Women’s weakness and vulnerability is a great source of power. This uniquely feminine power has no male equivalent, because men are generally expected to be able to defend themselves from harm.
Female victimhood has the potential to raise a woman’s social status by making people sympathise with her and want to help her. A man’s weakness, on the other hand, tends to lower his status in the eyes of others.
‘Chivalry’ by Frank Dicksee (1885)
Janice Fiamengo writes:
“Well over a century ago, our ancestors debated women’s demand for voting and other privileges. Traditionalists argued that women faced a choice: they could either have special treatment on the basis of their alleged vulnerability as a group, or they could have political equality, but they couldn’t have both. Lo and behold, women got both, with peculiar results for our political culture.
In our time, the performance of powerlessness has become a dominant strategy of power, nowhere more evident than in politics. “I’ve been traumatized” is now a more galvanizing cry than “I can handle that”—and trembling weakness often eclipses demonstration of strength and competence.”
Everyone pays attention to a distressed woman. Everyone wants to help her and keep her safe. It’s an essential biological instinct to protect the weaker sex, without which our species would’ve gone extinct a long time ago. On the other hand, a man in distress is usually blamed for the situation he’s in; he’s told to try harder and do better.
A woman in distress is not expected to defend herself, because she’s assumed to be weak, vulnerable and in need of male protection. The damsel in distress archetype is the epitome of female victimhood and the resulting power. It doesn’t matter if the distress is real, imagined, acted or exaggerated: there’s always someone around to rescue the damsel and cater to her every need. The saviour may be a man, the government or the media (as in the case of Amber Heard).
Women and Children First
All human beings are innately driven to protect children – an instinct essential for survival. Adult women are able to harness the same empathy people have for children due to a biological phenomenon called neoteny.
Neoteny refers to the retention of juvenile features in adults. In humans, this is a physical characteristic in women that signals innocence and vulnerability. It therefore elicits caring and nurturing responses from other people.
Examples of neotenous or baby-like features that are important for women’s facial attractiveness are large, widely spaced eyes and a small nose and chin. Cross-cultural studies have shown that these features are considered attractive by men all over the world.
Contrast these traditionally feminine features with typical masculine traits resulting from high testosterone levels, such as a pronounced jaw, chin, cheekbones, and brow ridges. In women, the hormone estrogen contributes to the maintenance of neotenous features. During puberty, testosterone levels in boys increase dramatically, which causes them to develop the masculine characteristics that clearly differentiate them from girls.
When we see a tiny baby or puppy, we instinctively want to keep them safe. This is the same instinct women can exploit well into adulthood, while men lose this opportunity after hitting puberty.
An eye-opening social experiment has shown that people are more likely to want to protect girls than they are to care about boys, even before the effects of puberty begin to manifest. In the experiment, people rescued the little girl first, followed by the dog and then the cat. The little boy was the last to receive help from passers-by. Another study has found that both men and women are more likely to sacrifice a man than a woman when it comes to both saving the lives of others and pursuing self-interests. This is heartbreakingly representative of our society, which incessantly exaggerates the discomfort of women, while downplaying the suffering of men.
The price of women’s power has always been male sacrifice. This was as true a hundred thousand years ago and a thousand years ago as it is today.
Feminists misrepresent men’s efforts to protect and serve women as patriarchal oppression. But the truth is that all cultures glorify male suffering and self-sacrifice, while putting girls on a pedestal for their beauty and innocence.
Traditionally, women had fewer rights because they had virtually no responsibilities, and they certainly weren’t required to sacrifice themselves for their community. In the West today, women have the same rights as men, while still enjoying special treatment.
The Temptation of Damselling
Some women exploit the power of the damsel in distress more than others, but I believe we all use it from time to time. I think we are all aware of this power at an instinctual level.
There are, of course, horrible instances of actual violence against women. But women making false allegations and playing the damsel don’t make life any easier for real survivors. In fact, they’re making it much more difficult for actual survivors to get help and justice. They’re also doing a lot of harm by calling into question women’s competence and ability to rule over their own lives.
*For more articles by Greta Aurora visit her Substack Feminine Power
There are countless definitions of what ‘feminism’ is, with feminists themselves pointing to glib dictionary definitions, and antifeminists preferring to define it as a female supremacy movement. A hundred other definitions could easily be offered, but the more important question is what (if anything) do all these different definitions hold in common?
Below, Adam Kostakis answers this question in the affirmative with an elegant definition that most would agree with. – PW
_____________________
Even essentially contested concepts, as W. B. Gallie referred to them, must have meanings which are greater than normative, else communication about them would be rendered impossible. That is – there must be some amount of general consensus over what feminism is, between feminists and anti-feminists, or we would not be able to argue about it! Even despite the differences between a feminist’s view of feminism and of our own, some shared content must exist at some level, or we would be talking about entirely different things. They might be talking about the feminist movement, while I am talking about horse-rearing, although we both refer to our respective subjects as ‘feminism’ – but we wouldn’t have much to say to each other, would we, if this were the case?
So, I shall posit the following as a universally applicable definition of feminism; that is to say, it must fit everyone’s criteria for what feminism is, in spite of the different perspectives that different people hold on its nature. It is a suitably limited definition, since it can encompass only those parts of feminism which all definitions hold in common. So, here it is: feminism is the project for increasing the power of women.
That, then, is what everybody who discusses feminism holds in common regarding the concept, whether they are supportive, skeptical, or nihilistically indifferent. No feminist, I think, would deny that this is, at the very least, the ‘bare bones’ of feminism, even if she would prefer to flesh it out in a lot more detail. But that will not do, for beyond this narrow inference, we disagree with each other. To be as objective as possible, then, we must take only that which everybody agrees upon, and that is our universally applicable definition.
Note that there is no mention of equality. This is because there are a number of feminists who explicitly did not pursue equality, but supremacy. So, equality cannot fit into the universal definition of feminism, since certain feminists themselves – who were very famously, unequivocally feminist – disavowed it. To say that feminism is ‘about equality’, then, would be to place oneself in diametrical opposition to several extremely influential feminists! And why, that would be … misogynistic!
Nor can feminism be said to be the project for increasing the power of women relative to men, since, in this counter-feminist’s view, feminists are often quite content to increase the power of women in an absolute sense. That is, they endeavor to grab all they can for women, without reference to the status of men. The phrase ‘relative to men,’ then, only serves to imply that women are power-less relative to men at present, thus casting feminism in an unfairly favorable light. In reality, once women do achieve power which is at an equal or equivalent level to that of men, the demands of feminists do not stop. What we find is that female power becomes entrenched, and extended, and when it surpasses male power, this is simply referred to as ‘parity’ and ignored by feminists – at least, when they are not gloating over men’s newfound powerlessness.
Nor are we able to list, in our universal definition, the specific areas of life, or spheres, in which the feminist project applies. This is because feminism is inherently universalizing; it seeks to colonize and dominate every single facet of life where men and women meet. It aims for domination in every sphere of life, actual and potential.
You may disagree with some of the points above, particularly if you are supportive of feminism. But this does nothing to change our universal definition, because all we can say about those points is that they are contentious. That is, feminists and non-feminists, who are educated about feminism, disagree about these aspects of feminism, and it would simply be biased to take one or the other view for granted. That would be like consulting only Jacobins on the historical accomplishments of the Jacobin Club, or like canvassing only conservatives to explain modern liberalism. It would be a good example of poor methodology, and would help us very little in our search for truth. Right? So then, our universally applicable definition cannot be expanded beyond that which we stated before: feminism is the project for increasing the power of women.
Source: The above excerpt is from Adam Kostakis’ essay Pig Latin.
The cause of the new woman has found an enthusiastic champion in M. Jules Bois, who has recently published a very readable book on the subject, L’Eve nouvelle. (Paris: Leon Chailley, 41 Rue de Richelieu. Pp., 381. Price, fr. 3.50.) M. Bois is unstinted in his praise and admiration for the inexhaustible potencies of the fair sex, and reviews their anthropology, or rather, if we may use the word in its literal sense, their gynaecology, less with the eye of the scientist than with the aim of the passionate special pleader.
With many sound and common sense claims he has mingled a few very doubtful sociological theories, evidently at second hand. He proclaims the judgment day of social anthropocentrism, the overthrow of the femme-poupee, the femme-reflet, the femme-victime, above all of that monstrum ingens the femme-homme, and hails the advent of the femme-femme. “Woman, before being a wife, a sweetheart, or a mother, is and should be first a woman. Her full freedom must be conserved.”
This new woman is not a new creation, moreover, but existed in the old woman, who was her undeveloped Platonic archetype. All the sides of her life M. Bois considers in brief, outspoken terms and shows great knowledge of her condition in all countries. We Americans have not so much need to take his admonitions to heart as need Continental Europeans, seeing that captious critics are prone to regard us as suffering rather from gynocentrism than anthropocentrism.
Be that as it may, and sticking still to the geometrical metaphor, what we have both to look forward to in the new dawning millennium is an anthropic, gynecicbifocism, preferably of curves with vanishing ellipticity; when which consummation has been reached, the eternal problem will be solved.
When studying sex differences in animals, biologists divide species into two categories: sexually monomorphic and sexually dimorphic. In monomorphic species, males and females can be difficult to tell apart. In dimorphic animals, on the other hand, the sexes differ considerably in terms of size, colour or other physical characteristics. It’s possible to infer a lot of information about the mating behaviour of a species by determining whether it’s sexually monomorphic or dimorphic.
Most animals fit clearly into one of these two categories – but humans do not. We possess both monomorphic and dimorphic features. But before I talk more about humans, let’s take a closer look at the characteristics of monomorphic and dimorphic species.
Sexual Monomorphism
Sexually monomorphic species
When males and females are roughly the same size, it is safe to assume males don’t routinely fight each other to gain access to females. If males actively competed with each other physically, a larger size would be an advantage, so they would’ve evolved to be bigger than the females.
Monomorphic animals are generally monogamous and display long-term pair-bonding. If neither sex is much more colourful than the other, then sexual selection based on physical traits probably doesn’t play a huge role in their mating. Behavioural traits are a lot more important, and females prefer to mate with males who have proven they are willing to share parenting responsibilities.
Females expect to be courted by delaying mating, in order to assess potential mate’s dedication and paternal instincts. Female birds often act helpless to see how the male reacts.
Twin births are common in monomorphic animals, because the two parents can work together to look after more than one offspring at a time. Also, due to monogamous pair bonds, the majority of males get a chance to reproduce. But females do sometimes abandon their long-term mate and form a bond with another.
Some examples of sexually monomorphic species are wolves, gibbons, beavers, swans, penguins and bald eagles.
Sexual Dimorphism
Sexually dimorphic species
In dimorphic species, two sexes vary physically quite significantly. In many mammals, males are bigger than the females. In some spiders, on the other hand, females are a lot larger than the males. In a lot of birds, males are much more colourful and sing to attract females.
In some species, males have not only evolved to be noticeably larger and stronger than females, but they may also have unique body parts meant to be used as weapons when they fight each other for dominance. These males are also a lot more aggressive than their female counterparts, due to their higher testosterone levels. That’s why these animals are often referred to as tournament species.
In dimorphic species, females are attracted to physical signs of male health and strength. The largest male in the group is often the most desirable partner, because he is able to provide physical protection. These dominant males usually have a number of sexual partners, but they abandon their mates and offspring. Therefore, females tend to be the only parent looking after their young, and therefore they rarely give birth to twins.
Because a minority of dominant males has access to a majority of females, physically weaker males don’t get to reproduce. Wherever polygamy is practiced, there’s going to be a lot of incels.
In these species, the life spans of males and females tend to differ significantly, too, with females living longer than males.
Where Do Humans Fit in the Picture?
Humans may seem monomorphic in some ways and dimorphic in other ways. Of course, in most cases, it’s easy to tell men and women apart. But we don’t look as different from one another as, for instance, male and female deer, lions or peacocks do.
Although the average man is larger than the average woman, the difference in size is not as significant as in many dimorphic species. The most noteworthy physical sex difference in humans is in upper body strength: the average man has 75% more arm muscle mass than the average woman. The overlap between male and female distributions of upper body strength is less than 10%. This has some crucial implications in everyday life, especially with regards to physically demanding professions.
Men also tend to have higher bone density, which makes them less vulnerable to injury. This difference may not matter much at an everyday setting, but it could be a matter of life and death in the battlefield.
Muscle mass and bone density are largely influenced by testosterone. This hormone also has a significant effect on behaviour, and men clearly have a lot more of it than women do. This fact alone could possibly tilt the scale towards dimorphism in humans, but it’s not quite that simple.
It is true that the average man is more aggressive than the average woman, and testosterone is to blame for this. However, some women are actually more aggressive than the average man, despite having nowhere near the same testosterone levels. It has been established that more testosterone doesn’t make a woman more aggressive. In fact, it’s not clear what causes aggression in women. There are a few theories, centred mostly on brain function. One of the most likely candidates is the amygdala, but no one knows for sure.
This example illustrates that biological differences don’t necessarily make a species dimorphic, because biology doesn’t always translate clearly into behaviour.
Let’s examine some personality traits to see if we can identify any obvious differences in behaviour! Looking at the Big Five personality traits is a good starting point. These are openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.
The Big Five personality traits
Numerous psychologists have replicated the same results when studying gender differences in these five traits. No one has found any significant differences in conscientiousness. In openness, some differences arise only if we break this trait down into several constituent parts. For example, women tend to score higher on their appreciation for aesthetic experiences, while men are more drawn to intellectual experiences. But the sexes don’t differ in their overall levels of openness.
Women tend to score slightly higher on extraversion than men do, but again, this is not a very pronounced difference. Women also score higher on neuroticism, which is the amount of negative emotions experienced. This probably results from women spending all their time with their infants after giving birth. In order to protect a tiny, very vulnerable baby from harm, women have to be incredibly cautious and protective. That’s why women generally worry more than men do. To paraphrase Jordan Peterson, the feminine unit is not woman by herself, but woman and child. The female nervous system is that of a mother.
The most significant personality difference between the sexes is in agreeableness. But even here, there is a great overlap, and the differences only become evident at the extremes of the curve. What we see here is that the most agreeable people are likely to be women, and the most disagreeable people are likely to be men. Combined with high testosterone levels, this is the reason most violent criminals are male. But the majority of men and women don’t diverge very much in terms of agreeableness.
Distributions of agreeableness in the sexes
Those who are following my work will know that I’m fascinated by evolutionary psychology. But the more research we read from this field, the more we’re going to find ourselves focusing on the differences between the sexes, especially with regards to mating. Evolutionary psychologists tend to think in terms of extremes: they represent men as highly aggressive and competitive in their pursuit of professional and reproductive success, and desiring not much more than youth and beauty in a woman. And they represent women as desperate to secure a successful partner, despite knowing he won’t be faithful. In this hugely simplified world, men and women both want one thing, albeit a different one: men only want sex, and women only want a family.
Although evolutionary psychologists like David M. Buss, Geoffrey Miller and Robert Wright have made significant contributions to our understanding of human nature, they often fail to look at the larger picture. They tend to apply the male competition – female choice model to human mating, which is generally true for sexually dimorphic species. But human mating actually resembles that of monomorphic animals is various ways.
Human males have traditionally been involved in parenting, and they are therefore a lot more selective about their long-term mates than the males of dimorphic species. That’s why women make such a great effort to look desirable.
Also, women tend to choose their partner more on the basis of their personality, as well as their ability to provide resources and their inclination to commit long-term. Women still carry the heavier reproductive burden, but they are not necessarily choosier than men are – they just take different considerations into account.
Proponents of sexual dimorphism in humans will point out that women generally live longer than men, and polygamy has been common throughout our history. It is true that men have traditionally died younger, but that used to be mostly due to fighting in wars and working in dangerous environments, such as mines. The life expectancy gap has been consistently narrowing. For example, in the UK between 1991 and 2014, it shrunk from 3.8 to 2.4 years.
As far as polygamy is concerned, it’s true that it had been permitted through most of history, in many different cultures. There were times when it was necessary, exactly because so many men had died in war. But, for the most part, monogamous relationships are the norm, even in societies that allow polygamy.
It’s important to note that our species is highly adaptable to extreme conditions. For instance, if needed, we can survive on an exclusively carnivorous or herbivorous diet for a long time. Thanks to our creativity, we can survive in a desert, as well as in Antarctica. Therefore, we have every reason to believe that our mating strategies are not carved in stone, either.
We don’t have to commit ourselves to being just one thing. We must accept that we have some monomorphic and some dimorphic characteristics, and we can express these in various combinations, depending on the challenges we face.
As neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky said,
“We are not a classic pair-bonded species. We are not a polygamous, tournament species either… What we are, officially, is a tragically confused species.”
We are not necessarily confused, though… We have a lot of potential, and we are the masters and mistresses of adaptation.
Gendered customs come in a variety of different models, and tend to have variance from culture to culture, and era to era. Each mythological representation of a god or goddess, for example, shows a different slant on gendered behavior; there’s no ‘one gendered model fits all.’
In the context of mythology I like to cite the example of Frau Minne, a medieval personification or ‘goddess’ as she has been called, who offers a template for gender roles in the context of romantic love – with romantic love being our most popular trope for organizing sexual relationships today.
Frau Minne likes men to look up to women as pure and transcendent creatures, encouraging men to serve them from a more humble position. In the words of Irving Singer,
Courtly love is often said to have placed women on a pedestal and to have made men into knights whose heroic lives would henceforth belong to elevated ladies. The idea arises from the fact that men frequently used the language of chivalry to express their servile relationship to whatever woman they loved, and sometimes they described her as a divinity toward which they might aspire but could never hope to equal… that he must prove himself worthy of her and so advance upward, step by step, toward a culminating union at her level; that everything noble and virtuous, everything that makes life worth living, proceeds from women, who are even described as the source of goodness itself. But though the lady now discourses with her lover, the men frequently cast themselves into the typical posture of fin’amors. On their knees, hands clasped, they beg the beloved to accept their love, their life, their service, and to do with them as she pleases.1
What sociologists like to refer to as “respectful relationships” can be seen a euphemism for Frau Minnie’s call to establish a gender hierarchy where women are cast as ‘nobles of love’ in relation to chivalric males – with women being spoken of with classist characterizations such as “esteem,” “respect,” “dignity,” “worth,” “praise” and “status.”
It would be a brave person who would attempt to count how many Offices for the Status of Women exist throughout the Western world today.
A man’s role, according to Frau Minne, is to “place a Lady on a pedestal” and to offer himself to her in a position of sacrifice and service. Minne’s archetypal formula constitutes the heart of romantic love, all three waves of feminism, and the Jungian infatuation with the notion of “the feminine” (which is the Jungian counterpart of feminism). These systems of devotion to women’s esteem each point back to the vision of Frau Minne whose religion, according to Joseph Campbell, triumphed over Christianity during the late Middle Ages to become our dominant worldview — which is why today the romantic love literary genre outsells all of the world’s holy books *combined*.
In summary, Frau Minne provides an example of how gender concepts are a result, to some extent, of the archetypal imagination.
The following book titles are all aimed at female readers and were collected from a cursory glance at Amazon. This sample is nowhere near the entirety of those available in this, er, genre – but they are sufficient to paint a picture of how millions of women around the world apparently view relationships with men as experiments in animal behaviorism and manipulation strategies, with the aim of controlling men.
The tables of contents reveal the books as patently disrespectful toward men, misandric and certainly repulsive for any self-respecting male. But for the adventurous reader who would like to look more closely at the content, each of the titles are searchable at Amazon.com.
DSM criteria for narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) are compared in the table below with beliefs and behaviours of the gynocentrism oriented woman (GW):
The following excerpt is from a chapter titled ‘The Archetype of The Victim’ in Lyn Cowan’s book Tracking The White Rabbit: Essays In Subversive Psychology (page.92). Here the author makes a direct correlation between victimhood identity and enactment of what Jungians refer to as the child archetype.
* * * *
As noted earlier, the root of the word victim carries an ancient meaning of “increase” or “growth.” However, I am not suggesting that victimization ought to be considered an occasion of “positive growth.” To do so minimizes the horror and fear and shame or represses them completely. The injunction to the victim to “grow” through adversity is a subtle appeal to the victim’s ego to leave the victimization experience behind (a form of denial). “Growth” in this usage is defensive, the demand of an anxious parent who does not know what to do for a child in pain (as in, “Grow up, stop crying, stop feeling sorry for yourself”).
A deeper objection to the demand on the victim to “grow” is that it keeps the experience of the victim within a fantasy of the child. Whatever complex meanings victimhood may have for the soul are obscured and reduced to false simplicity by forcing them into the single perspective of the child archetype. Thus the victim appears passively childlike or irresponsibly childish. This may be one reason why our culture takes a profoundly ambivalent attitude toward victims: either total neglect and abuse or idealization and galvanic convulsions to rescue. (Remember little Jessica McClure, who fell down a well in Texas in 1989? The whole country vicariously participated in the rescue operation.)
When perceived through the child archetype, the victim is infantilized: whatever injury has been done can now only be understood as a sign or consequence of psychological immaturity – the naïvety of a child, the innocence of a child, the carelessness of a child, the abuse of a child, the child who cries for grownups to play fair. Instead of an adult drama deep in the soul’s sacred interior, victimization is seen as one of many misfortunes that befalls a child. We demand either excessive responsibility of the victim (“She should have known better”) or expect him or her to be as helpless in trauma as a child.
“Taking what had worked for most women in the past and seeing it as a plot against them led us to see men as “owing” women. This created Stage II entitlement: women being entitled to compensation for past oppression. This prevented us from seeing the need to make a transition from Stage I to Stage II together : the need not for a women’s movement or a men’s movement, but for a gender transition movement.”
– Myth of Male Power
A gender transition movement will be the longest of all movements because it is not proposing merely to integrate blacks or Latinos into a system that already exists; rather, it is proposing an evolutionary shift in the system itself—an end to “woman-the-protected” and “man-the-protector.” This division is rooted in our biology; it exists among animals.
Gender transition starts by opening the lace curtain and closing down feminism-as-the-one-party-system-of-gender-politics. That combination frees women to hear what men at least could say if the media, academia, and government were not frustrating the already silent sex. It would bring into communication with each other the four major gender perspectives: traditional men, traditional women, transitional men, and feminists.
What does the communication consist of? For starters, how we can allow maximum freedom for both sexes without losing sight of our commitments to our partners and children. Redistributing housework, childcare, and work outside the home within each family; solutions to domestic violence, date rape, and sexual harassment that incorporate men’s experiences. Funding the thirty-four neglected areas of men’s health; making men’s birth control a reality….
An Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) might be relabeled an Equal Rights and Responsibilities amendment (ERA) and made user-friendly to men. Such an amendments legislative guidelines might suggest that congressional districts be deprived of welfare funding if judges assigned the children to women more than 60 percent of the time in cases of contested custody; it would deprive universities of public monies as long as there were significantly more women’s studies courses than men’s studies courses; it would deprive TV stations of federal licensing if the FCC found a consistent pattern of male-bashing or consistent attention to women’s issues and neglect of men’s issues. Being user-friendly to men includes funding research on the denial of dad time, on false accusations, and on violations of due process and the Fourteenth Amendment.
The ERRA would mean a new era—an era of shared rights and shared responsibilities.
Life and Death
A gender transition movement would incorporate men’s issues. Men’s issues are issues of life and death. Why do men whose spouses die or who are divorced commit suicide ten times as often as the women? Why are men in all ten “glass cellars” of disposability (e.g., more of the street homeless than women and children combined, 94 percent of the workplace deaths, dying five years sooner) even as we only discuss “glass ceilings”? Instead of having only an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), men’s issues of life and death might best be addressed by an Equal Life Opportunity Commission (ELOC).
* * *
“Ideally there should not be a men’s movement but a gender transition movement; Only the power of the women’s movement necessitates the temporary corrective of a men’s movement.” ~ Warren Farrell.
When I was noticing sponsored posts on Facebook by Matt Walsh’s page abut his new film What Is A Woman?, what grabbed my attention was the text on one of them: ‘One of the surgeons I interviewed for this documentary confessed to having mutilated the genitals of a 16 year old boy. The Left says this isn’t happening. They’re lying, as always.’
I admitted surprise at his choice of words: ‘mutilated the genitals of a 16 year old boy’. I wondered aloud, how much does he actually care about a child’s genital integrity across the board? What are Mr. Walsh’s attitudes towards routine infant circumcision? Assuming that he is just another traditional conservative, I had thought that he couldn’t give a shit about male genital mutilation and the serious consequences of it. However, I left it at that because that was all it was: an assumption. I wouldn’t speak more on it until I had concrete proof of what would be his hypocritical stance, and I’d be completely open to be proven wrong as well, delighted to be in fact.
About a week ago, I got my answer.
For clarity, the quote reads thus:
You lose credibility when you call circumcision “elective amputation”. Particularly because “amputation”, in the medical sense, generally refers to the removal of a limb. Make your point without being ridiculous. And parents frequently make decision for their infants. In fact, I’m not sure how else to raise an infant. You aren’t “infringing on their liberty.” Come on, that’s just absurd. Make your point without resorting to laughably hysterical rhetoric.
This screenshot was shared by a mutual follower on Twitter, Nikos Anti-MGM, who imparted to me that it in itself was originally something a Facebook friend of his posted. Regardless, the importance of sharing it cannot be understated. Matt Walsh, who grandstands that he is “obsessed with stopping people from mutilating and sterilizing children”, is proven to be yet another high-profile hypocrite regarding what kind of child is on the receiving end of the genital mutilation, and what ideology conducts it.
And yes, those were Walsh’s own words. Clearly he’s either not obsessed enough, or in fact obsessed strictly with refusing to admit that Americans have been making a mistake in eviscerating infant male foreskins for generations:
Some may be asking why I am spending a lot of energy going after these specific individuals who are open in their double standards about the genital mutilation of children. After all, too many Americans casually buy into the scam that calling all of them out one by one would be wasted effort. My response would be that anybody directly talking about the genital mutilation of children, especially when those are the exact terms that are used, must be consistent and deplore every context and every situation that this happens.
When they aren’t, and the likes of Walsh go forth and mock intactivists and hurl the same fallacies used to justify male infant genital mutilation, they absolutely deserve to be called out. They must be put to question whether they actually are against all forms of child mutilation, or are just tailoring their narrative to appease their large conservative fanbase that still thinks nothing about what trauma they put their infant sons through in an environment completely normalized for that.
As the backlash against woke nonsense gains more momentum and high-profile personalities such as Walsh, Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson become ever-increasingly influential voices, it is crucial to expose their shortsightedness when they are being disingenuous in their given advocacies. This is of grave concern because the mindset they are smuggling in is not only a matter of a difference of opinion, but a genuine, serious risk for infant boys’ well-being.
This is why I think we must get more serious in scrutinizing the attitudes of these personalities, and dismantle their hypocritical takes. As more of these gynocentric acts of throwing the male of the species under the bus while white knights plead for FtM trans surgery victims more so than the more numerous MtFs, if not exclusively the former, we will be on the track of casting into broad daylight the truth about their motives, none of which bode well for men and boys.
Anyway, it’s time to get into the intended focus of this article, to dissect and analyze Matt Walsh’s crude remark regarding the male foreskin and the amputation thereof. Speaking of, the subject of amputation is the first thing he blunders on.
You lose credibility when you call circumcision “elective amputation”. Particularly because “amputation”, in the medical sense, generally refers to the removal of a limb. Make your point without being ridiculous.
According to the featured expert on the subject of amputation from John Hopkins Medicine, Jaime Troyal Shores, M.D, “Amputation is the loss of removal of a body part such as a finger, to, hand, foot, arm or leg.” While the examples he immediately references include limbs because that is what tends to be in the forefront of the minds of those thinking about amputations, he appears to be clear enough that he is talking about a removal of any body part – and not exclusive to limbs. In the same web page under the entry for Amputation, under ‘Types of Lower Extremity Amputation’ a reference to pelvic amputation (hemipelvectomy) is made; last I checked, a pelvis is not itself a limb.
If this was not convincing enough, the Wikipedia page on amputations clearly states the different amputations that aren’t limbs, and unequivocally listed is the removal of the foreskin.
To add to that, a search on scholar.google.com for “amputation of the foreskin” and “foreskin amputation” would yield you over 100 results and over 70 results respectively. In short, the very act of referring to foreskin removal as an amputation is neither ridiculous nor non-credible.
For all his mockery on those who use the term “amputation” for MGM, I wonder if Walsh would at least entertain the idea that it is in fact closer to castration, especially since slaves or men on the losing side of a war have been so circumcised in lieu of actual castration. Also would he consider that children have literally lost or had their genitalia horribly damaged beyond saving due to a “botched” operation?
Recalling Walsh’s preoccupation about amputations being for limbs only; by his own logic, neither is breast removal an amputation, then. Does he not know that the breast is but a modified sweat gland to begin with? Furthermore in response to the common attitude that alleges that circumcisions are like inoculations that you do for children as a part of medical practice you generally do in caring for your infant; if circumcision makes sense so his rate of diseases can lower, then by that logic those mastectomies that these girls are having would be great things, since they’d be reducing the risk of breast cancer!
Since we’re on the subject of the argument for genital mutilation on the basis of alleged medical parental care, the next error:
And parents frequently make decision for their infants. In fact, I’m not sure how else to raise an infant.
Does that make piercing an infant girls’ ears during infancy an acceptable act? Does that qualify as raising an infant?
Let’s take a deep dive into this “decision” parents are making for their infants. Let’s make it so that even Matt Walsh can understand.
The decision to remove not “just the tip” as commonly and falsely advertised, but 33-50% of penile skin along with the sensitive nerve endings for fine touch as well as protection of the glans which then becomes thickened like a callus.
The decision to put the male infant through literal extreme pain resulting in brain changes due to high levels of cortisol as well as neurogenic shock (what circumcisers and their nurses euphemistically refer to as “sleeping through the operation”)
The decision to leave the male infant with a wound that is left alone and open to infections, including but not limited to herpes, meningitis, sepsis and cysts.
The decision to doom so early in life the prospects of a proper sexual experience during his adulthood onwards, by removing the functional gliding and sensitive component.
The decision to consign the male infant to the increased likelihood of sexual dysfunction during his adulthood, loss of sensation, and alexithymia – “the inability to recognize or describe one’s own emotions” which is connected to depression, and even suicide if the truth about what you’ve done to him comes to light. Next time a guy tells you he’s fine after being circumcised as an infant, that’s probably the alexithymia talking.
The decision to play American Roulette with your infant male.
By the last part, I mean risking dying just for being born male. It’s not a gun but a knife that you play American Roulette with, and it never misses. The gamble is whether he actually dies of infection, the blood loss, or other ensuing complications that get brushed off euphemistically as Sudden Infant Death Syndrome so the circumcisers aren’t held accountable.
If you think you’re practicing a medical act for your son by doing this, for example if you think it reduces your son’s chances of an STD or if it’s cleaner, then once again the same can be said about mastectomies, or even your run-of-the-mill female genital mutilation. And if you think you’re going to make him more appealing to ignorant American women cruel enough to self and others to prefer a “cut” penis, then you’re a sexual groomer of your own son; there is nothing else to describe you.
And finally it’s time to pick apart the last mistake of Mr. Walsh:
You aren’t “infringing on their liberty.” Come on, that’s just absurd. Make your point without resorting to laughably hysterical rhetoric.
I’ll refer back to the fact that a parent precludes his son’s ownership of his own intact sex organ before he even has developed the ability to exercise his own volition. Does Walsh understand the actual meaning and message of liberty or is he just too much of a conservative to look past his own neotraditionalist priorities and how liberty applied at large doesn’t always go the way he may want to?
Once again, let’s make clear this so even Matt Walsh can understand it:
Self-ownership is a crucial, integral component to the philosophy of liberty.
Self-ownership as a value applies to the human individual.
A human is valued as such upon, and even before, birth.
Self-ownership therefore is already in effect at infancy.
Let us also debunk the problem with the often-touted “parent’s choice”.
Liberty is about negative rights; entitlements are positive rights.
Negative rights are in line with self-ownership, and the right to be uninfringed by the force of others.
Positive rights presume the “right” over another individual. Reminder that this is the opposite of liberty.
The responsibility to the life you bring into the world is consistent with self-ownership; personal accountability and liberty are not in conflict.
Legitimate medical practices as well as raising and caring for the child are both consistent with the aforementioned responsibility and the fact that you are cultivating the child into a being that can exercise and become aware of his own self-ownership.
Non-medical or cosmetic acts do not count towards raising the child and depending on the lasting effect is tantamount to abuse of the child.
Male genital mutilation is a non-medical, cosmetic, and downright harmful act – by all definitions acts of entitlement over another being.
Self-ownership of the child is under assault by MGM as it includes both damage and theft of a crucial part of the male anatomy at a point in his life in which he is neither mentally or physically able to resist.
The child’s liberty is infringed via the assault on his self-ownership.
In short, there is no such thing as a “parent’s choice” aside from the best practices of raising one’s own child and the responsibility to his safety. Routine infant circumcision is a betrayal of that trust, safety, and the respect of self-ownership.
Also by Walsh’s own logic, anyone who practices FGM are not assaulting girls’ liberties. Oh wait, chances may be high that he may in fact consider it such an assault. What’s the big difference in this case: “It’s much worse for a girl”, “Infants have no rights”, “We must protect the girls but boys got to learn to take it”? Gynocentrists are so predictable.
The reader may be wondering right now whether the title I gave this article, “What is a Man?”, was nothing more than a way to grab attention as well as a pastiche of Walsh’s film “What is a Woman?” I confess that my intents leaned towards provocation in this regard, but if we think about it, we can very well ask and then answer the question “What is a Man?” in the context of the subject of the intact, whole, and unsacrificed male.
“What is a man?” may as well be a question that Walsh could ask himself, but I cannot trust any answer he may have.
So what is a man, anyway? I’m not here to give you a comprehensive answer on that at this moment, furthermore as individuals a man cannot afford to be condensed to one definition or even one archetype. For that matter, women as individuals likewise cannot afford to be so condensed (so much for “What is a woman?” am I right?). However the question of archetypes and the permutation of models for men and women is a subject I will save for a future article. In the meantime, let’s clarify a few things that we can:
A man has his liberty, and his self-ownership, his free will to exercise himself in this world as an individual as well as his own expression of masculinity.
As a masculine, self-owning free being, a man has his desires – including prospects of pairing with a woman counterpart, which under proper circumstances include his expression of sexual desire. (We are speaking of the heterosexual world for the moment, though it is clear that those that aren’t have their own such expressions and desire)
A man is fully equipped with everything he needs anatomically to exercise his sexual desires peacefully. He has a foreskin that is in no way a minor detail of this anatomy, but a crucially functional one. It is not an accident of birth.
Here we now have the conceptualization of the anatomically intact man, and answers the question in this respect. The act of routine infant circumcision, then, boils down to a mitigation of the qualities that make one a male. If foreskin amputations were regarded indeed as a form of “castration lite”, it is an act that translates into making the male less of one. The answer to “What is a man?” is not “something you cut the anatomy of”. “Man up” has been the go-to form of goading and shaming to advertise the circumcision industry and cultural practice. Routine infant circumcision is not the response to “What is a man?” but rather “How to destroy a man?”
What grand irony that it is the conservative that continues to moralize and defend this practice in the same breath as he decries the trans agenda for child operations. What irony, that the conservative who talks about “real men” and how masculinity is important to keep society going is the same one who wishes to surgically lower how much of a male someone is, so early in life. This is nothing short of punishment for males for being male – the radical feminists would be proud. It is no surprise to me why conservatives like Walsh and Tucker Carlson are so eager to “establish dialogue” with Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists just to own the biological males.
A few more thoughts to close off on:
I am betting everybody in the men’s movement and intactivist movement who read this, if they aren’t instead incensed by Walsh’s hypocrisy, are howling with laughter at the prospect of him demanding “rallies outside of hospitals that butcher children” as if it were a brilliant new proposition. Clearly he hasn’t heard of Bloodstained Men and Their Friends before…or maybe he has but is instead opting to screech with eyes closed and fingers in his ears whenever someone reminds him of it. In short, Mr. Walsh – there already is a movement of which you speak of. The ball is already rolling. Frankly, you’re proving to be just an obstacle without a good point to make.
I can only hope that we can bring this hypocrisy into light so much that the likes of Matt Walsh will have no choice but to stop ignoring it. They should be made to admit their blundering attitude on the subject and the fact that they’ve disingenuously grandstanded on a subject that goes deeper than they are willing to admit themselves. It is a travesty that what is a toxic fad by comparison is the specific type of child mutilation given disproportionately more attention than the vastly practiced, normalized and casually encouraged child mutilation that is MGM. This mutilation runs so deep in the cultural practice that the men who survive it are like most male domestic abuse victims: in denial, perhaps feeling like they deserved it, and do not consider what happened to them as abuse.
If anybody takes a stand against child mutilation, routine infant circumcision is rightfully the forefront issue. Matt Walsh symbolically and literally mocks the intactivist movement as he envisions himself as the forerunner against the kind of mutilation he can conveniently strike a crusade against. Consider these points the next time you think of Walsh as “brave” for speaking out myopically on an issue he has no moral authority on.
My thanks to the following links for sources on the damage of MGM:
‘Chivalry’ by Frank Dicksee (1885)
