacity to produce milk (Miller, 2000). What, then, are breasts for? A rather obvious clue can be found in the fact that most men find youthful-looking breasts sexually attractive. This has led to the suggestion that the primary evolutionary function of breasts relates to mate choice (Dixson, Grimshaw, Linklater, & Dixson, 2011).
The most widely accepted suggestion is that they are honest signals of good genes, youthfulness, and nutritional status (Jasienska, Ziomkiewicz, Ellison, Lipson, & Thune, 2004; Marlowe, 1998; Singh, 1995; for an alternative hypothesis, see Low, Alexander, & Noonan, 1987). If so, women’s breasts tell us something important about ourselves, namely, that we are not the kind of species in which males only ever pursue sex indiscriminately and females alone exert mate choice. Breasts are evidence of male mate choice operating over many thousands of generations (Cant, 1981). The same is true of other secondary sexual features found in human females, including facial neoteny (e.g., large eyes, small noses and chins); gluteofemoral fat deposits and the hourglass figure; and lighter, smoother, less hairy skin.” 1
“Of course,” Stewart-Williams concludes, “no one is surprised that men have mate preferences; it is such a familiar fact of life that we take it for granted. From a comparative perspective, though, we should be surprised. The existence of these preferences makes our species atypical among mammals and is inconsistent with the idea that we are an MCFC species.” 1
Considering these widely available scientific facts, we must wonder if men upholding Briffault’s Law are simply brainwashed by the prevailing gynocentric narratives, or whether they too suffer from “male mother need” as Briffault himself did? When, for example, Turd-Flinging Monkey dismisses all women as THOTS but then goes on to talk for a decade about said thots stealing men’s authority, is that not akin to Briffault’s obsession with female self-interest?
Who knows? Perhaps an examination of TFMs relationship with his mother would be revealing.
For me, the red pill is, in its purist form, a dedication to living in the truth. It’s red pill 101 that women should not be viewed as an omnipotent power in the lives of men. That, dear listeners, is one of the very first liberating truths of men’s red pill existence. That women largely have only the power we give them, and that we have the power to keep them in check. In the earlier days of red pill, we called it veto power, the ultimate trump card for men. And we still have that power in spades unless we insist on immersing ourselves in the victim narrative.
So how then, do we have red pill commentators proclaiming aloud, and I quote again, “Either I’m waiting for a woman to choose me to have a relationship, or I typically don’t care for them – like I do now”?
Word for word, that could have been uttered by any defeated blue pill simp you’ve ever met in your life. Get mad if you want to, you know it’s true.
And to be clear, I am not saying a thing in contempt of men who look at all the facts and choose to avoid women based on the risk, effort, expense and unfairness that often comes with the so-called fairer sex.
Indeed, I think it’s important to point out that we’re talking largely about two distinct groups of men. There are those who have stared reality directly in the face, weighed all the facts and dispassionately concluded that women are not worth the effort; that the juice isn’t worth the squeeze, as it were, and veto power is at the core of their very identity. If you’re in that group, this talk is for you, but it isn’t really
The other group are men who have looked at the challenges of attracting and pair bonding with women and decided that they are just not up to the job. These are generally men whose spine has never survived contact with a woman. Their frame cracks, splits and ultimately shatters at the hint of female influence. You can hear it in their endless droning about how a man can never win, how women make all the rules and that the rules are unfair. They make sweeping declarations of personal powerlessness. To wit, “Women don’t just determine all the conditions of the animal family, they determine ‘all the conditions’ – period!”
Men like this appear incapable governing their own lives if women are involved. They can’t choose mates, not because women have unbridled personal power, but because those men don’t have the personal strength, values and integrity to remain in control of their lives.
They are just men who can’t hold on to their interests, their friends, their values, or self-respect because women make all the rules and they have no choice but to follow them. Because that’s the way things are, and Briffault’s Law is the so-called truth they wallow in to prove it.
If that’s your idea of red pill, you might want to skip the refills.
Whatever the motivations, I can safely say that a blind belief in Briffault’s Law is relegating many men’s personal progress to the dumpster, because if men have no choice about the conditions of their life, what possible agency can they have?
What form of personal autonomy is it that you can’t practice in the presence of a female? What kind of poorly constructed frame won’t bear the weight of a woman’s whims? Ya know, if you have to hide from anyone to assert your, uh hum, agency in life, you might hear Inigo Montoya, whispering in your ear, “You keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means.”
Personally, I’d rather try to pull an AR15 out of Kyle Rittenhouse’s hands than surrender to this weak bullshit.
Finally, I’d like to propose a different set of axioms for red pilled men: First, as a human male you are the most magnificent living entity ever known to exist. Men built civilization and conquered all manner of frontiers. If I were to try to list all the accomplishments of men, you’d grow old before I got finished.
Whatever your decisions about allowing women into your life, seeing yourself as a loser who can’t win is a self-fulfilling prophesy, with all the lameness that implies. If you want sex, companionship or even a relationship based on red pill principles, don’t let some youtuber’s mommy issues hold you back. Don’t lock yourself into the black pill prison of learned helplessness and nihilistic defeatism. Well, unless that is what you want to do. If that’s the case, just make sure that when you’re staring into that black, optionless void, you know it’s just a mirror of your own making.
Meanwhile, red pill men will enjoy the byproduct of personal agency, accountability and practiced wisdom; a solid frame that doesn’t crumble when a woman enters the room. A frame that doesn’t crumble for anyone.
Addendum: A small point that some commentators missed, is that Briffault aimed his law strictly at animals. Just before he gives his law he states, quote; “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.” So while its perfectly ok to mis-apply Briffault’s law as he intended it (a biological law operating among non-human animals), its important to note that many have repurposed his law for describing the current gynocentric culture operating among humans…. which of course a lot of MRAs could agree with regarding the gendered issues operating in the cultural and legal spheres. Again, this was not the intended meaning of what Briffault wrote – he was describing biology, not the shapeshifting dating and culture trends of recent decades, and its that misplaced biological determinism among humans, wrongly attributed to Briffault, that is under question. He was, notwithstanding, very much a gynocentrist aside from the wide misapplication of his law by modern commenters.
