There’s been a lot of discussion lately on a return to traditional gender roles as a way to reverse the ill effects of feminism. We see it promoted by advocates for traditionalism, in which men and women are called to adhere to strict ‘gender roles’ – eg. he is head of household who goes out and earns the money and protects her, while she makes babies, apple pies, and keeps the house clean. Its what many people refer to as the ‘two-spheres doctrine’ in which men and women are apportioned sovereignty over different realms – he over the political and social realm, and she over the domestic realm. This, argue the advocates of traditional gender roles, creates a delicate but eminently workable balance that has stood the test of time.

The fantasy of a return to the ‘good old days’ when men were masculine and chivalrous, and women were feminine and ladylike, has run strong through the manosphere and beyond, whether promoted by Anthony “Dream” Johnson and his traditionalism-promoting convention, or women like Suzanne Venker who specialize in promoting traditional roles for women.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, everything.

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

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

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

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

Axiom: ONLY STORY CAN DISPLACE OR ABSORB OTHER STORIES.

Facts be damned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References:

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

“The long march through the institutions is complete and
feminists now occupy pivotal positions of power and decision-making
throughout the world.”

Despite being a feminist-friendly book with some of the usual agitprop, Governance Feminism: An Introduction caught my eye because I have never seen an overt discussion of feminist institutional power by a feminist. It’s a topic classified taboo for academics and authors despite the effects of that power being experienced by peoples around the planet daily .

The book intrigued and perhaps even excited me for the prospect that a veil of denial and secrecy surrounding feminist power might be perforated for the first time.

The four authors of the work dubbed their topic Governance Feminism (GF), by which they mean “every form in which feminists and feminist ideas exert a governing will within human affairs.” This definition follows Michel Foucault’s definition of governmentality in which feminists and feminist ideas “conduct the conduct of men.” Governance Feminism is proposed as a new phrase, but it deserves mentioning that MRAs have been using the synonymous phrase ‘Feminist Governance’ for many years.

The work looks at feminist infiltration into positions of institutional and cultural power – the long march through the institutions that so many of us have been monitoring. Feminists have infiltrated the UN, World Bank, International Criminal Court, every layer of national governments, and further into universities, schools, NGO volunteer orgs, and in HR departments at most medium to large scale workplaces. Not to mention Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and other social media platforms where most of the world’s people communicate with each other. We would not be off base to say that feminist gatekeeping now regulates much of the planet, from top to bottom. They are everywhere.

But of course when questioned about holding such positions of power, feminists are quick to remind us that they still work for the “oppressed” sex and are thus justified in using positions of power to correct global imbalances. Ironically feminists consider power per se to be bad, a judgment rendering any admission of their own institutional power regulated by a strict taboo – for such an admission is akin to a Catholic nun who undertook vows of chastity, and being faced with admitting she is now in a sexual relationship. The authors tell:

The first and most persistent form of resistance we have encountered is based on an idea that governance is per se bad, often expressed as an understanding that our describing governance feminism is identical with denouncing it. We do not think it is a gotcha to say that feminism rules.”

The lead author Janet Halley admits elsewhere to being an occasional feminist – in other words a feminist if/when the need arises. Nevertheless her adoption of utopic feminist narratives is apparent throughout the pages, as for example when she characterizes feminism, and more specifically Governance Feminism as an “emancipatory project”:

Feminism is by aspiration an emancipatory project, and GF is one kind of feminists’ effort to discover pathways to human emancipation. In the process, GFeminists have been, in some cases, highly successful in changing laws, institutions, and practices, very often remarkably for the better. Just scan the canonical first-wave manifesto for change, the 1848 Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments,[4] for once-impossible, now well-established changes in the legal status of U.S. women: the right to vote; the rights of married women to form contracts, to sue and be sued, to acquire and manage separate property, to select their place of residence, to be criminally and civilly responsible for their own actions, to seek a divorce and to seek child custody on formally equal footing with husbands and fathers, and other powers formerly denied to them by coverture; to formally equal access to paid employment; to formally equal  access to “wealth and distinction”[5] and to the professions; and to access to education.

These are all basic elements of a liberal feminist agenda for women. Women have devoted entire lifetimes to achieving them. None of them came easily. They are not complete emancipation, surely. But compared with lack of all franchise, coverture, and categorical exclusion from the public sphere and all but the most grinding and ill-paid work, they are immense achievements attributable almost entirely to GFeminist efforts. One reason to describe GF is to be clear about its immense emancipatory achievements.

I can hear the reader’s objections now, that Halley’s overview of three waves of feminism as ‘emancipatory’ is a laughable gloss over the violence, censorship and tyranny perpetrated throughout that history. No doubt Halley is here giving a mandatory nod to the narratives of her more powerful “sisters” in order to avoid a backlash.

Framing feminist aspirations as emancipatory, and not as an urge-to-power by ruthless gender-ideologues, softens the tyrannical use of power, painting instead a soothing pastel picture. Said more directly, feminist use of power has to most observers been far more tyrannical and destructive than this glowing characterization reveals. With that in mind the authors might equally have characterized Governance Feminism as unadulterated power-seeking (ultimately for women) and been more on point.

To be fair the authors do go on to tackle some of the excesses of Governance Feminism after their apparently mandatory hand kissing of feminist theorists, and this deeper critique is where the true value of this book lies. The authors admit that many feminist visions of “emancipation” have been left at the station when various governance trains took off, confirming that the ‘“selective engagement” of feminist ideas into governmental power has left some diamonds in the dust.’

Further, they state;

In our view it has also done some damage: some governance feminist projects strike us as terrible mistakes; others have unintended consequences that are or should be contested within feminist political life. As some Governance Feminist projects become part of established governance, we find ourselves worrying about them more, or differently, than we did when they were unorthodox, “outsider” ideas. We are, therefore, inviting a robust discussion within feminism and between feminism and its emancipatory allies about which elements are emancipatory and which may, after all, be mistakes. [italics mine]

The authors go on to critique a number of these ‘mistakes,’ while remaining at times uncritical about assumed feminist successes. As touched on above, Governance Feminists also go to great lengths to hide their grasp on power, while taking every opportunity to exaggerate and demonize male uses of power:

Gender mainstreaming has located feminists in many organizations, from the UN to college administrations, almost always as bureaucrats. Here they wield not judicial power, not the sword of punishment, but the more fine-grained power of administration. Gender mainstreaming, which aims to universalize feminist ideas in governance and convert every governmental entity into a branch of Governance Feminism, paradoxically produces gender specialists.”

For most readers this quote encapsulates the danger of feminist power. Feminist ideologues have been inserted into every institution around the globe as gatekeepers dictating who does/doesn’t get employed, get assisted, financed, approved, credentialed, included, heard and so on. It can even descend to who gets food aid, who gets to rent a house in a scarce rental market, or who gets a job as a cleaner.

As an example, Jordan Peterson recently talked about HR departments at workplaces serving as foci for the feminist social manipulations. This development is insidious because the practice is hidden in supposedly menial bureaucratic positions, ones that just happen to wield pivotal power over the work-lives of citizens and the associated family outcomes – not to mention the outcome of amplifying gendered expectations and conventions that inevitably get instituted culture-wide through this process of rewarding or punishing via biased bureaucratic decisions. With this in mind it’s no exaggeration to call feminists social engineers who have succeeded in running the world.

Beyonce? ‘Who run the world: girls’

Some years ago I read a paper on the topic of “administrative discretion” which refers to the flexible exercising of decision-making allowed to public administrators. The discretionary opportunity is made available by the wiggle-room in the bureaucrat’s code of practice, and she or he uses that to deliver preferred – and often unfair – outcomes. The use of administrative discretion typifies the modus operandi of Governance Feminism, which is utilized to implement a radical feminist ideological agenda through all levels of society. Feminism-inspired women are increasingly dominating HR roles, and as revealed by teacher-preferencing biases in elementary schools they are exploiting administrative discretion to favor females over males.

Janet Halley lays much of the blame for the failures of Governance Feminism at the feet of two forms of feminism that form an operational alliance: Power Feminism (PF) and Cultural Feminism (CF). The book provides a useful overview of both, stating that they have formed an unholy alliance that came to dominate the internal battle for supremacy between different ‘feminisms.’  Power and cultural feminism meld into each other or appear side by side, writes Halley, and together they are frequently dubbed Dominance Feminism. She adds that Dominance Feminism finds male domination in two distinct forms: in the false superiority of male values and male culture, and in the domination of all things Female by all things Male:

American dominance feminism is a top-down, bottom-up model of M/F relations: there are perpetrators (men) and victims (women); people with an individualist ethic (men) and people with an ethic of care (women); people feminists advocate for (women) and people they accuse (men). This model of right and wrong is highly assimilable to criminal law and tort law frameworks. Thus the very visible elements of Governance Feminism that use the penal powers of the state to “end” sexual violence in all its forms are saturated with dominance feminist ideas. Especially where power feminism makes its influence felt, it makes sexuality the core of the problem: dominance feminist thinking places sexual wrongs front and center, and assimilates other seemingly nonsexual wrongs to sexual ones.

This is, we think, a manifestly narrow, crabbed, and even paranoid view of the gender order in the United States, and it is hospitable to quite ethnocentric, neocolonial construals of the gender order prevailing in the global South. It is remarkably indifferent to distributional consequences. Why does it play such a large role in Governance Feminism today?”

In Chapter 3.  Halley discusses Governance Feminists’ need to reflect on generating, owning, and critiquing their own governance power, which as mentioned above is hamstrung by feminism’s denouncement of power structures combined with its own denials about both possessing and wielding real power.

When the authors first encouraged the sustained study of Governance Feminism in 2006, some feminists told them that “they simply did not understand how marginal and fragile feminist gains in state and near-state power really were… If some feminist ideas and interests had managed to find their way into law, these were crumbs from the table, compromises with patriarchy on patriarchy’s terms not worthy of the name “feminist,” tiny fragments of the full feminist agenda, which was not merely to ride along on the back of power but to transform it.”

Such a response is breathtaking in its denial, and I would add predictable, leading the authors to assert that not only do feminists hold such world-changing power, they need also to ethically critique their use of it:

We think such acts of public critique are absolutely essential now that feminists and feminist ideas are so firmly embedded in legal institutions and legal power.[25] But they can be costly: insider-insiders often feel compelled to attack any feminist who does it, at the very least by depriving her of her insider credentials and her insider job and at the very most by marshaling major institutional resources to discredit her and her ideas, defund her projects, and leave her constituents out in the cold.”

In the final chapter Halley implores Governance Feminists to develop an ethic of responsibility; to both admit to the power they preside over, assess its impact both negative and positive, and own the outcome. This lofty appeal is frankly laughable when considering the ideological agendas and unethical practices that Dominance Feminists are known for. Asking them to take a more ethical approach is as likely of success as asking Mao Zedong to develop an ethic of individual liberty and a policy of free-market capitalism.

Antifeminists around the world have a very different suggestion to that of going hat in hand imploring Dominance Feminists to show more ethical and considerate behavior. Their alternative is to shine a harsh light on the moral corruption of feminist ideologues, and work to neutralize their destructive programs via effective counter-activism. The antifeminist counter-movement is in full career and I’m certain that Governance Feminists around the world are already feeling the heat. Halley’s book contributes to that insurgency move, perhaps unwittingly, by demonstrating just how much power these ideologues have been wielding. The book is therefore useful in that it speaks the unspeakable… the cat is finally out of the bag.

The authors conclude by mentioning a second volume is in process titled Governance Feminism: Notes from the Field, which will provide case studies describing and assessing national, international, and transnational Governance Feminist projects by a range of feminists engaged in building them. No longer operating in the shadows, Governance Feminists are now being scrutinized in broad daylight…. and with that move they will have a lot of explaining to do for their transgressions.

There’s some confusion around the word gynocentrism and it’s meaning, so this piece will explore a little discussed part of the term: -centrism. This suffix makes a restrictive demand, i.e., that women are most important interest we might hold.

The Cambridge dictionary describes centrism the following way:

CENTRISM: The fact of having a particular type of person, place, or thing as your most important interest; the quality of being seen from the point of view of a particular type of person, place, or thing:

• The Academy has been accused of Eurocentrism and gender bias.
• The artist’s newest ventures embody his commitment to ecocentrism

Gynocentrism implies that our focus on the needs and wants of woman is the most important consideration; whether such focus be contained to a brief moment in time, or as applied to the entire duration of human relationships.

For example, when we celebrate Mother’s Day we can legitimately name this brief, isolated act as gyno-centric. Or for a more dramatic illustration of a brief gynocentric event, consider the scenario of a man taking on a knife-wielding maniac who is threatening to hurt his pregnant wife, while the wife retreats and does not help the husband during the fight; in this case the actions of both husband (protecting his wife) and wife (protecting herself) are rightly defined as gyno-centric.¹

Alternatively if we consider the overall relationship between the same husband and wife we might ask a new question – is the entire relationship a gyno-centric one? If that husband and wife take turns supporting each other across the duration of their relationship, then the relationship might be rightly referred to as “couple centered” — because by definition a gyno-centric relationship centers exclusively around the woman and her needs and wants. As soon as you have genuine reciprocity in a relationship, one that involves a couple-centric dynamic based on commensurate importance, the relationship can no longer be considered gynocentric.

Employing the word gynocentrism to discuss reciprocal exchanges between men and women, where women are occasional beneficiaries in certain ways, and men are beneficiaries in certain ways, is an erroneous use of the term because such exchanges, strictly speaking, do not constitute a gender centrism across the duration of the relationship – ie. its not a gyno-centric relationship.

While there can be gynocentric elements in relationships, they are historically balanced out by other elements like family-centrism, andro-centrism, child-centrism, pairbonding-centrism, or tribe-centrism. The theory that human relationships are evolutionarily gyno-centric is an exaggeration and a piece of sappy modern propaganda that even some men’s advocates fall prey to.

NOTE:

[1] After writing this essay in 2019, I’ve since become aware of Hanna Wallen’s thesis of the ‘Natural Gynocentrism Fallacy‘ which posits that even isolated, brief acts that I have described above as “gynocentric” are more accurately described as gene-centric, or family-centric behaviours. I agree with Hanna’s proposition.

Women, like ALL family members throughout evolutionary history, needed protection in order to be part of a strong, viable family team.  But that isn’t called gynocentrism; it’s called storge (the Greek word for ‘family love’). All family members were protected – as indicated in my recent poll below.

Men, too, were protected if they were injured, old, sick etc. Protection & provision was always based on the shifting needs of various family members…. whoever had the most immediate need, was catered to and cared for.

The following are a few clippings from newspaper archives pointing to the existence of an “Anti-Man Movement” – so called by the women who formed them –  existing as early as 1830. Clearly ‘anti-man’ turned out to be a branding problem which would later be changed to ‘suffragettes/feminists.’ – PW

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Anti-Man Society.

A meeting of the ladies in Maine has lately been held, to take into consideration the propriety of establishing a society to be called the Anti-man Society. It is said be an established fact that for the last century the male party have, by unholy combination, contrived keep all political offices to themselves, to the exclusion women. They are now resolved to put down this unrighteous combination, and if not exclude men entirely at least to have equal share among themselves.— Philadelphia Paper.

Source: Reported in Northampton Mercury – Saturday 19 June 1830
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This next one from 1842 mentions the ‘Anti-Man Society’ briefly in the second paragraph:

Source: Evening Mail Wednesday 26 October 1842
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The next item details an Anti-Man movement in the year 1895:

SOURCE: Lucifer the Light-Bearer, 23 Aug 1895, Fri, Page 3

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This last one is more recent, and I’m not sure what if any relation it has with the original 1830 Anti-Man Society:

Source: The Cumberland Argus and Fruitgrowers Advocate Newspaper, Wed 13 Jun 1923

Above is a painting of Frau Minne  from Southern Germany, 1320-1330 ca. The image depicts the lover presenting Frau Minne with his heart which has been pierced by three arrows. There are two German inscriptions with the image, the first of which translates as “Lady, send me solace, my heart has been wounded,” while the second reads as “Gracious Lady, I have surrendered.”

Frau Minne (vrouw minne) is the personification of courtly love from German Middle Ages. She is frequently addressed directly in Minnesang poetry, usually by a pining lover who is complaining about his state of spiritual suffering.

She is often referred to as the “Goddess” of romantic love, which is differentiated strongly from other kinds of love such as Christian agape as embodied in the figure of Jesus. To make the distinction clear, romantic love is understood as passion, whereas Christian and Buddhist love is understood as compassion.

A rare allegorical painting of ca. 1400 (see figure 1), discovered in a guild house in Zurich in 2009 shows Frau Minne presiding over the suffering of male lovers who are having their hearts torn from their breasts. In this cruel scene Goddess Minne, the mistress of love, sits on a throne consisting of two men. She has just torn out the heart of a man to her left which she holds in her hand, while she is already cutting open the chest of another man to her right to rip his heart out.¹

Goddess Minne sits on a throne made of two men, while preceding to rip out the hearts of men in love.

Romantic love involves the deployment of superstimuli, including titillating courtship rituals such as male chivalry toward fetishized ladies that in many ways resembles the power dynamic of sado-masochistic practices. Nevertheless, this still forms the basis of a spiritual practice, and the originators of this religion stated that if you were not suffering, you were not experiencing the fullness of the goddess’s divine power. Such passion-inducing love contrasts with other kinds of love as mentioned above, such as friendship love, parental love extended to children, or that of Christianity or Buddhism which focuses on human compassion.

In Figure 2. (below) N. R. Kline states,  “The central section depicts Frau Minne as she presides over a couple that seeks her advice. The bearded lover is presumably the author of the text telling of his plight at having to leave. He points to his chest, with text leading from his mouth that reads: ‘st hat dahin’ (you have my heart [in your hand]). The woman to whom he speaks holds the heart to which the man presumably refers. After a series of entreaties his lady finally gives him her blessing and, in the course of the conversation from one panel to the next, the lady offers her fidelity and the man promises the same. On the cover, winged and crowned, Minne, as both judge and witness, sits on a subjugated crouching man as her throne, a visual metonym of triumphant female power. There are no symbols of the religious trappings of betrothal and marriage.”²

Figure 2: Minnekästchen (cover), wood, end of 14th c. (?), Decorative Arts Museum, State Museums, Berlin.

According to Johan Winkelman of the University of Amsterdam, Frau Minne is identified (see figure 3) with a crowned vulva carried aloft by servile, erect penises, thus depicting Minne by her most extreme elemental power.³

Figure 3: Badge displaying three phalli bearing a crowned vulva in a procession, 1375-1450, found in Brugge (Van Beuningen family collection, inventory number 652)

As mentioned in a previous essay, romantic love began as a code of conduct among the aristocratic classes of the middle ages. However, the trend made its way by degrees eventually to the middle classes, and finally to the lower classes, and ultimately broke class distinctions altogether in the sense that all Western peoples became inheritors of the customs of romantic love regardless of their social station. This breaking of class barriers is marvellously rendered in the painting below by Hans Koberstein (figure 4), who portrays Frau Minne leading a helpless throng of individuals consisting of royalty and pauper, young and old, who are equally held under her sway.

Figure 4: Frau Minne smashes all class barriers, making rich and poor alike suffer from love sickness (Painting by Hans Koberstein, Germany, 1864-1945)

A 15th century depiction “The Power of Frau Minne” (figure 5, below) captures the pain and pathology so widely known to be part of the romantic love experience. The pathology associated with romantic love is so disturbing, in fact, that clinical psychologist Dr. Frank Tallis has written a book detailing the sickness associated with it based on his extensive clinical experience:

Obsessive thoughts, erratic mood swings, insomnia, loss of appetite, recurrent and persistent images and impulses, superstitious or ritualistic compulsions, delusion, the inability to concentrate—exhibiting just five or six of these symptoms is enough to merit a diagnosis of a major depressive episode. Yet we all subconsciously welcome these symptoms when we allow ourselves to fall in love. In Love Sick, Dr. Frank Tallis, a leading authority on obsessive disorders, considers our experiences and expressions of love, and why the combinations of pleasure and pain, ecstasy and despair, rapture and grief have come to characterize what we mean when we speak of falling in love. Tallis examines why the agony associated with romantic love continues to be such a popular subject for poets, philosophers, songwriters, and scientists, and questions just how healthy our attitudes are and whether there may in fact be more sane, less tortured ways to love. A highly informative exploration of how, throughout time, principally in the West, the symptoms of mental illness have been used to describe the state of being in love, this book offers an eloquent, thought-provoking, and endlessly illuminating look at one of the most important aspects of human behavior.⁴

Figure 5: “The Power of Minne,” – an allegorical depiction of women’s power over men’s hearts (Broadsheet woodcut, 15th century by Master Casper von Regensburg, Berlin, SMB, Kupferstichkabinett)

References:

[1] Frau Minne hat sich gut gehalten, 2009
[2] Naomi Reed Kline The Proverbial Role of Frau Minne: ‘Liebe macht Blind’ – Or Does It? in The Profane Arts: Norms and Transgression, Brepols (2016)
[3] The world upside down. Secular badges and the iconography of the Late Medieval Period, in Journal of Archaeology in the Low Countries 1-2 (November 2009) “Malcolm Jones has pointed out that the crowned vulva on this badge should be interpreted as a persiflage on Mary (Jones 2000, 100-101), whilst Johan Winkelman, Emeritus Professor of Historical German Literature at the University of Amsterdam, identified the vulva as an extreme depiction of Vrouw Minne (i.e. the Middle Dutch equivalent of Venus, a symbol of lust) (Winkelman 2002a, 231). According to the attributes with which she is associated, Vrouw Minne, portrayed as a vulva, is the counterpart symbol of Mary, just like Eve in the above-mentioned miniature from the Book of Hours of Catharina van Kleef.”
[4] Love Sick: Love as a Mental Illness, by Frank Tallis – overview on Goodreads

See Also: Frau Minne and Gender Roles