The Eventual Outcome of Feminism, Part I

Lecture No. 10

“The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.” – Nathaniel Hawthorne

It seems sensible, at this stage, to pose the question: why is all this happening? The answer I can offer up, for the purpose of this lecture, is not historical but psychological: it offers explanation through reference to the mental state of feminism’s operators. There certainly are historical processes at work, explored elsewhere, but no social movement survives purely for the sake of its history. Nobody is born a feminist. There must be some stimulus, or stimuli, working to remodel formerly non-feminist women and men into activated feminists. But we cannot explain feminist conversion by the agitation of those already existing feminist activists. We can certainly believe that feminist activism plays a role in recruitment, but this is not adequate as an explanation. Why would an individual then commit to feminism, rather than any other particular social movement whose advocates engage in agitation for the purposes of ideological recruitment?

It must be that feminism offers such individuals something that other movements do not. I propose that, by opening up space for perfectly satisfying, collective man-hating, feminism offers a form of catharsis eagerly seized upon by those already predisposed to misandry. There are probably as many rationalizations for misandry as there are individual feminists – we would have to explore the intimate details of an individual feminist’s life, particularly her mental culture, to come to a conclusion about when and why she decided to blame an entire sex for each of her inconveniences. What is common to them all is hostility to masculinity, i.e. maleness. When the initial excitement brought about by mutual indulgence in sexual hate has died down, the lines of communication between feminists remain open. Feminism provides more than the opportunity for catharsis. The feminist soon realizes that she need not restrict herself to echo chambers, but might try her hand at real change. A thrill rushes through her at the thought of not just disparaging, but actually hurting men. Backed up by an extensively organized, generously funded and institutionally-connected movement – one that enjoys a rosy reputation as defender of that greatest virtue of our time, equality – she sets to work. Feminism is a misandrist’s dream.

Implicit in what I have written above is the corollary that feminism does not create misandry. Feminism promotes, endorses, reinforces, organizes and aggrandizes misandry, but it does not generate it outright. A woman who is not antipathetic towards men will not become so upon exposure to feminist thought. More likely, she will recoil at its odious philosophy. Feminism simply provides a space for women and men who were already misandrically-inclined to congregate and make plans.

The forerunner to feminism was traditional Gynocentrism, a self-sustaining social system which taught women that men should sacrifice on their behalf, and taught men that they were defective women. The female privilege inherent to this sexual ecology was undoubtedly accompanied and reinforced by animosity towards men – the ‘flawed’ sex – most particularly those men who did not conform to the Gynocentric role expected of them. Feminism departs from this model, not only in the sense that it provides organization for this misandry, but also in the instability of its operations. Feminism relentlessly demands greater male sacrifice for the benefit of women. This is a process to be intensified without an end point. Such a process lacks forward planning or any semblance of equilibrium. Ever greater constraints are placed on the very class of people whose labor and genius sustains the social order in which feminism can thrive. The parasite is killing its host, and will either be purged or die along with it. Feminism is simply not sustainable.

But it is not as though feminists think in these terms. Despite their forays into such recondite subjects as jurisprudence and post-modernism, feminist thought ultimately resolves to the validation of primal emotions. The central tenets of Western-style justice systems, evolving as they did under patriarchy, aspired to impartiality and objectivity in all proceedings. We speak of habeas corpus, the right to trial by jury, the presumption of innocence, punishments which fit rather than exceed corresponding crimes, and so on. That these doctrines of civic freedom have lasted for so many centuries is testament to the integrity of the generations of men who inherited them. Feminists, in their efforts to replace these ‘outmoded, patriarchal’ institutions, do not engage in anything like the deep thought that begat their careful construction. Much less do they entertain the notion of impartiality. All feminist legal innovation – whether it is introducing the presumption of guilt (for men), advocating an inquisitorial rather than adversarial trial system (for men), or proposing that women should not be punished at all when they commit crimes – flows from the same source: the violent and vindictive emotions of individual feminist operators. Feminism is so dangerous because it exists to validate these emotions, and to assign them a permanent place in discussions over how society might be better organized.

twisted

The success of feminism in this regard can be appreciated when we consider the popularity of collective guilt, anathema as it is to the principles of neutrality and impartiality underpinning our liberal justice systems. Collective guilt is an emotional discharge, a visible effect of concentrated class hatred. It is an attack on the verifiable truth of individual moral agency. Under a system of collective guilt, one’s actions have no bearing on one’s fate. Human beings are sent to the gallows for the circumstances of their birth. There is no purpose for trials, or any institution which exists to ascertain the facts of the case and to assign guilt. Guilt is already assigned; the facts are irrelevant. What follows collective guilt is collective punishment.

Feminists are not yet in a powerful enough position to deliver collective punishment to the entirety of the male sex. Instead, they cast as wide and as deep a net as possible, hoping to snag as many men and boys as they can. Wherever an individually identifiable man appears on their radar, he becomes the latest pariah, even if the accusations against him are weak and unfounded. This is irrelevant; all that matters is that he has been identified. Then, he becomes the target for unbridled angst, a public piñata, an effigy of all men, of maleness itself. He becomes the personification of the entire male sex, and the collective punishment that feminists yearn to deliver unto all men is inflicted onto him. Even after he is proven to be innocent of all accusations, the attacks intensify, as though the reluctance of the world to acknowledge his guilt is an even greater injury than the charges brought against him. In a short while, he will be forgotten, and a new whipping boy will be discovered. Until that time, feminists will try to outdo each other in editorials, speeches, and in the comment sections of newspapers and weblogs, calling for the most grotesque mutilations and acts of violence against him.

An impartial legal system, which treats human beings as individuals, is a barrier against collective punishment. To do away with it altogether would allow for the punishment of many more men, on the basis that they are men, which is why feminists have fought so relentlessly to overturn impartiality. Bit by bit, feminist agents within government, academia and the legal system have replaced individual moral agency and the rule of law with the micro-management of people. As the mantra goes, the personal is political – it is, increasingly, the business of the state. Even when not explicitly framed like this, the underlying principle of all feminist innovation is to bring the state to bear down, ever more closely, on our personal, everyday existences. If the personal really is the same thing as the political, then political correctness must be personal correctness – a perverse and pervasive system of control which scrutinizes an individual’s every move, in order to lock him into place. You must be personally correct, in terms of your beliefs, your desires, your pursuits, your tastes – right down to the jokes you are permitted to laugh at – according to their standards. They being the self-declared ‘victims’ of society, who are nevertheless powerful enough to enjoy lunch with the President and set out the terms on which the government is to run your life.

The idea is not that men should overcome all the obstacles in their struggle to be politically/personally correct. After all, those who are demanding that men run this daily gauntlet are the very same people lining up to beat them with clubs as they try. The idea is that men should, so to speak, die trying. The intention is that men fail. For as long as average men manage to live peacefully, and even successfully, more and greater incursions into their personal space shall be required. It is at the point of failure -; when men have failed to live up to the increasingly constrictive rules set out for them – that they can be punished. The ordeal gets tougher by the day and with each passing of new legislation.

At the extreme end of societal micro-management, we find states like North Korea, a brutal, totalitarian dictatorship which controls all forms of media, place severe restrictions upon speech, association, movement and access to information, and detains dissidents and their families in concentration camps where many die from starvation or medical experimentation. Western societies are separated from the continuum of despotism, on which we find North Korea, by a small number of fundamentals, some of which have already been referenced: respect for the autonomy of the individual, the presumption of innocence, the separation of executive, legislative and judicial powers, etc. These doctrines correspond precisely to those which feminism aims to tear down. The violent, vindictive emotions from which feminism springs are, by nature, irrational; there exists no internal, rational boundary, to suggest that enough is enough once a certain benchmark is reached. The furious impulses at the heart of feminism would not stop short of constructing a totalitarian regime which restricts men’s speech, their association and movement, and detains them in concentration and labor camps where they are subject to starvation and mutilation.

Are we so far removed from savage regimes like North Korea that this is not a possibility? We should not allow ourselves to be misled by appeals that we live in a democracy, and that the leaders are ultimately accountable to the people. Our democracy is only ostensible, offering little real choice. The bipartisan consensus between leading parties ensures that the state continues to grow, and the feminist agenda is further promoted, whether the new government cloaks itself in red or blue. Facing no serious political opposition, the leaders do not have to bow to the people to secure their mandate. All public pandering is superficial, though highly effective, in the same way that all totalitarians have enjoyed the popularity of the masses.

By definition, totalitarians must be populist: the support they must mobilize, in order to remain in power, cannot be that of an armed minority alone. In exchange for the sponsorship of the masses, totalitarians caress their egos, giving enthusiastic praise to them for their courage, declaring them the inspiration of all progress. At least, the greater part of them are praised. Groups which are not in favor are, in contrast, treated with contempt prior to their destruction. It is the majority which becomes tyrannous – as Alexis De Tocqueville warned – when the leaders isolate a particular segment of the population for blame and castigation. Enjoying their glorification on behalf of the leader, the chosen majority will side against the undesirables, and treat them with abominable malice. It is a story that has played out, over and over, throughout history – not least in the populist tyrannies of the twentieth century.

Today, our leaders exalt the feminine and malign the masculine – a prejudice running so deep that it has become normalized, to the point where few consider it unusual for the President to bash men on Father’s Day. Men – who are, indeed in the minority, making up 49% of the population – are suffering the early stages of the tyranny of the majority. Leaders of all parties pander, first and foremost, to the female majority, and particularly to the pressure groups set up (supposedly) in their interests. More pernicious than this is the entry of women into politics – not because of the fact that they are women, but because almost every female politician, whatever her party allegiance, makes women’s issues her priority. In contrast, male politicians swear their allegiance to the principles of their party and to the demands of their constituents, but not to men’s issues. There are no politicians who make men’s issues a priority, but plenty – male and female – who run on the cross-party, women’s issues platform.

The world is not so simple that we can say men are over-represented because they are present in greater numbers. Although there is a greater number of men in politics, it is women who are over-represented, because more politicians represent them than they do men. The sex of the politician makes no difference to the legislation that he passes. In courting the female vote, and particularly in his efforts to please feminist groups (organized misandry), he will perpetuate and extend chivalry, he will publicly belittle his own sex, and he will pass ever more anti-male legislation, sanctioning the brutalization of ordinary men.

injail

Systematic destruction follows systematic contempt. The eventual outcome of feminism is nothing less than a Holocaust, the almighty crescendo to mark the success of a century or more of sexual warfare and the demonization/degradation of the masculine. Those men, such as the male politician who has stoked the fires of gender tribalism to win votes and benefit his own career, will become the concentration camp facilitators and the enforcers of population reduction programs. They shall be the Uncle Toms, the Judenräte atop white horses, who will ultimately meet the same fate as the men they have helped exterminate. The anti-male, homicidal and genocidal violence in feminist rhetoric is well documented:

“The male is a domestic animal which, if treated with firmness … can be trained to do most things” – Jilly Cooper, SCUM (Society For Cutting Up Men)

“I want to see a man beaten to a bloody pulp with a high-heel shoved in his mouth, like an apple in the mouth of a pig” – Andrea Dworkin

“Kill your fathers” – Robin Morgan

“Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation, and destroy the male sex” – Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto

“It is no accident that in the ancient matriarchies men were castrated, sacrificially slaughtered, and excluded from public forms of power; nor is it an accident that some female supremacists now believe men to be a distinct and inferior species or race. Wherever power is accessible or bodily integrity honored on the basis of biological attribute, systematized cruelty permeates the society and murder and mutilation contaminate it. We will not be different” – Andrea Dworkin

“Why have any men at all? … The proportion of men must be reduced to and maintained at approximately ten percent of the human race” – Sally Miller Gearhart

“If life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth.  I think this will be accompanied by an evolutionary process that will result in a drastic reduction of the population of males” – Mary Daly

The stock feminist response is to point out that these quotes are from radical feminists, who have not been active for a long time, and do not represent mainstream feminism. While it is not exactly true that they do not represent mainstream feminism, we can find more recent examples of feminist attitudes:

“It is time that government had a strategy on changing men away from power and oppression as part of its strategy for women and gender justice … Changing future agendas for women involves changing men; changing men involves deconstructing men and reducing men’s power; and, in the longer term still, this may even involve the abolition of men” – EuroPRO-Fem, a European men’s pro-feminist network

The following is extracted from a recent discussion on a feminist weblog:

Allecto: I think there is a very simple solution to the ‘problem’ of the team sport of gang-raping that is so popular as a form of gay male bonding between football players.

Mandatory castration of all men who play football and all men who watch football. This would be a quick and easy solution.

bonobobabe: I like your castration idea. I’d take a step further and castrate all male babies at birth.

Mary Sunshine: There is no remedy for this situation other than to halt the emergence of any more human males.

Two caveats must be advanced before we go any further. The first is not a compromise; it is not self-censorship or moderation. It is a statement of fact. The overwhelming majority of women do not, and would not, support the extermination of men. The question of whether all or most or only some feminists support the extermination of men is one that I shall address in a couple of weeks’ time. Clearly, there are feminists who do not openly support the extermination of men. Nevertheless, they have a role to play in the process, as do all misandrists. For the time being, it will suffice to say that all feminist self-reflection and self-criticism reaches the verdict that they are not being ‘feminist enough,’ i.e. it results in further radicalization. I quote from the back cover of Zillah Eisenstein’s The Radical Future of Liberal Feminism, a feminist text which arrives at this very conclusion:

Eisenstein shows that liberal feminism is ‘self-contradictory’ because it ‘accepts liberalism and at the same time rejects its patriarchal base.’ Yet in truth, feminism is ‘potentially subversive’, to both liberalism and the capitalist patriarchal state, and it must and can become radicalized as it pushes against the limitations of what can be accomplished within the context of the state … Eisenstein advances the view that liberal feminism contains within itself the seeds of radical change.

The significant point about the above quote is that Eisenstein, the feminist author, rejects the ‘patriarchal base’ of all liberal institutions; that is, she would happily do away with legal impartiality, equality before the law, presumptive innocence, and so on. Retaining these doctrines, which exist to protect innocent people, is not on the feminist agenda, and Eisenstein comes to the very same conclusion that I have presented in this lecture: that liberal feminism will become radical when it achieves all it can through the liberal state. The violent and vindictive emotions will not be satiated, ever. Once feminism has gone as far as it can go through the liberal state, ‘liberal feminists’ will turn against it and plot its overthrow.

The second caveat is that the physical destruction of men is not inevitable. It is the logical outcome of feminism, but our future is not set in stone. Given that feminists have explicitly called for forced male labor and the presumption of innocence to be removed when men are accused of rape, and that lawmakers are seriously floating the suggestion that those found guilty of sex offences should be physically castrated, we might conclude that we are already some way down the feminist road to hell. Feminism has no internal brakes; a victory does not temper the feminist’s violent emotions, but provides the momentum for her to push for greater results, in the knowledge that she can get away with hurting men. Any barrier to the progress of feminism will therefore have to come from outside feminism. It is up to external agents to build a brick wall in feminism’s path.

We are more than sixty years into an organic process that will leave humanity with an irrevocably changed society. The catalyst for the abolition of Gynocentrism is its own radical and unsustainable expression in feminism. Those same social and conceptual changes which made feminism possible prompt the question of why men should put up with any form of Gynocentrism.

The critical mass of opposition to Gynocentrism, resulting in its overthrow, will be reached as soon as feminism is exposed to the world. What remains to be seen is whether feminism shall expose itself, or whether it will be exposed by counter-feminists. The former will occur if the movement becomes powerful enough to explicitly launch the physical destruction of men. My own view is that feminists will make this final roll of the dice, and that they will be ultimately unsuccessful, although many men will suffer tortuous deaths. The other possibility is that feminism is exposed in advance of this, preventing much of the violence, and allowing for the repeal of all Gynocentric rule with minimal bloodshed. Whatever the case – whether feminism exposes itself, or is exposed – it is done for. Cast in the disinfecting sunlight of the world’s gaze, held to account for its grievous transgressions, never again will feminism be tolerated.

Adam
Further Reading:

Roger F. Gay. Unraveling Feminism in Sweden

Shannon O’Neil. Man Hatred OK at University of New Hampshire

Martin Lehmann. Feminist Zealots Create an Anti-Male World

GYNOCENTRISM THEORY LECTURE SERIES:
1. Staring Out From the Abyss
2. The Same Old Gynocentric Story
3. Refuting the Appeal to Dictionary
4. Pig Latin
5. Anatomy of a Victim Ideology
6. Old Wine, New Bottles
7. The Personal, as Contrasted to the Political
8. Chasing Rainbows
9. False Consciousness & Kafka-Trapping
10. The Eventual Outcome of Feminism, Part I
11. The Eventual Outcome of Feminism, Part II
12. How to Break a Dialectic

False Consciousness & Kafka-Trapping

Lecture No. 9

“Never mind whether it’s Critias or Socrates who is the one refuted. Just concentrate on the argument itself, and consider what on earth will become of it if it is examined.” – Socrates of Athens

It is necessary, at this point, to set aside the the thread I have been weaving, and take a detour into the deep wilderness of feminist logic. The phrase feminist logic will strike most of my readers as a misnomer – if not an oxymoron! – so let me reassure you that what I really mean is feminist attempted logic. And there is nothing logical about that, I assure you!

First, why is the use of logic so threatening to feminists? We know, assuredly, that it is – with some feminists going so far as to claim that logic is nothing but a tool of the patriarchy. Of course, this is absurd. Logical argument is, by definition, a collection of valid inferences – so it is not possible to argue against logic. To put it another way, you cannot reason against reasoning, because the very attempt to do so involves the (attempted) use of reason. The only way to attack logic without using (or attempting to use) logic would be to attack it most randomly – that is, without entailment. The argumentative points you make, in attacking logic, would have to have no relation to each other whatsoever. You could not say, for instance:

Men use logic to defeat women in argument, therefore logic is a tool of the patriarchy

because the use of “therefore” indicates a logical consequence, i.e. it indicates entailment, which is a matter of logic! This leaves the feminist with two unfavorable choices: she can state that logic is a tool of the patriarchy, without reference to premise, evidence, example, definition, and so on – without any reference, indeed, to reality; or she can accept that her own argument, because it attempts to link two propositions together on a logical basis, is itself a tool of the patriarchy – and as the proponent of the argument, so is she!

Hence, the appropriate response to the feminist argument that “logic cannot be trusted, because it is a tool of the patriarchy,” is to say: “and so are you! Hey – as a patriarch, I appreciate you doing my job for me!”

 

feministlogic

But again, why is logic so threatening to feminists? Could it be that feminists are simply misguided about the nature of logic? That is doubtful. Having seen feminists defeated by logic many times, I am quite sure that they fear it because that their beliefs cannot withstand it. Like any cult, feminism does not allow its members to investigate the truth, nor does it tolerate free and open discussion of its core beliefs. Still, none of this makes a bit of difference to usas non-feminists, there is no human authority obliging us to hold our thoughts or tongues on the matter of feminism.

Yes, feminists fear logic because it contradicts other ways of ‘knowing’ the world – e.g. being told what to think. They also fear that logic will discredit ideological ‘truths.’ Feminists want you to see the world as they say you should see it – they certainly don’t want you coming to your own conclusions! Particularly not conclusions critical of feminist orthodoxy, derived, for instance, from the process of asking questions and receiving unsatisfactory answers. And yet this is precisely the outcome that feminists guarantee, when their anxieties over criticism and the consequences of open discussion cause them to react, kneejerk-fashion, with shaming tactics.

What would a discerning neutral observer think, when he hears a reasonable question answered with an attack against the interlocutor’s character? Will this inspire him to adopt all tenets of the questioned set of beliefs? Is he more likely to feel threatened into submission by the shaming tactic used against the gadfly, or to feel offended by proxy at the ideologue’s evasiveness and insulting manner?

Ideologues don’t tend to ask themselves searching questions like these. Small wonder, then, that the word ‘ideology’ began life as a term of abuse. It was not until Marx and Engels wrote The German Ideology that the phrase took on the characterization we associate today with identity politics. One’s ideology, they claimed, is the product of one’s social position – that is, whether one is a proletariat or a bourgeois. The socialist proletariat are the possessors of the ideology which reflects truth, while the capitalist bourgeoisie possess only ‘false consciousness.’ It is never explained how it is known that things are this way around and not the other – i.e., why can’t the bourgeoisie possess true ideology, and the proletariat be subjected to false consciousness? That question does not need to be answered, because Marxism is a closed system of thought. It is like a man who stands not on the ground, but somehow, on his own feet; any one part of Marxism stands upon the other parts of the theory, and does not depend upon the vagaries of the experiential world for support. In other words, what happens in the real world does not matter – Marxism is self-verifying. The truth which backs up its claims is located within the theory, utterly independent of any contrary evidence that can be gathered from the actual experiences of actual people.

It is much like feminism, then – being abstract and anti-contextual, deciding upon the story before the facts are known. Feminism, to feminists, requires no justification outside of itself. It is impenetrable by external argument, and thus irrefutable – because it is inherently unreasonable. That is to say, it cannot be reasoned with. It is a waste of time trying to get feminists to see sense, and every MRA soon learns that he will more easily squeeze blood from a stone. The only discourse which will make feminists sit up and change their ways is the discourse of power: and this is a discourse that must be backed by action. Anti-feminists must be comfortable with the idea of wielding power over feminists, at least enough to marginalize them into irrelevance. This is the end game. Building critical mass is how we get from here to there, but we take a step backwards every time we indulge feminists in their sophistry.

Take, for example, the feminist sophism that we are ‘locked in’ to a perspective determined by the sex we belong to. Any counter-feminist argument launched by a man, no matter how accurate his observations, no matter how evidenced his claims, can be dismissed on the grounds that it was made by a man. The argument goes like this: “you’re only saying that because you’re a man. If you weren’t a man, you wouldn’t have a male perspective, and so you wouldn’t be saying that.” The implication is that a male perspective is inherently wrong – that a man, owing to his being a man, is incapable of grasping truth. So you see, this is really the same ‘false consciousness’ trick as practiced by Marx and Engels and their followers – the feminist has not explained how or why it is that a woman’s perspective, owing to her being a woman, is necessarily the one which yields to truth.

The ‘false consciousness’ trick is, ultimately, an evasion. In one dishonorable move, the feminist has sidestepped the argument itself and attacked the interlocutor – “you can’t possibly be right, because you are male.” For the feminist, this is enough. She considers the matter closed, and moves on. By the same undisclosed reasoning by which Marx knew that the proletariat possessed the truth, the feminist ‘knows’ (i.e. strongly feels) that her own ideology possesses the truth. But that undisclosed reasoning, whatever it is, does not work in reverse. The feminist is confident enough that a counter-argument, using the same tactic – “you wouldn’t be saying that if you weren’t a woman” – is inapplicable and impossible. The implication is that feminist women view the world objectively, whereas mere men are ‘locked in’ to a privileged perspective and cannot see the way things truly are. An attack on the perspective of a man, for it being a male perspective – even the identification of a perspective as peculiarly ‘male’ – is nothing less than a statement of female supremacy.

As for non-feminist women, they too are oppressed by ‘false consciousness.’ You see, when women use their own minds to decide things for themselves, they are being manipulated by the patriarchy! But when they stop thinking for themselves, and defer to feminist consciousness without question, then their minds are ‘liberated!’ Do you see how this works?

Now, I hate to ruin their fun by being a man who says things he wouldn’t say if he wasn’t a man, but there’s something that doesn’t quite make sense about all this. What the feminists are trying to impart is a kind of sexual determinism. That is, the notion that they are attempting to propagate is one which states that our actions and behaviors are determined according to our sex, and we have no freedom of choice in the matter. We are moral robots, hard-wired from birth to view the world in one particular way, from which we cannot deviate.

This theory would only be meaningful if it could tell us how men and women will act or think. Yet, both men and women are far less predictable than the pigeon-holers of the world would like them to be. There are, for instance, feminists who are men, MRAs who are women, and people of both sexes who buck all the trends we can imagine. Feminist sexual determinism, then, has become a useless theory; if there is any truth to it, it is limited to those aspects of human behavior that cannot be identified. It has been reduced to tautology: we will always do those things which we will always do!

 

brain

It hardly needs stating that men and women are not two opposed and internally homogeneous classes of people. Feminists would very much like them to be. Indeed, feminism rests upon this faulty perception. The idea that men and women should be opposed to each other is a feminist construction, and any deviation from this is a threat to the whole feminist enterprise – hence the imperative of familial destruction. This is also why the most venomous attacks are reserved for male ‘feminist allies.’ That small number of men who exert the strictest self-discipline in accordance with feminist orthodoxy come under the most fire for being not feminist enough. This happens because every man who is pro-female in the slightest is a thorn in the side of feminism, just as much as the most outspoken anti-feminist woman (perhaps even moreso: in the case of feminist men, there is no equivalent to the ‘false consciousness’ argument used to dismiss anti-feminist women). It must be denied that feminist men could ever be feminist enough! The illusion must be maintained that men are ‘the enemy’ – and this means repudiating the friendly intentions of male allies. In declaring themselves feminist, those men fail to conform to feminist sexual determinism, thus contradicting feminist theory and threatening the progress of the movement as a whole. It is not so easy to paint them as atavistic brutes, and this is largely down to their own efforts to make themselves amenable – which is precisely why they receive such vitriolic scorn.

To get back on track: there is more that Marxism and feminism hold in common than the Appeal to False Consciousness. Both fit a certain template, upon which we could map any modern radical ideology. Again, it is developments in language and thought which allow for the theoretical configurations making possible social movements like feminism. Socialism was only possible once the state and the economy were conceptually distinguished – in feudal times, no distinction between the two was discernible, rendering moot the possibility of a socialist system being idealized. It was in response to the rise of capitalism, with all that this entailed – Enlightenment thought, economic individualism, free markets, free labor, an end to tax farming, the formation of the business and working classes – that Utopian socialism and (later) Marxism became possible in the realm of the imagination.

Similarly, nationalism – in its modern form, as an ideology – only became possible once society and culture were distinguished in language and thought. Our question here is, what had to be distinguished before feminism could become a possibility?

This is a question which would take a great deal of space to answer – more space than I have available here. It will suffice to say that the escalating liberties being granted to men resulted in a divergence of expectations between men and women. Reasonably enough, we might think, a small number of women began to question why the Enlightenment notion of individual freedom extended only to men. However, what is often missed is that these women began from a position of strength – they were already the beneficiaries of Gynocentric cultural codes that placed them high above men, atop pedestals. Over the coming decades, men tripped over themselves delivering whatever women demanded. It is likely that most of them sincerely believed that individual freedom should be extended to women as to men. But the very fact that Gynocentrism was already in full force meant that female supremacy was the only possible outcome of feminism. The ‘equality’ feminists sought was an ‘equality’ to do all the things men are permitted to do, and to retain their traditional advantages over men, accrued through centuries of Gynocentrism. The recipients of additional advantages are, of course, not equal at all, but privileged at the expense of all others. This was always the intention.

Despite the occasional claims of feminists that they are dispensing with all forms of male thought and creating anew, feminism slots in neatly with other radical ideologies which preceded it (and which were, of course, dreamed up by men). To take the most obvious fact about modern radical ideologies, their basis is in forms of association – Marxists oppose the proletariat to the bourgeoisie, nationalists oppose their own culture or race to a culturally or racially diverse society, and feminists oppose women to men. The key relationships, used by ideologues as total explanations for all human phenomena, correspond to the forms of association which are emphasized. For Marx, the key relationship is economic – the control of the workers by the capitalists is an economic relationship, and all else (politics, religion, culture) is mere ‘superstructure’ atop this ‘base.’ The superstructure may change, but nothing fundamental will alter unless the economic relationship of the classes is reconfigured. Similarly, for nationalists, the key relationship is cultural (or racial, if the two are differentiated). This is the ‘base,’ upon which everything else is built. Changes to the superficial structures on top of the ‘base’ (e.g. modifications to political and social institutions) are irrelevant; the only fundamental change will come about via transformations in culture and/or racial demographics.

We find the same pattern in feminism. Opposing women to men, the key relationship for feminists is, of course, sexual. It is the relationship of men to women which determines all else (politics, economics, culture, religion, and so on). The elements of the superstructure may well change, but until the domination of women by men is smashed at the base level, nothing fundamental will be achieved.

It is this belief which ultimately explains feminist attempted logic. Their attempts at rational argument are clouded by a belief in collective guilt – that all problems or inconveniences faced by women result from this base relationship (the domination of women by men), so that, as long as problems or inconveniences remain, it must be the case that men (collectively) are dominating women (collectively). It does not matter if a particular man is innocent – he is still ‘the enemy,’ as feminists are more than willing to admit (see: The Redstockings Manifesto). Nor does it matter if a particular woman is guilty – she is absolved in the name of collective innocence.

And on these grounds, we encounter the peculiar feminist debating tactic called Kafka-Trapping. I did not invent the term; the credit must go to Eric S. Raymond, whose original article on the subject is linked below. Nor did Eric intend the term to be used only for feminists – any member of a victim ideology can effectively Kafka-Trap their opponents. The name, Kafka-Trapping, is a reference to Franz Kafka’s work The Trial, in which the protagonist is told that he is very, very guilty, although his crime is never specified; and, as he soon discovers, the only ‘way out’ is to admit his guilt (though he knows not what of), thus acquiescing in his own destruction.

In Eric’s own words, a Kafka-Trap is:

an unfalsifiable claim, about thoughtcrime, intended to induce guilt so the subject becomes manipulable.

The most chilling thing about this tactic is that the Kafka-Trapper declares your mind to be out of bounds to you – her judgment is a dismissal of your own opinion about your own thoughts. Think you know what you think? Think again, buddy!

Now, I shall reproduce, from Eric’s blog, six models of the Kafka-Trap which feminists will use against you. Learn them. Know them. Recognize them for what they are: nothing more than ad hominem evasions. Calling out the tactic, as a Kafka-Trap, is sufficient for its refutation.

(Note: in the following examples, I have used the terms ‘sexist’ and ‘sexism’ but these may be replaced by ‘misogyny,’ ‘woman-hating,’ ‘patriarchy,’ etc.)

Model A Kafka-Trap

Your refusal to acknowledge that you are guilty of sexism confirms that you are guilty of sexism.


Model C Kafka-Trap

Even if you do not feel yourself to be guilty of sexism, you are guilty because you have benefited from the sexist behavior of others in the system.


Model P Kafka-Trap

Even if you do not feel yourself to be guilty of sexism, you are guilty because you have a privileged position in the sexist system.


Model S Kafka-Trap

Skepticism about any particular anecdotal account of sexism, or any attempt to deny that the particular anecdote implies a systemic problem in which you are one of the guilty parties, is itself

sufficient to establish your guilt.

Model L Kafka-Trap

Your insistence on applying rational skepticism in evaluating assertions of pervasive sexism itself demonstrates that you are sexist.


Model D Kafka-Trap

The act of demanding a definition of sexism that can be consequentially checked and falsified proves you are sexist.

It is the last model, Model D, which I find the most intriguing. It implies – and my experience with feminists verifies – that simply asking how to not be sexist will be taken as evidence of one’s sexism. The reason why I focused so heavily on definitions in my earlier lectures is because of the utility of attaching concrete meanings to terms. If we have a concrete definition of sexism, for instance, I could check my own behavior against this definition, and potentially discover that I do not fulfil any of the criteria – i.e., I am not sexist. But this does not satisfy the feminist notion of collective guilt. It feels like a panicked response on their part, then, to insist that any man who tries to discover whether or not he is sexist is automatically sexist simply for trying to find this out. In other words, he is a sexist for not wanting to be a sexist. Could there be any clearer indication that feminists want men and women to be two conflicting classes of people?

The purpose of the Kafka-Trap is to leave absolutely no room for the trapped individual to believe in his own innocence. A denial that he is oppressive is further evidence that he is oppressive; the only other option is to admit that he is oppressive, which is also evidence that he is oppressive. (Note the following from the Violence Wheel, designed by the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project: “saying the abuse didn’t happen” is abusive. So, you see, whether you plead “guilty” or “not guilty” in a court of law, both pleas are evidence of your guilt.) Oppression is alleged because the individual is a member of a group – but not necessarily one that he identifies with. The in-group identification is ascribed to the individual by the operator of the Kafka-Trap. To quote from Eric once more,

 

Real crimes – actual transgressions against flesh-and-blood individuals – are generally not specified. The aim of the kafkatrap is to produce a kind of free-floating guilt in the subject, a conviction of sinfulness that can be manipulated by the operator to make the subject say and do things that are convenient to the operator’s personal, political, or religious goals. Ideally, the subject will then internalize these demands, and then become complicit in the kafkatrapping of others.

That actual transgressions are not specified is true for all models apart from Model S, in which a specific transgression is specified, but any doubt regarding the alleged victim’s account of things is taken as evidence that the doubter is guilty along with the alleged perpetrator. How familiar this all sounds! Is it not the precise experience of anyone who encounters feminists while discussing the prevalence of false rape accusations? On that note, I shall refer you to a comment from the feminist Amanda Marcotte, which she quickly deleted, but not before Fidelbogen saved a copy:

 

marcotteGaffe

Let’s talk about Amanda Marcotte some more, shall we? In fact, in her honor, I would like to define a seventh model of the Kafka-Trap, Model J:

Model J Kafka-Trap

Even if your innocence is proven in a court of law, this not only confirms your guilt; it also confirms the guilt of the (legal) system that found you innocent.

Exhibit A for Model J is a series of comments that Amanda Marcotte made in the wake of the Duke Lacrosse false rape accusations. Unable to accept that the accused men could possibly be innocent (hey, why do we even have trials?), she said the following:

 

In the meantime, I’ve been sort of casually listening to CNN blaring throughout the waiting area and good fucking god is that channel pure evil. For awhile, I had to listen to how the poor dear lacrosse players at Duke are being persecuted just because they held someone down and fucked her against her will—not rape, of course, because the charges have been thrown out. Can’t a few white boys sexually assault a black woman anymore without people getting all wound up about it? So unfair.

Leaving aside the content of her raging diatribe, doesn’t the style of her writing strike you as that of a twelve-year old, perhaps one who has only just discovered swear words, and believes that using them as much as possible is ‘cool’? In the spirit of this post, then, and given the evidence before us, I hereby believe that Amanda Marcotte is, in fact, twelve years old. Any argument to the contrary, from Amanda or anyone else, will be taken as further evidence that she is twelve years old.

All right then. Since she has clearly not been brought up properly, I shall recommend a regimen of discipline that will soon have her speaking as a proper young lady should! I suggest, first, that Amanda Marcotte shall have her mouth vigorously washed out with soap; next, that she shall receive a stern, bare-bottom spanking (over some patriarch’s knee, of course); and then, that she shall be sent to bed without dinner for a week. This will soon set her straight! And since I refuse to believe any evidence to the contrary of my opinion that she is twelve years old, any disagreement with my opinions on this matter shall only reinforce my contention that she is utterly deserving of this punishment. Now, what do you think about that?

Adam

 

Further Reading:

Eric S. Raymond. Kafkatrapping

Fidelbogen. Do You Know What ‘Kafka-trapping’ Is?

Michael Miller. Femspeak

 

GYNOCENTRISM THEORY LECTURE SERIES:
1. Staring Out From the Abyss
2. The Same Old Gynocentric Story
3. Refuting the Appeal to Dictionary
4. Pig Latin
5. Anatomy of a Victim Ideology
6. Old Wine, New Bottles
7. The Personal, as Contrasted to the Political
8. Chasing Rainbows
9. False Consciousness & Kafka-Trapping
10. The Eventual Outcome of Feminism, Part I
11. The Eventual Outcome of Feminism, Part II
12. How to Break a Dialectic

Old Wine, New Bottles

Lecture No. 6

“Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called” – J. S. Mill

Domination. So much of feminist analysis revolves around this concept. A man who punches his wife is not just angry at her; he is attempting to dominate her. A man who disagrees with a woman and talks over her is not just being rude; he is trying to dominate her. A rapist is not really that bothered about sex; his crime is a display of power, he just wanted to dominate the woman.

You see, the fact that these things happen at all is not enough for the male-bashers of the world; they shall forever require more grist for the misandric mill. Punishing actual criminals is one thing, but it’s simply not gratifying enough to leave it there – they need to articulate what their womyn’s intuition has always told them, and go on the attack against all men. The problem, of course, is that the overwhelming majority of men don’t attack women in any perceptible way whatsoever. The solution, as feminists found, is to play Dr. Freud and posit some subconscious, underlying motivation – a dark, sexual, deviant, violent mentality, which acts as a universal explanation for male behavior.

You see, even when men are not actually engaging in criminal acts, the criminality is still there, it is just latent – so the feminists would have us believe. The idea that all men possess an inherent, latent evil, and that women do not, serves as a useful cover for all sexist hate speech against men. We find it at work in senseless diatribes against a non-falsifiable “rape culture,” in campaigns to prohibit the private consumption of pornography, and in apologia for malicious women who falsely accuse men of sex crimes. Consider this statement from Mary Koss: “rape represents an extreme behavior but one that is on a continuum with normal male behavior within the culture.”

Inherent male deviancy, so they say (or imply), manifests as a continuum of dysfunctional maleness, covering everything from a simple verbal disagreement, all the way up to the murder of a spouse. All male actions which do not contribute towards the feminist project – increasing the power of women – are to be taken as evidence of an innately flawed masculinity which seeks, above all, to dominate the fair sex.

Put it this way. Would you say that being murdered helps to increase a woman’s power?

No?

Well, what about losing a verbal sparring match – does this help to increase her power? Or doesn’t it? It certainly seems that one will have greater autonomy if she can more easily convince others that her view is correct.

So, if both of the above examples exist on a continuum of women losing power, the corollary of which is patriarchal domination, then of course men are to blame. That is, if our analysis is based in dubious, feministic assumptions.

The concept of domination, so taken for granted in its present manifestation, is a supreme example of the linguistic shifting I have discussed previously. As a term, it carries ideological contraband, concealed in an overcoat of righteousness. Originally, the term domination, which has its root in the Latin dominus, referred specifically to the power exercised by a master over slaves. Like so many other terms that feminists have seized upon in order to manipulate perceptions of reality, domination has become an object of semantic bleaching.

dominus

 

What is really interesting about all this, is that our new concept of domination – as unjust hierarchy, to be opposed and attacked – has been put to use in a specific direction: as a sponsor for true despotism. The single most obvious red flag marking the road to despotic rule is the encroachment of the public sphere into the private lives of individuals. Despotism is precisely the type of unjust hierarchy with which we identify domination; yet if the latter term is broadened sufficiently, to encompass all areas of private life, then a crushing and brutal dictatorship is the inevitable result.

This is the context in which we should understand the feminist slogan which has had the most staying power: the personal is political. Note that (according to the slogan), the personal is not only a matter of interest to the political; it does not form part of the political; it is not of equivalent importance to the political. It actually is the political.

The two terms are presented as though they are identical, interchangeable.

The personal is political.

If this is true, then there does not exist the smallest space of privacy which is a matter for the individual alone – that is, over which the individual is sovereign. It is true enough that a private life worth anything would not be possible without an overarching public structure – it is law which protects all the liberties that make private lives and interests possible. To use J. F. Stephen’s favorite analogy, law is the pipe through which the waters of liberty flow. It is when public life – the state – fails to recognize its own limits that society becomes threatened by despotic rule.

Intellectuals of all ages have come up with the most ingenious of reasons for why it is that their mode of thought is superior to all that passed before. The majority of people have simply assumed this without the need for justification whatsoever. What is peculiarly modern is the construction of artificial boundaries between our own time and epochs past. We do not, for instance, consider ourselves to be living on the same historical plane as those of Medieval Europe, let alone of Ancient Greece. These are times inexplicable and inaccessible to us. It is a seductive fantasy by which we explain away any fears conjured up by the horrors of history books. We like to believe that bloody autocracies will confine themselves safely to those pages, and that such things could not happen here, not now; not in real life. Surely, we have moved beyond all that. We are Enlightened, unlike the human beings that existed before us.

But are we not on the same historical plane that gave rise to Soviet Communism and the Nazi party? These particular reigns of terror occurred within the last century, no matter how much we might like to think of ourselves as having progressed beyond such barbarism. Supposedly, we in the Western world abhor totalitarian regimes; and yet the rise of the two mentioned previously is indicative of a trend existing within our political culture. Among the baggage we have inherited from the Enlightenment is the concept of utopia. The term was coined in the 16th century, and it designated, for the first time, the notion of a perfect socio-political order. With the birth of this idea, the seeds were sown for the cleansing of human impediments as an operationalized political program.

8022

Prior to the Enlightenment, human life was mostly assumed to be cyclical. As surely as the sun would rise in the morning and set once more in the evening, so great powers would rise and fall, only for new ones to take their place. Such was the science of Polybius, whose historical works did not arrange events in chronological order, but presented human experience as a unity. Dynasties, empires, cultures, people and their communities lived and died in the swings of the cosmic pendulum.

One of the major conceptual innovations of modernity is progress as the guiding ideal in politics and society. Not only do we assume that we are constantly on the move away from our own history; the belief persists that it is only a matter of time before each problem yields to a solution. Faith in human knowledge has never been so great as in the Information Age; we actively seek to overcome what were long considered intractable facts of life.

The purpose of this digression is not to cast doubt over the possibilities for human knowledge, nor to suggest that an attempt to improve the human condition is an ignoble pursuit. It is to point out that we are all children of the Enlightenment, no matter where we fall on the political spectrum. It is to point out that there are certain peculiar assumptions which form the base and scaffolding of Western political thought, and it is upon these assumptions that ideologies as diverse as conservatism, liberalism, National Socialism and feminism are built.

The -ism itself is an altogether modern phenomenon. An -ism (or we might say, an ‘ideology’) assumes a difference between how society is and how it ought to be, predicated upon a specific moral view of the world. This is obviously true for those ideologies explicitly advocating change – liberalism, socialism, feminism, and so on. It is just as true for conservatism and traditionalism, ideologies which (as they see it) aim to resuscitate the baby that has been thrown out with the bathwater of the ages.

Typically, that which ideologues find so objectionable about the world is its existing configuration of power. The great texts and speakers of the ideology describe a configuration of power, argue for its recognition as injustice, and then present the means for achieving the desired change. The means may involve working through the existing institutions of state, or they may necessitate their overthrow, or they may shun mainstream practices altogether and advocate working their magic through civil society.

Whatever the ideology implies in practice, this is a marked difference from what went before. Progress, not recurrence, is at root of all political expectation. Whether this is progress towards the classless society, or ethnic purity, or the return of traditional virtues, progress is the constant. The view that something is wrong and something needs to be done about this, as a political statement, is a recent invention, one which defines our shared political culture. Conservatives are caught up in the same ‘progressive’ web, but then, so too are iconoclasts, who signal their compliance with conventional modes of thought even as they state their intentions to break away. The more they struggle against this inevitability, the more stuck they find themselves. To take a relevant example, feminists have sometimes declared that they are moving away from ‘patriarchal’ assumptions altogether, and building up their own worldview from scratch, quite untainted by male influence. In truth, nobody starts from scratch, and feminism remains deeply embedded in modes of thought which have evolved over centuries, exclusively through the minds of men. The feminist ideology, and all of its innovations, simply could not occurred without centuries of work by men beforehand.

Next week’s lecture shall take a closer look at the feminist assertion that the personal is political, and the hidden implications contained within this catch phrase. In the weeks that follow, we will consider the concept of utopia, which has been mentioned only in passing here. A brief comment here will suffice: utopia is the logical extension of progress, in that it is the end of all progress, the final stage of human existence. It is a profoundly dangerous idea, one responsible for the most oppressive regimes and bloody revolutions the world has ever known. While personal power and glory may have been the motivating force behind the actions of despotic individuals still in recent memory, it was a collective, utopian vision that aroused their followers to make manifest the most violent of fantasies. In all cases where utopians grip the reigns of power, the human beings which do not fit into their vision of a new world order are treated as the living garbage of a faded regime.

It is with disgust and horror that the West looks back at the utopian despots of the twentieth century, and yet these particular despotisms correspond to a tendency that forms the infrastructure of our own politics. The disgust and horror is real enough, though, and perhaps the most truly progressive shift in recent times is the rejection of extremism, in all its forms, by populations determined to leave behind the century of genocide.

roots

Only, it’s not that simple. You can pull up the heads, and tear the stalks clean from the earth, but unless you dig out the roots, you will find those flowers in bloom again before long. Utopianism, with the cleansing of human impediments that it always implies, is coded into our political DNA. Widespread detestation of the recent, failed totalitarianisms will not make this go away; it can only make the despotic tendency fall quiet for a little while. A new despotism can only emerge if it does so silently, in disguise as something quite different – perhaps as organized opposition to certain forms of unjust domination, the solution for which is always to increase the power of the state relative to the autonomy of the individual.

The personal is political, say the feminists.

I can hear the goosesteps getting closer.

Adam

Further Reading:

Fidelbogen. The Redstockings Manifesto

W. F. Price. Who Really Wants Control?

Angry Harry. The Governmental Beast

 

GYNOCENTRISM THEORY LECTURE SERIES:
1. Staring Out From the Abyss
2. The Same Old Gynocentric Story
3. Refuting the Appeal to Dictionary
4. Pig Latin
5. Anatomy of a Victim Ideology
6. Old Wine, New Bottles
7. The Personal, as Contrasted to the Political
8. Chasing Rainbows
9. False Consciousness & Kafka-Trapping
10. The Eventual Outcome of Feminism, Part I
11. The Eventual Outcome of Feminism, Part II
12. How to Break a Dialectic

Anatomy of a Victim Ideology

Lecture No. 5

“The weakness of men is the façade of strength: the strength of women is the façade of weakness” – Warren Farrell

Among the worst mistakes that freedom-loving people can make is to stereotype feminists as a small, motley crew of angry lesbians who have long since ceased to be relevant. Take note: this stereotype helps them.

I must repeat myself: this stereotype helps them.

Let that sink in for a moment. Every time you have belittled feminists as a bunch of cranky old hags that nobody takes seriously, you have helped to obscure their program and indeed, their very existence as a form of organized power. Belittle them, you must – but do so in a way which exposes, not obscures! For feminism is far from being a relic of the past. The feminist movement is taken very seriously indeed by those with the power to enforce its core aims:

(1) The expropriation of resources from men to women.

(2) The punishment of men.

(3) To increase (1) and (2) in terms of scope and intensity indefinitely.

Obscurity assists the realization of these goals by creating doubt amongst potential opponents. The misidentification of feminism as a cultural artifact which no longer holds sway over the operations of government and society is a product of feminism’s own metamorphosis. Note that the essence, or substance of feminism has not changed over the years, only its form, or packaging. The change of packaging has proved so effective that some now deny that the product still exists.

Au contraire. As much as the times changed with feminism, feminism has changed with the times. In the transformation of feminism from a movement opposed to government and society at large, into a movement which controls the state and public opinion – and uses this position to persecute the new enemies of the state – its strategies underwent a certain cultivation. Today, feminists no longer need to throw temper tantrums to get their way, because while they once raged against the machine, they now control it. This is the truly profound shift in Western societies since the height of consciousness about feminism in the middle of last century; it is not that feminists have become less relevant, but more.

As Fidelbogen recently put it:

Feminism is now lodged in the institutional structures, hence, “respectable”. I might compare it to organized crime, which was openly thuggish in the early racketeering days, but once they got their people into “city hall”, and into electoral politics, learned to wear a silk tie and play the game in a different way.

When feminists were outside the tent, causing offense was one of their prime weapons – poorly disguised as edgy boundary-pushing. Who remembers this lovely piece of propagandistic hate, published in the 1970s?

1970s

 

The above is precisely the kind of thing that feminists today like to pretend never happened. Now that feminists are inside the tent, they are forced to defend their gains; in the 1970s, when the above picture was produced, they attacked from the outside, and sought to tear down official morality rather than (as they do now) define and dictate it.

And how better to maintain control than by punishing those who attack, or who might attack, the new status quo? We are of course referring to men, who stand to lose the most from the three core aims of the feminist project as listed above. Today, feminists believe that women have the inalienable right to not feel offended, and they do not hesitate to employ state violence to enforce this. Prosecuting those (men) who cause offense is their new weapon, one which has replaced the old (causing offense). Of course, persecuting people merely for being offensive is rather less charitable than men were to feminists before feminists took over. But, as Gynocentrism Theory tells us, men were only charitable to offensive women in the early days of feminism because women already exercised substantial control.

Do feminists believe that they are doing right? The answer is an unequivocal yes for most of them – they truly do believe that they are a righteous people, and even when they become cognizant of doing wrong, they rationalize that they are also, simultaneously, doing right. How could this be? Well, let me show you how it works, by tracing the anatomy of a victim ideology.

Once a period of consciousness-raising has propagated the belief that the members of a group are – by their essential nature as members of the group – victims, the group shall pursue two objectives:

(1) To equalize with the designated ‘enemy’ group;

(2) To forge their own ‘victim identity,’ separate from and unaccountable to the ‘enemy’ group.

You will notice that, while the first objective brings the ‘victim’ group closer to the ‘enemy’ group, in terms of status, expectations, autonomy, etc., the second widens the gulf between them. The first objective, we are told, will unite us in our common humanity, and bring about liberty for all, and other nice things like that. But as soon as we get close to this, there tends to be a drift towards proclamations of the importance of the second objective. Nothing will ever be enough to satisfy the ‘victim’ group, because they view themselves as essentially and inherently the victims of the ‘enemy’ group, regardless of what may have changed in reality. A victim ideology is anti-contextual, and its followers – the self-designated ‘victims’ – shall never see themselves as anything but. Their victimhood is affirmed in advance, and the facts must be made to fit the story. In other words, they will spin any situation into one where they are most harshly treated.

This is why feminists like Hillary Clinton can get away with saying things like

 

women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat.

Well, sure – losing family members to horrible deaths is so much worse than actually having to die those horrible deaths. That is, if your whole worldview is tainted by sexism and you reduce the status of men to Protecting/Providing Objects. In Mrs Clinton’s quote, no humanity is ascribed to men whatsoever. The real problem is not that they are traumatized, mutilated and blown to pieces per se; it is that, because of their being subject to atrocities, men will not be able to fulfill their protecting/providing roles quite so effectively. It is, therefore, women who lose out, because men don’t actually matter except insofar as they can assist females. This is precisely the kind of attitude which emerges out of a victim ideology. The entirety of existence, in all its wonderful complexity, is reduced to black-and-white primitivism: my people matter, your people don’t. Or, as we shall see, my people good, your people bad. Anything good for my people is good, no mind whether it is good or bad for your people.

 

anatomy2

 

This kind of thinking is known as Manichean Essentialism, and it is the metaphysical cornerstone for feminism as a whole. Decades of consciousness-raising have ensured that women are reflexively considered to have been wronged, whatever the facts. Whenever genuine examples of women being wronged cannot be found, compensatory privilege becomes the sanctioned goal. That is, women are treated more leniently in one regard because they are believed to be disadvantaged in unrelated regards, or just disadvantaged in general. One recent example of this from the United Kingdom is the order issued by Dame Laura Cox to judges that they must treat female criminals with greater leniency, a ruling which simultaneously reduced British men to second class status while green-lighting abusive women who might otherwise have been deterred.

There are some who go further than this. Baroness Corston, who explicitly identifies as a feminist, believes that women don’t really deserve to be punished at all when they commit crimes. Her 2007 Government report advocates that all women’s prisons should close, and that even the most violent and abusive female offenders should not be locked up. Indeed, they

 

would no longer go to one of the country’s 15 women’s prisons, which would all close. Instead, killers such as Rose West, serving life for the murder of ten young women and girls, would be sent to “homely” local custody units. There they would be allowed to live as a “family unit” with between 20 and 30 other women prisoners, organising their own shopping, budgets and cooking. The units would also allow them to stay close to their families … All the women’s jails would shut within the next decade, and could instead be converted into prisons for men … The report claims: “Women and men are different. Equal treatment of men and women does not result in equal outcomes.”

The above is a classic example of Orwellian Newspeak. Anti-feminists of all stripes have been saying for decades that men and women are essentially different. Feminists have insisted that men and women are essentially the same, and we must therefore have equal treatment. But as soon as equality works retrograde to the goal of female empowerment, it is dropped like a hot potato, and feminists twist themselves around in incredible semantic gymnastics to justify the sudden turnabout.

Women also (sic) never be sent to jail to “teach them a lesson”.

Of course they shouldn’t. Women shouldn’t have to actually learn how to abide by the law, much less how to be functioning members of civilization. They should be allowed to run wild and free, abusing and destroying anything they please with absolute license. They shouldn’t even expect a slap on the wrist for their misbehavior – that would be domestic violence, don’t you know?

But if feminism truly was about equality, shouldn’t feminists be pushing for new laws to criminalize more women, rather than their anti-egalitarian approach of imprisoning less women and more men? Or does equality only matter when it is women who are deemed unequal? (In and of itself, this would imply strongly that women are a privileged class like no other.)

The female incarceration rate is just one-eighth that of men in the United States (Wikipedia, accessed 10th October 2010), while women account for only 5.7% of inmates in Great Britain (accessed 10th October 2010). Surely, if equality was the goal, we would be relaxing the punitive, feminist-inspired laws against men, and seeking to punish more women instead. I can think of nowhere in modern society that is more male-dominated or unrepresentative than the penal system – something which, in the interests of sexual equality, needs to change.

But no – flatly contrary to the principles of neutral, impartial justice, feminists deem it a good thing for its own sake to lock up fewer women! It is as though women who are guilty of crimes aren’t really guilty – and are therefore victims of whatever is done to them as punishment. It is a popular notion that women are disadvantaged – generally, inherently, essentially, within the very fiber of their being – and so must be disadvantaged in every particular area of life; thus, anything done to assist them must be a reduction of unfair disadvantage. Any rationally-minded person can see how absurd this all is, and I include leading feminists in this, as they are shrewd but not stupid. Just deserts, deterrence, fair treatment, civilization itself be damned; this is Gynocentrism in action.

punishment

 

To recap, victim ideologies such as feminism seek to:

(1) Equalize with the ‘enemy’ group;

(2) Forge their own ‘victim identity,’ separate from and unaccountable to the ‘enemy’ group.

That these two objectives are in contradiction is not just a logical flaw; it’s part of a strategy which allows the ‘victim’ group to shift its stance as circumstances require. Objective (1) might be consistently pursued for a little while. But if the movement comes under scrutiny for disadvantaging the ‘enemy’ group, the ‘victims’ can just switch to objective (2) and emphasize the importance of their own uniqueness in ways for which equality does not suffice. Or, as feminist Germaine Greer puts it:

In 1970 the movement was called ‘Women’s Liberation’ or, contemptously (sic), ‘Women’s Lib’. When the name ‘Libbers’ was dropped for ‘Feminists’ we were all relieved. What none of us noticed was that the ideal of liberation was fading out with the word. We were settling for equality. Liberation struggles are not about assimilation but about asserting difference, endowing that difference with dignity and prestige, and insisting on it as a condition of self-definition and self-determination. … the visionary feminists of the late sixties and early seventies knew that women could never find freedom by agreeing to live the lives of unfree men.

Once equal status has been reached, the rhetoric of equality can be discarded, because who wants to be only equal to a man anyway? Here, in black and white, is a statement of female supremacy.

Same as it ever was.

If equality had ever been the end goal, then men’s disadvantages would have been addressed seriously, and not exacerbated while men themselves were goaded. To this day, the only time a feminist bothers herself with an issue of male disadvantage is when it benefits women to point it out – as in the case of parental leave. Enforced equal paternity and maternity leave rules out any disincentive that employers have to hire women. A feminist will set aside her ‘all fathers are rapists and abusers’ shtick, just long enough to insist that men should have equal rights to parenting – but this is typically presented as a demand that men shoulder the burdens of raising children so that women may be empowered in the workplace. Even when injustices against them are being redressed, men are tools for female betterment.

Same as it ever was.

Another example is male rape in prisons. This is occasionally highlighted by feminists, but only because men can be shown to be the oppressors, allowing them to attack maleness itself. Feminists pick up the torch once the rapist has done his part; they complete the rape victim’s sexual humiliation by destroying his self-identity, poisoning his mind with aspersions that maleness itself is to blame for his victimization; and so a fundamental, immutable part of himself was the cause of his rape. They force upon him the identity of rapist along with rape victim, their vilification of ‘toxic masculinity’ serving to assure him that he shares the abusive characteristics of his abuser. On the other hand, the high level of female culpability in child abuse, both sexual and non-sexual, is ignored or denied.

This is why our universally applicable definition of feminism could not have included any reference to ‘equality’ – it’s not a reasonable statement to make if we’re using analytical tools more incisive than Manichean Essentialism. The universal definition remains, and no ground can possibly be ceded: feminism is the project for increasing the power of women.

Power in what regard? Power to do what? Such questions inevitably arise. The answer, if you’ve been following closely, is obvious – whatever they please, no matter who else is harmed. Silence is not consent, but it is complicity, when you have the power to draw attention towards abuse and the resources towards stopping it, yet you fail to do so on the grounds that the abusers have genitals that resemble your own.

And that’s what it comes down to, folks – we are dealing with primitives in pantsuits.

Adam

Further Reading:

Welmer. Feminism and the Prison Industrial Complex

Babette Francis. Feminist Legal Theory

Oz Conservative. Men’s role is to empower women for what exactly?

 

GYNOCENTRISM THEORY LECTURE SERIES:
1. Staring Out From the Abyss
2. The Same Old Gynocentric Story
3. Refuting the Appeal to Dictionary
4. Pig Latin
5. Anatomy of a Victim Ideology
6. Old Wine, New Bottles
7. The Personal, as Contrasted to the Political
8. Chasing Rainbows
9. False Consciousness & Kafka-Trapping
10. The Eventual Outcome of Feminism, Part I
11. The Eventual Outcome of Feminism, Part II
12. How to Break a Dialectic

Pig Latin

Lecture No. 4

“It is as if the ordinary language we use every day has a hidden set of signals, a kind of secret code” – William Stafford

To recap on last week’s lecture: Men’s Rights Advocates should not be afraid to play around with words; to reframe debate; to recast conventional linguistic usages however we see fit. Don’t be afraid to make a game out of it. Use words – and the meanings you choose to ascribe to them – to mock, humiliate, and confuse your enemies. Here’s a good example – it makes use of typical feminist phraseology, but with one major difference:

 

Not all patriarchs are like that. I am a patriarch – and proud of it – but that doesn’t mean that I, personally, am responsible for what other patriarchs do, particularly not those radical patriarchs. But patriarchy isn’t a monolithic entity. There isn’t only one kind of patriarchy. There are lots of different types of patriarchs who have different views.

Note that defining yourself as a patriarch need not imply that you define yourself as feminists think that patriarchs should be. Feminists are not linguistic arbiters; you are absolutely free to call yourself a patriarch using your own definition of the term, which may or may not coincide to some extent with their definition. Whatever the case, though, you certainly don’t need to explain which qualities you possess that, in your mind, make you patriarchal. However, upon announcing that you are a patriarch, you may find feminists attempting to trick you into giving some definite shape to your patriarchy; the shape having already taken form in her mind, her task now is to get you to acknowledge it. She will say something emotive like, “oh, so you think men should just be able to rape women with impunity?”

Your initial response, of course, will be a furrowed brow. Then you will say, “of course I don’t think that. And yet I am still, most certainly, a patriarch.”

In this example, you could define patriarchy any way you please; having decided in advance that feminism is non-credible, you have dismissed altogether any feministic notion of what patriarchy is. You could even, if you like, define yourself as a patriarch on the grounds that you support equality between men and women. Yes, that kind of wordplay will wind them up no end, because feminism depends upon a peculiar configuration of words and meanings, which may not be circumnavigated without signaling a threat to the ideology’s power base.

Does the suggestion above sound preposterous? Well, I can but refer you to a real example of a social movement, the success of which has depended, for the most part, on its adroitness at linguistic manipulation. I am speaking, of course, of feminism, the proponents of which have made it their business to recast perceptions of reality through the redefinition of words. But this weapon is available to all those who are marginalized; it is the establishment which must defend its orthodoxy, not the outcasts! And while feminists once made great use of this strategy on the linguistic battlefield, it has become a point of vulnerability for them now that they control the machine, rather than rage against it. Now, you see, they must consolidate their gains; they must conserve what they have created; and thus, they are placed on the defensive, guarding their etymological orthodoxies from those who beg to differ. As I noted in the first lecture, their capacity for controlling perceptions of reality is faltering. The iron is hot. It is time to strike!

 

 

terror

 

But, have I been too quick to dismiss the definition of feminism as offered up by feminists? I think I may have been. 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, as I uncovered last week with the help of one Nick Levinson, 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.

We must not be swayed by feminist attempts to deny the universalizing tendency inherent to feminism. In their attempts to win the debate over what feminism is, feminists are notorious for abridging their own ideology to a nub of its whole, and presenting their support for – and your dissent from – feminism as resting entirely on a single issue. Let me give an example, in which you are confronted by the Appeal to Franchise. You have just stated that you do not support feminism. Your feminist opponent’s next move is to reduce the entirety of feminism to women gaining the right to vote – thus implying that you must oppose this, since you claimed to oppose feminism. You must simply remind all onlookers that feminism is about more than this and cannot be reduced to a single item as she has tried to do. You can openly state your support for that single item – in this case, the vote – while nevertheless maintaining your antipathy towards feminism, this being in no way reducible to women’s right to vote.

Essentially, your conscience is clear, and you are free to label yourself a non-feminist – and even, an anti-feminist – sans the implication that you therefore support every single thing that feminism opposes.

So, to recap: the only thing we are all going to be able to agree on is that feminism is the project for increasing the power of women. As you may have noticed, feminists go a little further than this when speaking about what they think feminism is, and they shall have plenty of half-truths and obfuscations to offer up if you ask them politely enough – though remember, it’s not their job to educate us about these things. 

icarus

 

As such, we may leave them to their own fluffy fantasies, and move beyond the universal definition to one which more accurately accounts for men’s experiences of the world.

So, here is the definition I offer up: “feminism is the most recent, and presently the most culturally dominant form of Gynocentrism. It is a victim ideology which explicitly advocates female supremacy, at every facet of life in which men and women meet; it does so in accordance with its universalizing tendency, and so it does so in each sphere of life, including but extending beyond the political, social, cultural, personal, emotional, sexual, spiritual, economic, governmental and legal. By female supremacy, I refer to the notion that women should possess superiority of status, power and protection relative to men. It is the dominant cultural paradigm in the Western world and beyond. It is morally indefensible, although its adherents ensure that their hegemony goes unchallenged through the domination of societal institutions and the use of state violence.”

In response to last week’s lecture, Primal offered up his own definition of feminism, which is not quite the same as mine, but the two are certainly complementary:

Gender-feminism is an overarching ideology built on a stack of bald-faced lies. As the primary reverse-sexist superstition of Post Modern age, it forms the foundation for female sexual supremacy in the name of ‘gender’ equality. Like other half-baked Utopian fantasies, it is totalitarian to the core. It is formed from a witch’s brew of recycled but dis-credited ideological relics from the trash heap of history…relics like Marxism, Romanticism and Classism. It’s proponents proudly destroy well-established standards of scholarship to force others to take the ideology seriously. It’s adherents have spread like carcinogenic pathogens in authoritarian institutions…that is wherever power is perverted for political reasons. It’s philosophy is nonsensical, circular, and self-serving. As the primary moral foundation for the mainstream hate groups which operate in the name of Women’s Rights worldwide, gender-feminism is a dangerous dogma and one that has no place in civil discourse.

Both of our definitions are rather lengthy, although I think it is useful to have a statement of exactly what we mean by the term. It could be much shortened and presented as follows: feminism equals female supremacism.

That the shortened version is more memorable is offset by its unfortunate implications that i) only women are feminists, and ii) all women support feminism. Neither i) nor ii) is correct. The charge of supremacism alone is not really sufficient for our purposes; it leaves too much left unsaid regarding what this supremacism is, and about the success rate of feminism so far. For shorthand purposes, it will do, but it should be remembered that it is a reduction of broader definitions as worked out here and elsewhere.

What may be more useful for our purposes in presenting our view of what feminism is is a brief statement of its goals. Feminism essentially seeks the following goals:

(1) The expropriation of resources from men to women.

(2) The punishment of men.

(3) To increase (1) and (2) in terms of scope and intensity indefinitely.

I feel that such a definition will strike a nerve with feminists themselves – because it hits a little too close to home. That the real-world effects of the feminist project have indeed been (1) and (2), and that these have increased in scope and intensity over the years (3) is frankly, irrefutable.

Time has yielded the truth about what happens when feminist-minded women come to occupy the most powerful positions in society, and that is that Men’s Rights are systematically trashed. The more power that feminists have, the more new laws are created to accomplish greater confiscation of men’s property and intensifying violations of their liberty, bodily integrity, and lives.

But there is hope. For it is deeds, not words, that shall speak our enemies. Have a pleasant weekend, everyone.

Adam


Further Reading:

Exposing Feminism. Language manipulation

Alex Schroeder. Progressivism Is Not Progressive

ISP. Feminist False Consciousness

 

 

GYNOCENTRISM THEORY LECTURE SERIES:
1. Staring Out From the Abyss
2. The Same Old Gynocentric Story
3. Refuting the Appeal to Dictionary
4. Pig Latin
5. Anatomy of a Victim Ideology
6. Old Wine, New Bottles
7. The Personal, as Contrasted to the Political
8. Chasing Rainbows
9. False Consciousness & Kafka-Trapping
10. The Eventual Outcome of Feminism, Part I
11. The Eventual Outcome of Feminism, Part II
12. How to Break a Dialectic

Refuting the Appeal to Dictionary

Lecture No. 3

“Have you ever actually looked up the word feminist in a dictionary? It means equality between the sexes. It is not about hating men. This is very simple and you would know if you actually looked it up” – Diva

Following on from last week’s overview of Gynocentrism then and now, I propose that there is a common thread of female-worship running through, and linking, traditional conceptions of masculinity – historically expressed in what we might call ‘patriarchy’ – and feminism, which has taken over state and supranational institutions, and is poised to unleash the explicit persecution of men.

It may well take many more of these lectures before this is fully elucidated, but I mention it here for two purposes. The first is a reminder that reference to this common thread runs through all these musings: that Gynocentrism has been with us for a long, long time, and has only changed its form, not its content. This is the crux of Gynocentrism Theory, and it is the narrow focus which I am taking over a broad range of subjects.

Secondly, to shift the discussion towards feminism. There is the danger of reading into Gynocentrism Theory a minimization of feminism’s effects, considering that it is only the most modern version of a phenomenon which is centuries old. On the other hand, though, it is the most active form of Gynocentrism that we must presently deal with; it is the enemy, and as the all-singing, all-dancing tremendous final act in this regard, it is a phenomenon worthy of study in its own regard.

comedytragedy

 

Better the devil you know! It is said that it is better to know thine enemy, but feminists are highly effective at obscuring their own intentions, actions, history, and penchant for the use of eristic. Amidst the smoke and mirrors, a chorus of shrill voices from all directions can be heard to proclaim, “it’s not our job to educate you about feminism!”

Fine – then we shall have to cast around for ourselves, burrow for gems of knowledge, and procure our own judgments on what feminism is. And since feminists themselves have disavowed their role as our educators, the conclusions which we reach shall require no sanction from them. If it is not their job to educate us about feminism, then it could hardly be anybody else’s but our own, could it? And yet, strangely enough, when we do seek out knowledge for ourselves, they object most vociferously to our findings, as though they do in fact covet the role of educator after all. It has been repeatedly suggested that we might like to check the dictionary.

This is a spurious request, not least because there is no ‘the dictionary’. There are, rather, dictionaries (plural). The Appeal to Dictionary is one which is made by people who, to put it bluntly, are not very bright. Such people apparently believe that language is a finite array of words, each carrying a single objective definition, the final arbiter of which is The Dictionary.

In the real world, language is ever fluctuating and it is corruptible. It is a collection of meanings, designated by terms – but quite how these are configured is determined by the vagaries of time and place! And very often, people disagree about how terms are, or should be, designated to meanings – and how meanings are, or should be, designated to terms!

The very existence of contested terminology, then, seems to refute the Appeal to Dictionary. Where disputes arise over the definition or use of a term, this is an indication that we have several meanings (or ideas, or concepts, if you prefer) huddled together under the same word-umbrella. To put it another way: there are several things, but they are all designated by the same word. A given configuration of terms to meanings may benefit certain people, and be of detriment to certain others!

Let’s take an example – sometimes, the claim that feminism supports women in making false rape allegations has been refuted by a reference to feminism’s stated support for sexual equality. “Feminism,” a feminist would say, “is about sexual equality, and nothing more.”

And yet false rape allegations still exist – as does feminist complicity in the making of them. This issue has only been deprived of recognition in language. The feminist has expertly obscured the complicity of feminism in the making of false rape allegations, by whitewashing the ideology as being “about sexual equality, and nothing more.” If we accept her argument that feminism only refers to support for sexual equality, then we no longer have any terms with which to discuss or understand false rape allegations, beyond viewing them as a series of unrelated incidents. Certainly, we wouldn’t be able to consider false rape allegations in their proper context, which is as part of a system of control and persecution. The phenomenon of a false rape allegation is surely not explicable by what we understand when we say “sexual equality,” and since feminism is about nothing more than that, we are left with no linguistic resources with which to meaningfully speak about it; we have been struck dumb. In short, we have an existing thing, but it is no longer designated by any words. How then could we draw attention to it, criticize it, oppose it?

Let’s take another example. A feminist may well create a false partition in the problem of Father’s Rights by defining it in such a way that feminist culpability is overlooked. She could, for instance, say that “patriarchy is to blame for the unequal treatment of fathers.” Once again, she has controlled the language – meanings are split between terms, or they are compressed into one, and the intended outcome is that the guilty party avoids being taken to task!

Now, you might think – “why does this matter? A feminist might say this or that, but I don’t believe her; my own experiences tell me that it’s not true, and I’m unlikely to be fooled by what she says.”

That’s all well and good. But there are a lot of people out there who will be fooled by what she says – including those who possess the very real physical power to imprison you, destroy you, or alienate you from your loved ones. Feminists aren’t just saying this to people like you and I – their nonsense gushes forth in all directions, like crude oil from a burst pipe, flowing towards anybody who will listen, and especially those who can “do something about it.” Their message comes through, louder than a rushing waterfall, whether you want to hear it or not – and their whole project depends upon the relentless repetition of a dozen or so mantras, and the sinking of their sentiments into the collective subconscious. This is why they endlessly prattle on, typically parroting stock phrases like subordinate cells in a hive mind! They do it because it works – at least, until somebody stands up and points out that the Emperor’s not wearing any clothes.

And then, all hell breaks loose!

rosetta

 

It was necessary to speak at length on this point, because we must realize that political language is never neutral, and implications are always hidden in the configuration of ideas and terms. The role of Men’s Rights Advocates is to critically assess the feminist use of language, and to determine where we would be well-served to separate out several ideas which are referred to by one term, or to compress several terms into one. We should never respond to a feminist argument without first looking critically at the terms through which it is being conducted. To put it in Gamespeak, we must “control the frame!”

The Appeal to Dictionary can be summarily dismissed. Official dictionaries represent establishment positions. Feminism, as it is in vogue, is officially defined in the way that its adherents would like the world to see feminism; it is not defined in a way that describes, or accounts for, the totality of the project. That which happened, or still happens, but does not reflect the establishment view, is simply ignored. To define feminism as

 

the advocacy of women’s rights on the grounds of political, social, and economic equality to men…

is to brush aside much of its unpleasant history – and to deprive skeptics of the resources for an unofficial linguistic and historical analysis of the term. This old revision of the Wikipedia page ‘Feminism and Equality’ contains plenty of material which disputes the black-and-white dictionary definition, although the page itself has fallen prey to the very same forces which seek to delimit the linguistic opportunities of their critics. Thankfully, Wikipedia archives old versions of its articles, so the efforts of one Nick Levinson in exposing the explicitly anti-male tenor of several famous feminist works has not gone to waste. Let’s get cracking!

 

Jill Johnston, in Lesbian Nation, called for men to eliminate the qualities they hold as men. “Man is completely out of phase with nature. Nature is woman. Man is the intruder. The man who re-attunes himself with nature is the man who de-mans himself or eliminates himself as man […] A small but significant number of angry and historically minded women comprehend the women’s revolution in the visionary sense of an end to the catastrophic brotherhood and a return to the former glory and wise equanimity of the matriarchies.”

Mary Daly, in Gyn/Ecology, wrote in favor of reversing power between the genders […] “As a creative crystallizing of the movement beyond the state of Patriarchal Paralysis, this book is an act of Dis-possession; and hence, in a sense beyond the limitations of the label anti-male, it is absolutely Anti-androcrat, A-mazingly Anti-male, Furiously and Finally Female.”

“Do women need land and an army . . .; or a feminist government in exile . . .? Or is it simpler: the bed belongs to the woman; the house belongs to the woman; any land belongs to the woman; if a male intimate is violent he is removed from the place where she has the superior and inviolate claim, arrested, denied parole, and prosecuted. . . . . Could women ‘set a high price on our blood’?” – Andrea Dworkin

Phyllis Chesler, in Women and Madness, drew on matriarchal history, Amazon mythology, and psychology and, with some ambivalence about relying on biology alone as a justification, argued that a war between the genders has always been underway and that women would benefit from using their full powers to be the exclusive wielders of political power to produce an unequal society in which men live but are relatively powerless, even if such a society is no more just than a patriarchy, and called for feminist women to dominate public institutions in their self-interest. “Amazon society, as mythology, history, and universal male nightmare, represents a culture in which women reign culturally supreme because of their gender […] In Amazon society, only men, when they were allowed to remain, were, in widely differing degrees, powerless and oppressed […] If women take their bodies seriously—and ideally we should—then its full expression, in terms of pleasure, maternity, and physical strength, seems to fare better when women control the means of production and reproduction. From this point of view, it is simply not in women’s interest to support patriarchy or even a fabled ‘equality’ with men.”

One organization that was named The Feminists was interested in matriarchy. Two members wanted “‘the restoration of female rule'”.

AMAZONS

 

Unless the aforementioned organization and books did not really exist, we are forced to conclude that feminism cannot only have been about the advocacy of women’s rights on the grounds of equality with men. At the very least, what we must say is that some feminists may have supported equality, while other feminists have overlooked equality and have outright supported female superiority. And neither can the latter group be reduced to a handful of fringe lunatics. As Nick Levinson points out (much to the chagrin of feminist moderators), two and a half million copies of Phyllis Chesler’s Women and Madness were sold.

That’s a whole lot of hate.

And a whole lot of energy is spent actively sweeping this kind of thing under the rug, by those who have since realized how damaging honesty can be to one’s case. Modern feminists are far more rhetorically disciplined than their forthright foremothers, and have concluded that unpopular plans are not helped into motion by being discussed openly. Rhetorical discipline adds a whole new layer of subterfuge to all that has been said regarding the designation of terms to ideas. It will not suffice only to look at what they say; we must watch carefully what they do. And haven’t some of the above recommendations come true, per the actions of feminists? Is it not now the case that male intimates accused of violence are removed from their homes in which the woman has the superior and inviolate claim, as Andrea Dworkin hoped for? Have feminist women not dominated public institutions in their own interest, as Phyllis Chesler advocated? As Gynocentrism Theory tells us, women already had a “high price on their blood” – much higher than that of men, at almost any time in history. This simple fact is the reason why it was possible for the prescriptions of radical feminists to be achieved in the first place – and for dissidents to have been so effortlessly marginalized.

Still, times change. Establishments are overturned, and words are officially redefined. If the new definition of a word proves more accurate, then it must have existed for some time, unofficially, before the word’s revision. Sometimes, establishments must change before terms catch up. The dictionary lags behind definition, because the establishment is stuck in the mud. I predict that, as we reach a critical mass opposed to feminism, and shortly before its collapse, we may well see some concessions in the form of alternative definitions of the term becoming accepted.

Adam
Further Reading:

J. Durden. Feminism as a Language Ideology

ArgusEyes. Why I am NOT a Feminist

Davout. Oxford English Dictionary massacres the definition of “anti-feminist”

 

 

GYNOCENTRISM THEORY LECTURE SERIES:
1. Staring Out From the Abyss
2. The Same Old Gynocentric Story
3. Refuting the Appeal to Dictionary
4. Pig Latin
5. Anatomy of a Victim Ideology
6. Old Wine, New Bottles
7. The Personal, as Contrasted to the Political
8. Chasing Rainbows
9. False Consciousness & Kafka-Trapping
10. The Eventual Outcome of Feminism, Part I
11. The Eventual Outcome of Feminism, Part II
12. How to Break a Dialectic

The Same Old Gynocentric Story

Lecture No. 2

“I’m not cut from the same mold. I don’t read from the same old story” – Pennywise

My readers must understand that the concerns which Gynocentrism Theory addresses are not limited to feminism. Feminism is still fairly new on the scene, while Gynocentrism has been around for as long as recorded history. The Men’s Rights Movement seeks to address problems associated with feminism, but does not limit its attention to these problems. Many of these problems existed prior to the emergence of feminism proper in the late 19th century, although they have been expanded and exacerbated since. Feminism is only the modern packaging of Gynocentrism, an ancient product, made possible in its present form by the extensive public welfare arrangements of the post-war period.

welfare

In spite of its radical rhetoric, the content of feminism, or one could say, its essence, is remarkably traditional; so traditional, in fact, that its core ideas are simply taken for granted, as unquestioned and unquestionable dogma, enjoying uniform assent across the political spectrum. Feminism is distinguishable only because it takes a certain traditional idea – the deference of men to women – to an unsustainable extreme. Political extremism, a product of modernity, shall fittingly put an end to the traditional idea itself; that is, in the aftermath of its astounding, all-singing, all-dancing final act.

Allow me to clarify. The traditional idea under discussion is male sacrifice for the benefit of women, which we term Gynocentrism. This is the historical norm, and it was the way of the world long before anything called ‘feminism’ made itself known. There is an enormous amount of continuity between the chivalric class code which arose in the Middle Ages and modern feminism, for instance. That the two are distinguishable is clear enough, but the latter is simply a progressive extension of the former over several centuries, having retained its essence over a long period of transition. One could say that they are the same entity, which now exists in a more mature form – certainly, we are not dealing with two separate creatures. Take any of the great Empires that swept the globe – the Roman, the Ottoman, the Spanish, the British – and you shall find Gynocentrism as the order of the day. Such extensive geopolitical enterprises, historical testaments to man’s triumph over the earth and sea, were built and maintained by men perfectly accustomed to the idea of dying for the sake of their women. It is an idea that has outlived nearly every other, and endures to this day in our American Empire. That men should sacrifice themselves utterly – their very essence, their being and their identity, to save women that they do not even know – is neatly encapsulated in that popular phrase, ‘women and children first.’

(And if you’re paying special attention, you will notice that it is never uttered as ‘children and women first.’ The very thought is absurd! This is because what is really meant by the phrase is ‘women first, children second.’)

The endurance of these social and class codes owes nothing to totalitarian control. Even when staging bloody revolts against tyrannous monarchs and landed elites, men aspiring to power left the Gynocentric code well alone. The self-sacrifice of men is a sexual constant which has survived all regime change. Gynocentrism, it seems, was not entirely without benefit to men; in peacetime, a man could be fairly assured of a stable familial structure and of his own paternity for the children he helped to raise. Regardless, what was offered to men was essentially compensatory. For most of history, men apparently considered this compensation to be reasonable enough – or perhaps, Gynocentrism was so deeply ingrained that they simply did not consider it at all. Through their actions, they affirmed (and renewed) Gynocentrism, and whether it went by the name honor, nobility, chivalry, or feminism, its essence has gone unchanged. It remains a peculiarly male duty to help the women onto the lifeboats, while the men themselves face a certain and icy death.

It is only now, with the political and social developments of the 20th century that have driven a wedge between the sexes, that the kind of thoughts found on this weblog can emerge. Late modernity provides us with new conceptual resources – new ways of thinking, which can be traced back to the Enlightenment of the 17th-18th centuries. Out of this intellectual melting-pot eventually crawled feminism, a vindictive blend of classic Gynocentrism, victim fetishization, radical utopianism and liberal presuppositions.

It would be an oversimplification to say that feminists set out to make gains. On the contrary, they made demands for both gains and losses. They wanted to gain men’s rights, but lose their traditional female responsibilities. This, it seemed, would put women in a social position equal to that of men. It was an argument rooted in the liberal tendencies of individualism, civic equality and self-definition. In rhetoric if not in reality, feminism asserted its points of concurrence with the most admirable aspects of traditional liberalism: equality before the law, the abnegation of arbitrary rule, and so on. Extending rights to all women appeared, logically enough, to be the successive phase of human liberation following the extension of rights to all men.

It was assumed – more fool us – that once granted equal rights, women would voluntarily adopt the accompanying responsibilities that men had always fulfilled. This did not come to be. Feminists were happy to gain men’s rights, and lose women’s responsibilities, but they were horrified by the suggestion that they should adopt men’s responsibilities as a corollary. Rather than men and women sharing the burdens of the world, we got the White Feather Campaign:

 

This campaign began in the early days of the First World War in Great Britain, where women were encouraged to pin white feathers on young men who were not in military uniform. The hope was that this mark of cowardice would shame them into ‘doing their bit’ in the war. The practice soon spread to Canada, where patriotic women, in response to declining voluntary recruitment figures, organized committees to issue white feathers to men in civilian clothes and publicly denounced the ‘slackers’ and ‘shirkers’.

It is surely worth remarking that many of these women were suffragettes; and thus, even as they campaigned for equal rights with men, they used shame as a tool for ensuring that men, and only men, fulfilled traditionally male obligations. Particularly, duty to give up their own lives, because they were men, for the sake of women. Whatever disadvantages women may have faced at the time, there is surely no greater coercion than death.

Much has changed since the First World War, and the feminist project to slack and shirk on women’s responsibilities while extending their license to act however they damn well please has met with wild success. And it is precisely this state of affairs which begs certain questions, made possible by the conceptual resources we have inherited from the Enlightenment: what if a man doesn’t want to live this way? Why should men continue to fulfill or perform their traditional obligations, when women will not live up to theirs, but neither will they adopt the responsibilities corresponding to their rights at present? The questions arise: were men wrong, all this time, to sacrifice for the sake of women? Should we, in fact, have no obligations to women whatsoever?

 

titanic

 

The reason why the Men’s Rights Movement arouses such hostility, from both the left and right, is because it is the first attempt in history for a sex to attempt to break out of its traditional role. Feminism is not this; it is the entrenchment of the power that women already held. The Men’s Rights Movement today goes far beyond simple accusations of feminist wrongdoing. Its adherents labor at historical analysis and social criticism, and with the benefit of two-and-a-half centuries of imagination and innovation stemming from the Enlightenment, can easily conceive of a world in which men, for the first time in history, are not required to self-sacrifice for women.

This is surely the future, and it is an inevitable reaction against – thus, an unintended consequence of – feminism itself. In times past, when men could claim compensation for their self-sacrifice, they accepted that this was simply the way of the world. In the absence of compensation, and with the screws being turned ever tighter on men in every sphere of life, they are provoked into questioning the new arbitrary rule, and into formulating their very own liberation project in response.

My statement above – that political extremism, the product of modernity, shall put an end to the traditional idea – should now be clear. Feminism, which is the extreme form of Gynocentrism, shall put an end to Gynocentrism altogether through the reaction which it creates. We are fifty years into the tremendous final act; a grand, orchestral performance, a theatrical display making unprecedented use of sound and light to confuse and cast illusion. But if all the world truly is a stage, then all men and women are actors – with roles of our own choosing, now free to toss aside the scripts we have been handed and create a new story in place of the old.

And when the curtain finally falls, I do believe that there shall be no encores.

Adam

Further Reading:

Paul Elam. To Man Up or Stand Down

Pierce Harlan. Titanic: Its Lessons About

Gender Still Resonate

Rookh Kshatriya. Remembrance Day: A Time of Anglobitch Hypocrisy

 

 

GYNOCENTRISM THEORY LECTURE SERIES:
1. Staring Out From the Abyss
2. The Same Old Gynocentric Story
3. Refuting the Appeal to Dictionary
4. Pig Latin
5. Anatomy of a Victim Ideology
6. Old Wine, New Bottles
7. The Personal, as Contrasted to the Political
8. Chasing Rainbows
9. False Consciousness & Kafka-Trapping
10. The Eventual Outcome of Feminism, Part I
11. The Eventual Outcome of Feminism, Part II
12. How to Break a Dialectic

Gynocentrism Theory

The following seminal lectures on Gynocentrism Theory were given in 2011 by Adam Kostakis

Staring Out From the Abyss

Lecture No. 1

“I love an opposition that has convictions” – Frederick the Great

The Battle of the Sexes has degenerated into a Dirty War, and we are, each of us, being drafted into it by forces who care not a whit for equality or fairness.

Propaganda, as a tool of control, is effective only insofar as the vision of the world that it presents concords with the perception of the world experienced day-to-day by its targets. The wider the gap between the perceived world and the propagandistic representation of the world, the less effective – and therefore less useful – the propaganda will ultimately be. We have reached a juncture at which women are increasingly rejecting feminism as irrelevant or inapplicable to their lives, because the world that feminist orthodoxy describes does not appear to be planet Earth. At the same time, we are approaching a zenith of feminist control over the actual inhabited world, which combines state repression with gender tribalism, both forces intensifying exponentially as they use each other as leverage to climb ever higher.

mountain

I am reminded of an ancient riddle, which asks, ‘how high can one climb up a mountain?’ The answer is ‘to the top,’ because once you reach the summit, the only possible way is down. Feminism has no obstacles left; total control is within its grasp, and by total, I do mean in the sense that it shall be totalitarian. The victim card has served as an entry pass through the back door of state and supranational institutions. Now empowered over men, feminists have re-established the principles of Valerie Solanas’ Scum Manifesto, declaring – in language clearly evocative of the Final Solution – that we shall soon witness The End of Men. The ‘sex war’ is not cooling down as women approach (or in some cases, surpass) equality with men – it is heating up. Feminists are not only publicly inciting male hatred and getting away with it, they are using their positions in government, in academia, in think tanks and in the media to make their violent fantasies a reality, advocating the renunciation of men’s basic human rights.

To take one recent example, the Secretary of State of the most powerful nation in the world recently announced that an international mobile prosecution unit shall be established specifically to target men around the world. To take another recent example, a leading feminist has suggested that certain legal principles designed to protect innocent citizens from persecution and unjust imprisonment, dating back to the signing of the Magna Carta, should be withdrawn from men. Nor is feminism a problem confined to the Western world. Men are subject to the arbitrary rule of women in India, facing severe penalties for inadvertently causing the slightest offense.

None of this squares with the ‘women-as-victim’ cliché, which has so usefully served feminists in getting to this point. Nevertheless, feminism is firmly entrenched and in control of the mechanisms which boast the monopoly on physical power, legitimate or otherwise. There is hardly any countervailing force which remains. The West has found its new Imperial Mission to replace Global Christendom: enforced worship of women. As any dissenting voice is immediately and violently stamped out, feminists are free to radicalize their anti-male agenda to the point of moral sickness and to unleash unto the world all manner of vindictive atrocities.

For you see, when propaganda has ceased to be an effective tool of control, one seeking control will simply find other means. Control of the state – the monopoly on physical violence – is the means which feminists have sought. But unlike propaganda, which manipulates the mind, state control only brutalizes the body. The power of the controllers always ultimately rests upon the resilience of the controlled, hence consent must still be manufactured. The Roman Empire did not last for five hundred years by the exercise of brute force, but by mass support; the Emperor was glorified as a mortal deity, and even the smallest townships in his realm voluntarily erected statues and altars in his honor. For too long, men have been worshiping at the altar of the female, and it is tempting to believe that this psychological submission will not yield even in the face of physical oppression or extermination – that men will march to their demise like sacrificial lambs, hoping to win women’s favor with their last servile actions. But proclamations regarding The End of Men may well turn out to be as empty as those which were made nearly twenty years earlier, concerning The End of History. The so-called Clash of Civilizations which followed led that author to refute his own position. We should be optimistic that a true Clash of the Sexes will soon have feminist-minded women eating crow.

As feminism grows ever more powerful, and begins to realize its radical ambitions, it will simultaneously exhaust its capacity for manufacturing consent. Those chivalric illusions which ensure the consent of men, and which feminism ultimately rests upon – ‘women-as-victim,’ ‘women-as-precious,’ ‘women-as-helpless,’ and so on – will become rather more difficult to maintain in time. The more force is advanced against men to bridle and inhibit their lives, the more discontent shall be nurtured among them. The misandry bubble is due to burst, and with every example of overreach, which sees yet more good men cast into the role of criminal and subjected to humiliating and vicious punishments, another crack appears in the wall, another step we take closer to the day that the whole hateful edifice collapses under its own weight – and, crucially, under ours.

Our task, then, is twofold: first, to prepare the ground, in order to hasten the collapse of feminism.

Second (and complementary to the first): to construct the ideological weapons to help prevent a feminist resurgence following its collapse.

Both of these goals require, not force, but some propagandizing of our own. Things being the way they are, this does not require us to distort the truth. On the contrary, we shall, for the most part, be exposing those truths which others have distorted; revealing the facts to a wider audience than has yet received them, diligently and unapologetically. As one notable activist in the field recently put it, he does not need to attack feminists – all he needs to do is quote them. Simply exposing feminist hatred to the disinfecting sunlight of the world might well be enough to turn the tide – which is why enormous energies are expended on misdirecting, discrediting, neutralizing and obscuring the arguments and advocates of the opposition.

vigeland2

 

One key strategy for the achievement of our task was announced at an April 2010 conference, in the form of Male Studies, a new discipline already facing hostility from an academic world that has long been a bastion of radical feminism. That this sore thumb, this thorn in the side of scholarly uniformity should provoke such outrage as it has done should not be surprising. Here is a selection of topics which Male Studies is set to cover:

Socioeconomic factors leading to males’ over-involvement in the criminal justice system, underemployment and limited opportunities as fathers, resulting from changes in child custody law (economics, forensics, law, public policy);

Misandric representations of boys and mature males in the media and advertising (media studies including cinema, television and internet, and advertising);

Accounts of the experience of being male (history, literature, autobiography);

Pressing issues related to the emotional well-being of boys and older males, most notably depression and suicide (clinical psychology, medicine and psychiatry, social work).

Friedrich Nietzsche, writing in the late 19th century, warned that if one gazes into the abyss for long enough, then one shall find the abyss gazing back into them. It must be deeply troubling for feminists, to wake up one morning and find other people deconstructing them, having made it their mission in life to expose and correct feminist wrongdoing.

This would seem to be the reason for the abusive response, from the feminist sector, to the idea of men discussing issues of sex and sexism without the supervision of women. It matters not what feminists think of Male Studies, because feminists are not the discipline’s target audience; its success is not dependent upon their approval, a fact they will no doubt have trouble reconciling themselves to. Regardless, even if they launched a concerted campaign to stop men from discussing their experiences through the fora of academia, they are incapable of preventing this from happening elsewhere. The true sticking point for would-be dictators today is that we live in an Information Age. It is rather difficult to control the flow of information when our very epoch is defined by it. So, let’s have these discussions right here, right now – as long as people can use the internet to congregate and speak their minds, nothing can stop us. Let’s have these discussions in a million other places too, out in the real world – because if men had never spoken up about their experiences, as men, then we would not be looking forward to the commencement of Male Studies in the near future.

There are already a great number of websites devoted to Men’s Rights issues; indeed, these seem to have proliferated over the last few years, sprouting up all over the pasture like so many delicious mushrooms! For most of these weblogs, their content needs no greater unifying theme than opposition to feminism. Given the growing and active network of people concerned about the status of men today, it has become possible to push the envelope a little further. This weblog aims to encourage the intellectual crystallization of what we are calling the Men’s Rights Movement, by taking a narrow lens across a broad range of topics. This weblog is dedicated to the elucidation of Gynocentrism Theory.

What is Gynocentrism Theory? To put it simply, it is a system which explains social relations between the sexes. It supersedes Patriarchy Theory, the cornerstone of all feminist thought. Now memetic, Patriarchy Theory has proved a remarkable tool in denying men their rights, including their most basic human rights to dignity and bodily integrity, on the pretense that all men are oppressors (or at least, allied with oppressive men from whom they receive benefits) and that all women are victims of male power. Gynocentrism Theory is the articulation of many years of effort by various thinkers in the Men’s Rights sphere to describe a vision of the world which more accurately reflects the experiences of men – and many women, too. In contrast to the simplistic, black-and-white tribalism of Patriarchy Theory, Gynocentrism Theory does not equate male fulfillment with the holding of tyrannical power over women. Gynocentrism Theory does not accept that men act as a power bloc. On the contrary, Gynocentrism Theory exposes the divergence between demographics and interests; fundamentally, that while a small number of men may be the ones holding social and political power, this by no means implies that they do so for the benefit of all men; and that in fact, more usually, they do so for the benefit of most women and to the detriment of most men. Gynocentrism Theory advocates that power be understood as multi-faceted, and that policy has historically been a matter of appealing to, and protecting, women.

monkeys

The above, no doubt, shall make heads spin among those who assume that power at all levels can be identified according to the shape of the genitals of those who get to make important decisions – regardless of what they actually decide.

Any more shall be beyond the scope of this introductory lecture. And so, we shall continue this train of thought next week. Lectures will be held on Saturdays, and students from around the world are invited to attend – or catch up in their own time if they prefer. Discussions shall be held immediately afterwards. Unlike most feminist weblogs, whose authors take after their mentor Mary Daly in systematically denying men a voice, all shall be welcome to speak here, although expulsions shall be warranted in the case that obscene material or personal information is posted. I prefer that feminists be fisked than filtered out, but the fate of truly persistent trolls shall be delivered at my discretion.

I bid you all a reflective day, and I’ll be seeing you again.

Sooner than you think.

Adam Kostakis

Further Reading:

Angry Harry. Gaea IV

The Futurist. The Misandry Bubble

Fidelbogen. For the Benefit of Newcomers: A Review of Some Basic Things

 

 

GYNOCENTRISM THEORY LECTURE SERIES:
1. Staring Out From the Abyss
2. The Same Old Gynocentric Story
3. Refuting the Appeal to Dictionary
4. Pig Latin
5. Anatomy of a Victim Ideology
6. Old Wine, New Bottles
7. The Personal, as Contrasted to the Political
8. Chasing Rainbows
9. False Consciousness & Kafka-Trapping
10. The Eventual Outcome of Feminism, Part I
11. The Eventual Outcome of Feminism, Part II
12. How to Break a Dialectic

Dom vs Unruly Supremacist

The following article provides a useful differentiation between female domination, and female supremacy. Gynocentric culture is a mixture of these two things and, from my perspective at least, female sexual domination lends itself to a transmogrification into female supremacy – ie. a little power leads to absolute power by dint of the power urge in human nature.