The nature of male value and our gynocentric culture (part two)

January 10, 2020July 13, 2020 / Peter Ryan / Leave a comment

By Peter Ryan

Please read part one of this article before continuing.

The Gynocentric Obsession With Asserting Men Are Inferior:

I understand the desperate need of gynocentric bigots to justify their own double standards of prioritising women above men, with the reductionist concept that reproduction is all that counts to propagating your genes, and that having a uterus makes women more biologically valuable and that men are more expendable. I understand the lengths and the efforts they will go to, to assert their falsehoods and silence any dissenting opinion. Gynocentrism requires rationalisation for bigots to make their bigotry more palatable and acceptable for society. Distorting science to provide a supposed empirical basis for their bigotry, is a key method that they employ. This is why I have spent so much time writing on the subject of male value to set the record straight and it really does not help when the manosphere repeats the lie that men are inherently biologically expendable. As we saw in the phrenology scene ¹⁰ in the movie Django Unchained, junk science has been used to make all sorts of claims about group superiority.

The rationalisations and sophist claims that men are expendable because they lack a uterus, and that women have to be elevated above men to preserve the species, are just a different flavour of the same bigoted logic from that scene in the movie and just as ridiculous. The same claim that men are destined to be the more disposable sex because they lack a uterus, is analogous to the reasoning that African-Americans were destined to remain slaves because of supposed dimples in their skull. The key difference is that we now at least recognise one of these beliefs as bigotry.

Why Do We Believe Men Are Less Than?:

Why is the lie men are ‘less than’ so widely believed? People will look for simple ideas that justify their emotionally preferred worldview and appease their conscious. This applies to the manosphere as well. It is a comforting lie to believe that the sexism men face is an unavoidable and immutable facet of biological reality and the manosphere is no exception. However this gynocentric society is not comprised of people that are slaves to their biology. No, no, no, people do not get off that easily. People are wilfully and consciously going along with the marginalisation and exploitation of men and boys. The reason for this is not some innate biological mechanism, but the reality in our modern gynocentric culture that there is no incentive to care for men and every incentive to exploit them. Men that do not value themselves cannot expect society to care for them. Men that do not enforce boundaries with women and stand up for themselves, cannot expect women to not take advantage of them. The way men are treated by society, is a reflection of the way men treat themselves. The way men treat themselves is a reflection of how men perceive themselves.

The reason why society gives a shit about women, is because women give a shit about women. The reason why society does not give a shit about men, is because men do not give a shit about men. Ultimately society cares about women, because women give them an incentive to care and a disincentive not to. In contrast men simply place most of their sense of self-worth in what they achieve or do. Men place very little value in their physical and mental being. Society reflects that perspective right back at men in how men are treated. Men who regard themselves as human doings are treated as human doings. If men really want this to change, then they will need to change their perception of themselves from human doings to human beings.

Social stagnation is the norm for society and the social status quo prevails, because most people will not change without an incentive to change. Slavery was not abolished until sufficient numbers of people were incentivised to abolish it. The absolute rule of monarchs was not questioned until sufficient numbers of people were incentivised to challenge the established order. Every significant evolution of society has been preceded by a change in the mixture of incentives and disincentives in society. Things have to reach critical mass for major change to occur.

For centuries men have performed for society, because their own survival and the survival of society depended on it. This often meant that substantial numbers of men made sacrifices and died. What we have in the modern age, is a situation in which the fruits of what men provide are taken for granted. Technology has allowed apathy, short term thinking and decadence to dull our senses. Society has forgotten the true value of men and even men have forgotten their own true intrinsic value. Men cannot “do” for society, without caring for their being first. This is a basic reality that society and men have forgotten because of our decadent materialistic mentality, which has become divorced from reality and our long-term survival interests. Men are human beings first and the doing part comes from their being. Society has descended into a mass delusion, where we have forgotten that men are human beings and that their value emerges from that.

Why has male value been forgotten? Male biological value is more fluid in its form than female biological value. The reproductive role of women does not change much from one environment to the next. How men contribute to the survival of society, does vary to a much greater degree from one environment to the next. The result of this is that male value is not as fixed as female value and as a consequence there is more scrutiny placed on men to prove their value. It is harder to assess male value than female value and requires men to demonstrate their capacities. When you hear people say things like “man up”, “be a man” and someone define what a man is, you are hearing people call upon men to prove their biological worth. This is a social pressure women do not experience to anywhere near the same degree as men. No one dares to tell women to “woman up”.

Social scientists call this social pressure on men to perform to prove their worth as men, “precarious manhood”¹¹. A positive side to the greater fluidity of male value, is that men have many paths they can take to express their biological value to society. For women their biological value is more fixed on motherhood. Women have greater stability and certainty in their biological value, but men have more freedom and scope in the expression of their biological value. Men rising to the top of their profession and pursuing a career or a talent or natural interest, will have a greater impact on their evolutionary success than it will for women. This biological difference does at least partly inform our societal attitudes and culture.

I do believe that this asymmetry between the sexes, is part of the reason why feminism has emerged and demanded all of these changes be made to our institutions and workplaces to empower women to pursue employment or other interests over having children. I understand, respect and support the need of women to find meaning in their lives outside of having children and to be valued for more than just their uterus.

Whilst we clearly do not have a 50:50 gender representation in all aspects of our economy and society and never will, it is a reality that there are no barriers left holding women back. Whilst evolved biological sex differences in interests and abilities do exist and do at least partly explain these differences in gender representation in society and why they will always remain, we have overturned the social and legal barriers that may have existed for women in pursuing a pathway outside of motherhood and being valued beyond motherhood.

The challenge I have for society, is that if we can clearly overcome our fixation on associating female value solely or primarily to motherhood, then we can do the same for men and their provision and protection for society. We can overcome our knee-jerk reaction to assign value to men based on what they “do” for society and how they perform. We can overcome and move beyond precarious manhood. As Dr. Warren Farrell has written about, if women are sex objects, men are success objects. If we can address one biologically informed cultural bias against women in regarding them as sex objects, then we can address the other bias against men in regarding them as success objects. If we can remove barriers for women, we can remove barriers for men.

There is another factor at play here as well. The male role in contributing to the survival of the community can obstruct our capacity to have concern for the well-being of men. When the community is dependent on men for survival, it becomes harder to see the need to support men. The nature of male value means that it essentially gets in the way of societal concern for male well-being. Men naturally want to take risks and they want to challenge themselves and take on hardships and society often benefits because of the extraordinary things that men do. Just as before, there is a positive flipside. Freedom for men is one of the most important things you can give them. Whilst there is less concern for male well-being from society, there is also less inhibition in allowing men to expose themselves to challenging and risky pursuits that can be highly rewarding both financially and otherwise. Men often find fulfillment and are naturally drawn to these pursuits. Men literally skydive from the edges of space and go to the bottom of the world’s oceans, because they have a passion to push the envelope of possibility.

Whilst there are certainly psychological and physiological sex differences that at least partly explain sex differences in the representation of risky, challenging and dangerous work that has high personal and financial reward, it is also correct to observe that men have had greater freedom to take on risky and challenging pursuits in the past. Both factors are at play. Whether it is exploring the world on sailing ships, pioneering on the frontier of new territories, undertaking expeditions to find the Northwest passage and go to the North and South Pole, mining in the gold rush, flying prototype aeroplanes, or going into space, society has historically given men more latitude to pursue these rewarding but dangerous endeavours. Women have traditionally been protected from risky and challenging work and this has come to some degree at the expense of part of their freedom.

Just as society has had less concern for male well-being, there has been less concern for women’s freedom outside of getting married and having children. Just as society has relied on men for survival, society has relied on women to produce the next generation. Just as male value has partly obstructed societal concern for male well-being, female value has partly obstructed societal concern for women’s freedom. The concern for men to provide for society got partly in the way of society caring for men’s well-being and the concern for women to produce children got partly in the way of society caring for women’s freedom.

Again this asymmetry is no doubt partly why feminism has emerged for women and I understand, accept and fully support the need for women to have the freedom to be more than just a mother. The second challenge I have for society though, is that if we can overcome our protective fixation on making sure women stay at home and raise children, then we can overcome our reservation in caring about men’s health and general well-being.

Despite what feminists claim, both men and women have faced discriminatory practices throughout our history and both sexes have had different types of “privilege”. It has not been a man’s world and an “oppressive patriarchy”, it has been a world where men and women struggled for thousands of years to subsist and continue society. When faced with the risk of death, disease and starvation on a semi-regular basis, men and women had much less choice on how to live and the roles the sexes were to play in society.

Technology which mostly men invented, has given us the opportunity to escape our traditional biological roles and opened up options that simply were not possible before. We have the capacity to go beyond our basic biological programming and ironically society has demonstrated this with feminism. If we can overcome our societal reservations on women being something other than a mother, than we can overcome our reservations on addressing male well-being and recognise the intrinsic value of men as human beings. If one sex can be freed from the confines of their biological mandate, then so can the other sex. This is because the biological mandate of each sex (the rate limiting factor of reproduction versus the rate limiting factor of survival) is interconnected and interdependent.

Some say that feminism is merely entirely an extension of biology and from a reductionist lens that position may seem tenable. Certainly there are biological factors at play driving feminism, to at least some degree. However when we consider how antithetical feminism is to female fertility and the net evolutionary impact that has on the continuation of communities and lineages within a population, the absolutist position feminism is entirely biological and driven by evolution, simply has no empirical leg to stand on. Feminism has created countless numbers of childless women that will not directly pass on their parent’s genome. If reproduction for the individual is “everything” from a skewed (and wrong) evolutionary perspective and women are the rate limiting factor of reproduction and biology is supposedly inescapable, then feminism in its present form should not have happened and yet it has. There is more to human evolutionary psychology and culture, than just reproduction and biology.

I wrote in part 2 of Gynocentrism And The Golden Uterus ¹², that men are not biologically disposable. I wrote that male disposability is a pathological expression of a society that has abandoned concern for male well-being and now takes them for granted and exploits them. I made the point that society has historically had to possess at least some concern for male well-being to minimise avoidable losses of men, to ensure its own existence and prosperity. Whilst there has indeed been some gut level inhibition that society has had in showing concern for male well-being, society in the past has also had an understanding at a cognitive level that we must look after and support men to at least some degree, so that men can in turn support society.

A king may not have had much concern for the individual well-being of his soldiers at a gut level, but cognitively he understood the need to adequately feed, pay and train them so they would effectively fight. We have recognised this need in our past culture to support men not a gut level, but at the cognitive level. Another example of this can be seen in how our educational institutions in the past were established to educate boys, so that they would then be equipped as men to support society and families.

What has happened, is that technology has delayed the need for society to think about the long-term consequences of neglecting male well-being (we have lost our long-term perspective on many other things in general as well, like private and government debt for instance). So we have gradually slid into a mode of perceiving men as human doings and not as human beings and on assigning value to what men do, but not to the men themselves. We have lost our cognitive connection between caring for men as human beings, so men can in turn support society. It is a cognitive connection we must restore before we are too late to realise what is happening in time to save society. Our current social and economic prosperity cannot be sustained in the long term without caring for male well-being. It is only through the massive resource surplus of our civilisation (which is gradually diminishing), that there has not yet been mass awareness of the decline of our societies and its link with the issues facing men. We are in a cycle of decadent short term thinking, where the concerns for the future of our civilisation has become an afterthought and so has concern for men and what made our society great. We must snap out of this cycle. Every civilisation reaches this decadent stage of decline in its final stages before it collapses.

This is a glimmer of hope though. People are waking up. People are starting to notice what is happening to men and boys. Is it happening slowly? Yes, very slowly. All social change happens very slowly initially with few exceptions. Even the mainstream media now though ¹³, is starting to pay attention and show some genuine concern for men. So yes things are changing. If feminism can push back against the rigid expectations and attitudes that were directed at women, so can men when it comes to the rigid expectations and attitudes that have been directed at men.

However to accomplish this goal, men must first change their perception of themselves from human doings to human beings and men must help each other and boys achieve that. We need a new cultural narrative on masculinity. A narrative that focuses on men as human beings before paying attention to what they do. The movie Joker¹⁴ is one example of this new type of narrative. Its popularity is no doubt at least partly the result of the film’s storyline filling a void in our gynocentric culture in recognising the humanity of men and men’s pain. Into The Wild¹⁵ is another brilliant film that focuses on men as human beings and their pain, vulnerabilities and inner world. Society is in need of a change to our narratives on men and masculinity. Not a feminist inspired change that tells men they are “toxic” or “obsolete”, but a change that tells men they are human beings first and foremost and have intrinsic value.

From 1848, it took more than a century for feminism to achieve many of the goals it set out to achieve. Men face a similar wait. Social change happens slowly at first and it can slow and speed up at various stages over time. Just because change may not be immediate and may be slow, does not mean men’s place in society is biologically immutable. Our major hurdle in my view in the manosphere, is getting over the belief that men are biologically less than women and actually biologically disposable, as opposed to considering male disposability a pathological expression of a society that exploits men and has forgotten their value. Gynocentrism is built on and dependent upon maintaining the lie that men are less than women. Only when this lie is unlearnt, can gynocentrism really be challenged.

The Self-Fulfilling Cycle Of Learned Helplessness

The claim women are more valuable than men, has been put forward multiple times directly and indirectly in the culture over the last fifty years and in various ways even before then. We have all been raised in this lie from birth and have lived in a gynocentric culture saturated by it. This false claim has also unfortunately been propagated in the manosphere as well and often used to explain the origins of sexism against men. The major difference of course between female supremacists/radical feminists and the people in the manosphere that put forward this idea, is that female supremacists consider it to be vindication that their worldview is the natural order of things and treating men like shit is the way it should be.

In contrast proponents of this idea in the manosphere that women are more biologically valuable, either avoid the implications of what it means (including the implied futility of what they are doing in the manosphere to get society to pay attention to men), or alternatively adopt a black pill fatalistic view ¹⁶ that there is little scope for any substantive mainstream change for society to address the discrimination, hatred, marginalisation and exploitation of men and boys. This mentality is one expression of the learned helplessness factor I described in my article on the Normalisation Of Gynocentrism ¹⁷ and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy for men. Men deserve better. We should recognise biology and our limitations, but we should be cautious not to resign ourselves to a fatalistic worldview, or to fall into a reductionist line of reasoning. Things are not as simple or as set as they seem. The manosphere has to move away from this fatalistic perspective and recognise the true intrinsic biological value of men, if it is to move forward in any substantive way.

One example of propagating the idea women are more biologically valuable than men in the manosphere, comes from a video from Karen Straughan called, “Neoteny!”¹⁸. Now before people start thinking this is a hit piece on Karen Straughan, let me assure you it is nothing of the kind. Karen has done some excellent work for men and boys and continues to do so. It is also worth noting that Karen is not the only one that has propagated this idea in the manosphere either. There are plenty of other examples from other people (men and women, mgtow and mra’s, both high and low profile) I could have cited over many years.

It is because the idea that women are more biologically valuable than men (and that men are biologically expendable) is so widespread in the manosphere and never questioned, that I am addressing it so thoroughly in this two part article, in my series of articles on gynocentrism and male value and in my earlier series on gynocentrism and the golden uterus. Karen was inviting criticism of her video and so I will provide it. I can be wrong, Karen can be wrong, we all can be wrong. The danger is not in being wrong, the danger comes when people remain silent when they know people are wrong. That is when rigid ideology forms and we stagnate and divorce ourselves from reality.

In her video Karen makes an argument that the sexism men face is at least partly innate (as she says we can see from sex differences in neoteny and the social reactions that invokes) and that this innate sexism arises from the fundamental reality that women are more valuable than men. Her reasoning is essentially that women evolved neotenous features to a greater degree than men to elicit protection from the community and that we protect the more valuable and so women are more valuable than men.

Neoteny is certainly a trait that women have to a greater degree than men, although in our modern environment women exaggerate their neoteny. The innate sex difference in neoteny whilst still substantive, is considerably less pronounced once you take away female cosmetics. Prehistoric women were no doubt more weathered, hairy, dirty and adult in appearance, than many women appear today. Neoteny certainly can elicit help from the community, but as with many characteristics, there are multiple suggested causes for the sex difference in neoteny.

One explanation ¹⁹ is that female neoteny was sexually selected by males, as female fertility markedly decreases with age. Men find more youthful looking women more physically attractive as younger women are more fertile and so more neotenous women pass on their genes. Sex differences in neoteny don’t necessarily reflect women having a greater biological value than men. Female neoteny can function as a biological marker to attract males to signal fertility. I do not think we should ignore the likely possibility that this dynamic could at least in part be at play in explaining the sex difference in neoteny. Of course certain people (cough feminists) and even some corners of academia (yes scientists can be biased and less than objective), rally against such explanations because it does not suit their narrative of female superiority.

Greater female neoteny is the result of differences in the manner in which each sex can maximise the propagation of their genes, rather than because women are more valuable than men. As I have discussed in the first part of this article and in part 2 on Gynocentrism and Male Value ²⁰, the male and female sex manifest their biological value differently- One sex derives value by investing more heavily in reproduction and the other sex derives value by investing more in survival. I specifically singled out in my writings the greater intrasexual competition of males, as one of the ways male value manifests itself. There is an inverse relationship between the level of reproductive investment by a sex and intrasexual competition, which is what Bateman’s principle describes ²¹.

Whilst competition is certainly not the sole domain of men, the biological reality is that men stand to gain far more from competition than women. The male sex can produce far greater numbers of progeny per unit of time, because males do not gestate or lactate and are thus more freely available to derive benefits from the mating opportunities arising from competition. The male sex also has the capacity to invest far more in activities related to acquiring status, competing and that are high risk/high reward or high effort/high reward, because they do not have to gestate or lactate.

Now let us consider the sex difference in neoteny and the presumption that neoteny has at least in part evolved to a greater degree in women to elicit protection. Will an individual be more successful at competing with others if he or she has to rely on the support of others to compete? How will that affect their status in a socially competitive hierarchy? Will an individual be more successful in acquiring status and engaging in high risk, high effort and high reward activities, if they have to rely on the support of others? Competition, status seeking, taking risks and undertaking challenges, all require one thing- personal agency. Personal agency requires independence and self-reliance rather than eliciting protection from the community. It is true that men have not evolved to elicit protection from the community to the same degree as women. However that is not the result of men being less valuable than women. It is because the life history strategy through which men manifest their biological value and pass on their genes, is different to women and requires different sets of traits.

The greater agency shown by men, is the reason why it is inevitable modern civilisation will be led by men. In order to lead in our modern complex world at the highest levels, you must accept high levels of responsibility and with that responsibility comes a large amount of sacrifice, hardship, risk and the need to be highly self-reliant and independent. This is what feminism does not understand or want to accept and why a “matriarchy” cannot scale to modern civilisation and is bound to fail with horrible social and economic consequences if it is forced on society.

The fatal flaw in Karen’s reasoning, is the implied assumption that we always protect what is valuable and we only do not protect what is expendable. We do protect what is valuable, but not always. There are valuable things in the world that we expose to risk and hazards, because that is how their value is harnessed. Sometimes we do not protect what is valuable, when the source of value is protection itself, or the value is harnessed by exposure to challenge, hardship and risk. We spend billions of dollars on valuable military hardware, race cars and spacecraft and expose them to risks and hazards, because that is how we harness their value. Value alone does not determine whether or not something is protected. There is a duality to value that exists between the sexes that Karen has missed in her video. The duality of survival and reproduction and the interplay between the two in a complex life history strategy to perpetuate the human genome. One form of value that requires protection and another form of value that actually manifests itself as protection.

We also need to remember that both sexes died performing their biological roles. It is not as if women were so biologically valuable that nature protected them from hardship and put it all on men. Women risked their lives in their reproductive role and did die or suffered chronic health conditions from pregnancy and giving birth. Men risked their lives protecting and providing for society and died and suffered from injury as well. The deaths of men and not just women, cost their communities in terms of both reproductive capacity and survival capacity.

There is a duality between the sexes to sacrifice and the cost of their sacrifice to the community. Women have not escaped biological hardship because they are more valuable, they just have experienced a different form of hardship. We can argue over which sex has had it “worse”, but really any sex difference in the degree of hardship comes down to the differences in the environmental and cultural conditions pertaining to their different biological roles and life history strategies, rather than differences in biological value.

The problem with gynocentrism and feminism, is not that they focus on female hardships or female sacrifice or female needs, but that they focus solely on those things and ignore male needs, male sacrifice and male hardships throughout history and in the present day. The problem with female superiority, is that without fail those that purport to claim women are superior, will selectively report only those strengths women have over men and consistently ignore or dismiss any evidence of male strengths and male value.

There is never any genuine recognition of all of the facts by either feminists or female supremacists, just the facts that are convenient. Ultimately it is one-sided gynocentric reductionist thinking, that consistently leads people to perceive only one side of the biological and social equation when it comes to the sexes. They ignore the duality of biological value and the duality of sacrifice between the sexes. The manosphere must try not to repeat those same mistakes.

I have a final point to make on Karen’s video regarding her initial comments on fatherhood and the long developmental period of human offspring and her suggestion that it is has been the monogamous egalitarian model that has allowed prolonged development in humans, rather than paternal investment alone. I would suggest that monogamy and the levels of paternal investment in offspring go hand in hand. Monogamy reduces paternity uncertainty, which in turn results in greater paternal investment. The more monogamous pair bonding there is in a population, the greater the levels of paternal investment.

Yes a species can have paternal investment in offspring in a polygamous community, but it will be at a reduced level in comparison to a monogamous arrangement. Whilst some people beat a drum that humans are a polygamous species, we are actually only weakly polygamous and monogamy has been present to a substantial degree in both our prehistory and in our current societies. We don’t really have one fixed mating mode we cannot escape from and human courtship is heavily influenced by culture and has been for many tens of thousands of years. Indeed cultural practices of marriage with only low levels of polygyny ²², are found to go far back into our hunter-gatherer prehistory.

Even in polygamous societies, only a small fraction of the population is actually engaging in polygamy and a substantial degree of monogamy still takes place in these societies. One only has to ask why monogamy has become so widespread, if we are supposedly so hardwired to be polygamous (as some claim). I could go into further detail on this point, but I will leave the discussion on polygamy in humans for another time and return to Karen’s discussion. The reason I expanded on this point, is because there are some people that incorrectly assume monogamy has had no impact on our evolution and that monogamy is a modern invention. This is scientifically and factually incorrect.

Karen discussed in her video, an example of the marmoset monkey in which only one pair is mating in the group and the father invests more than the mother in raising offspring. Karen suggested that the failure of the marmoset to acquire a long period of maturation and exhibit high intelligence, shows that fatherhood alone is not sufficient to lengthen the developmental period of offspring. My response to that, is that only one marmoset male in the group is invested in raising offspring and the rest of the male and female population is providing intermittent alloparental care. Whilst paternal investment within the mating marmoset pair is high relative to the maternal investment, paternal investment in the population as a whole is actually relatively low in comparison to humans (It is also worth pointing out that the paternal investment of a male marmoset is not even close to that of a human male, which I am sure Karen understands.).

In a human population there are many mating pairs (not just one) and thus much higher overall numbers of fathers investing in the raising of their offspring (rather than just one lucky marmoset male with one lucky marmoset female). Greater numbers of monogamous mating pairs, provide the opportunity to have a slower individual rate of reproduction to replace the population. The paternal investment in offspring, harnesses this opportunity to provide the conditions to support a longer developmental period for offspring.

So I would agree that both the monogamous egalitarian model and paternal investment across the population (outside of just one exclusive mating pair), are both involved in lengthening the human developmental period. However it is paternal investment that has actually directly played a role in human development and allowing it to be lengthened. The spread of monogamy just permitted paternal investment to become widespread. That clarification is important to add to what Karen said in her video. Fatherhood is particularly important in human adolescent development and particularly important in respect to raising sons whom fully mature at an older age. These realities indicate that fatherhood is indeed connected to supporting the longer development of our offspring (Particularly with teenage sons!).

Conclusion:

In closing I would like to draw attention to the massive fires that are currently burning across Australia. Firefighters whom are mostly men, have been battling these blazes whilst the country has been enjoying holidays and New Year’s Eve. It is funny how society on the one hand really needs men in a national emergency, but at the same time the mainstream media has no problem in telling men they are obsolete ²³ and telling people why it is okay to hate men ²⁴. Despite men risking their lives fighting the fires, feminists somehow think it is appropriate to make claims from highly questionable feminist “research”, that some men will come home from the fires to beat up their wives (yes you read correctly, watch this link ²⁵ and this link ²⁶). We live in a culture and a society, that is dominated by an authoritarian feminist ideology that spreads outright hatred toward men with impunity and attempts to demonise men even when they risk their lives for their community. That is how threatened feminism is by male value. Any expression and recognition of the good men do for society, even when men are risking their lives in a national emergency, is to be quashed by feminists.

Society does not want men to know their own value, because if they did this whole parasitic gynocentric system of exploitation would grind to a halt. It is the fear of men discovering their own intrinsic value as human beings that drives male disposability in society, remember that.

I will finish this article with a link ²⁷ to a speech by Charlie Chaplin. He made this speech in a movie called The Great Dictator in 1940 during World War 2. With our growing geopolitical tensions with China, Russia and now Iran, remember this speech. It is as relevant today for men, as it was back then. Make no mistake, war is a men’s issue and may become the greatest issue men face this century. The rejection of male disposability and the recognition of men as human beings with their own humanity, is the antidote to war and violence. The machine minds of our world will stop at nothing to snuff that out of men’s hearts and lead men astray with false promises of glory. Take heed of that warning.

“You are not machines, you are not cattle, you are men!”- Charlie Chaplin, The Great Dictator, 1940

How men perceive themselves will determine the fate of their lives and also the fate of the world. Reflect on that reality and what I have written in this article.

References:

Anti-gynocentrism is the only anti-feminism that matters

December 1, 2019September 21, 2023 / Peter Wright / 2 Comments

Men’s Rights Advocates have often watched with bemusement as newcomers arrive declaring support for men, with a resume saying just one thing: “I’m an antifeminist,” as if that were all we needed to know.

Because antifeminism and men’s rights activism is synonymous, right? That’s literally what they assume.

With the resume tabled they quickly move to promote a gynocentric tradition that gushes about males saving women from floods, fires, bullets, or sparing them from minor inconveniences in life – like discomfort, dirt, criticism or employment. Feminine women, they say, are best preserved as home-makers; each woman as precious as the fingers of a concert pianist which must never be put under strain. Men, they say, are heroes, put on this earth to lift heavy things as Jordan Peterson would say, and lift them specifically for the fragile, and of course pregnant, womenfolk.

“Life back then was as close as we can get to perfect” they foam, “it was an arrangement that saw feminine women give compliments to men for ongoing sacrifices — an arrangement far superior to the feminist approach which goes out of its way to denigrate men while expecting those very same sacrifices to continue.”

It is superior because massaging a man’s ego in exchange for expected sacrifice is somehow less denigrating than saying, as the feminists do, “we hate you.” But is such gratitude really better when both feminist and traditionalist women continue to expect male servitude – when they both reduce men to the role of ‘do things for me’?

That is the essence of the deal: a little ego-stroking in exchange for a man destroying himself. She inflates his ego like a helium balloon, at least in the area of saving, serving and pedestalizing her, and he signs up for a smorgasbord of self-destructive sacrifices and an earlier death.

We could be forgiven for interpreting the traditionalist woman’s complimenting of male sacrifice as superficial gushing, offered up with all the sincerity of a Miss World candidate saying she wants to bring about world peace, while watching the corpses pile up around her.

That appears to be the gynocentric tradition that most anti-feminists are peddling, the one they would substitute in place of feminist models. Here I should add that not all traditionalists are like that – at least not for the tiny minority of red pill men and women who seek to preserve the otherwise valuable, non-gynocentric aspects of tradition.

Some readers might protest that we should be grateful for those charging forward to destroy progressive gynocentrism (feminism) in order to substitute traditional gynocentrism in its place. But for this old timer that program reads like a rejection of Judas, in order to take sides with Iscariot.

I’m sure you all get the point.

As Paul Elam once summarized, ‘anti-gynocentrism is the only anti-feminism that matters.’

Compare the traditional gynocentrist as described above with women who are neither feminist nor traditional gynocentrist; women like Janice Fiamengo, Suzanne McCarley, Elizabeth Hobson, Alison Tieman, Hanna Wallen and countless others who are as quick to question the unbalanced privileges of traditional women as they are the privileges held by feminists. The difference in perspective between these two kinds of women couldn’t be more stark.

The rest unfortunately are frauds, women masquerading as allies while inviting men to adopt a women-serving scam with the bait of a 1950s smock and a demure look, women who are today unwilling to match men with reciprocal gestures or labor, nor the shouldering of life’s stresses. When traditional gynocentric women are featured in media interviews, gushing praise for the usefulness of “masculinity” and “real men” who save women from house fires, one can’t help but notice there’s an absence of discussion of what’s in it for the men, as if its not a relevant concern.

Perhaps praising is a form of respect for men, but respect for what? On face value it looks like that of a narcissist who “respects” others as food to satisfy his/her impersonal gluttony for special treatment.

Perhaps I could be more generous and say that rather than trying to enslave men, the I’m-Not-A-Feminist Gynocentrists are simply behind the times, believing that they are championing the lesser of the only two evils on offer. They view it as the lesser of the two evils because, under traditional gynocentrism, men were at least complimented for their labor, and given medals after their deaths – a thing denied under the feminist vision which sees men and women as competitors for narcissistic turf in which only women receive compliments; not men, but women alone are the ‘Stunning and the Brave.’

Sadly, the traditional contract under which that situation worked, the one that limited men’s and women’s options in favor of narrow set roles, can no longer work in a culture that refuses to encourage and support that same contract. Wave after wave of feminist activity has seen the toothpaste squeezed completely out of the tube. Women will never go back to the role of baby-making, apple-pie cooking wives, because any attempt to reduce women’s multi-option life will be met with resentment, if not interpreted as abuse. Therefore any attempts to enact that traditional role today will amount to little more than cosplay.

Swapping progressive gynocentrism for traditional gynocentrism is going nowhere. We can no more turn back the clock on Women’s Liberation than we should ignore the fact that’s Men’s Liberation now is due — men who no longer need to be tied to the traditionalist role of He-for-She.

Before bringing this article to a close I want to come back to the question of what, if anything, is the value of anti-feminism for the men’s rights movement. To that, two of the more obvious answers come to mind.

Firstly, antifeminist work pushes back against efforts to create more He-For-She demands, e.g. for men’s supposed responsibility to stop partner violence; for men’s responsibility to address the wage gap; for men to assist in promoting affirmative action policies; to do more household chores; for taking up too much female space on public transport, or for not setting the office air conditioning to women’s desired temperature. These and many more ‘patrarchy-do’ lists amount to little more than collective female nagging, which anti-feminists are helping to call out in the public domain.

Secondly, anti-feminists fight the widespread censorship of men’s issues by feminists. The problem of feminist-driven deplatforming and censorship was even apparent in Ernest B. Baxs’ day, which he described in the year 1913; “[Feminists] seek to stop the spread of the unpleasant truth so dangerous to their cause. The pressure put upon publishers and editors by the influential Feminist sisterhood is well known.” In response there has always existed people within the MRM who push back against feminist-driven censorship of men’s issues, and indeed censorship from other sources, and this needs to continue with full force.

To put these two concerns in context, pushing back against feminist demands on men, and feminist censorship, have never been the only goal of the men’s movement despite claims by some that the MRM is synonymous with ‘antifeminist backlash.’ To suggest equivalence is to confuse purely antifeminist movements with the much broader portfolio of the men’s human rights movement.

A survey of the last 100 years reveals that the MRM is concerned more directly with issues impacting men and boys such as alimony, genital mutilation of male infants, homelessness, mental illness, false accusations, family court bias, suicide, child custody, low funding for male health issues, legal discrimination, educational performance, and misandry in mainstream culture just to name a few. And just as important, a pressing issue today is fostering of more life choices for men: Its time for men to embrace whatever options exist beyond the narrowly prescribed role of serving women – just as women long ago rejected narrow roles and responsibilities toward men.

The time for the multi-option man is now.

Gynocentrism And The Demographic Implosion Of Western Civilisation

November 25, 2019July 13, 2020 / Peter Ryan / 3 Comments

By Peter Ryan

Things Are Not As Simple As They Seem

In this article I wanted to share a comment I made in relation to Sargon’s video¹ on the increasing trend of people not having children. He was specifically addressing an article about Emma Watson and her choice to “self-partner” and remain single. He went on further to share his thoughts more broadly, about the trend among men and women of not having children. Whilst I certainly think that the importance of people having children to replace society is a valid point, I think he misses the mark by failing to address the environment that is producing this problem and that he focuses too much on individual selfishness as a cause. So I have left a comment below on his video addressing that:

“Shaming people for not breeding in this highly dysfunctional gynocentric society, is like blaming people for leaving a burning building. The sexes are naturally attracted to each other. We have not had a problem replacing ourselves for the entire history and prehistory of our species. Healthy males and females in healthy functional societies, where relationships are healthy and functional, reproduce just fine without shaming people.

It is quite interesting how quickly people are ready to shame single men in particular for being single (and I note it is almost always directed at single men and not single women, because we are that gynocentric we blindly adhere to gynocentric double standards like zombies), but stop the presses if we look at and criticise the gynocentric bias in family court, divorce, the feminist criminalisation and demonisation of masculinity in the legal system and wider culture and the deliberate marginalisation of men in education and employment and the legal system and all of the associated effects that has on men not partnering up and remaining single.

We could look at the effect of the neglect of boy’s education in the feminised education system, feminist employment quotas and its mismatch with female mate choice which is at least partly based on male earnings and female hypergamy, as just one example of many.

If people are SO concerned about the population not replacing itself, how about having the courage to deal with the rampant gynocentrism² that is at the root of the problem? The usual silence of course will follow no doubt. People can keep ignoring gynocentrism all they like- Until gynocentrism is confronted our civilisation will continue its path of decline. Mark my words- No amount of shaming men will stop this problem. Gynocentrism will continue to destroy society until it is confronted.

I understand Sargon is talking about Emma here, but he is also talking about the growing numbers of single people in general (male and female). What he does not address in the video, is the toxic anti-male gynocentric environment that is driving the low birth rate. He talks about taking responsibility for perpetuating the society that birthed and raised us, but then fails to mention this same society cultivated the very environment that generated the problem he is talking about in the first place. How about the responsibility older generations and society as a whole has for creating a gynocentric feminist environment where the population does not replace itself? Insert crickets.

See responsibility works both ways. If you bring a future generation into this world, you are responsible for making sure you raise them right and preserve your culture and address social dysfunction so they have a healthy society to raise your grandchildren in. You better make sure you protect your culture and values and don’t continuously ignore social problems like gynocentrism.

So you see, society actually has no right to point the finger at younger people not breeding in an environment that is the result of decades of reckless disregard for societies future by older generations. This video is 30 years too late and now older generations and this feminist society will reap what it is sown.

You want to fix this problem? Stop blaming people for leaving a burning building and start putting out the fire.”

Sargon does some brilliant work, but in this instance I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding presented in his video, of the nature of the problem behind the low birth rates in the West and what is actually required to perpetuate society. I do not think things are as simple as Sargon describes in his video and I do think we need to be honestly appraising just how healthy and functional Western culture actually is at the moment, given how gynocentrism permeates almost every aspect of it.

The Gynocentric Cancer Destroying Our Society

Men and women are biologically wired to reproduce and pass on their genes. This is a key driving force of our evolution and the evolution of all living things. The fact that our society has become so dysfunctional that substantial numbers of men and women are not reproducing despite the natural drive to do so, speaks volumes about just how irresponsible older generations and the present population have been to let our culture and society degrade to this level. In our gynocentric culture, we place women on a pedestal and we place men in service to women and then we expect through our collective wilful ignorance, that this dynamic will not lead to exploitation and dysfunction.

This gynocentric mindset has destroyed marriage and relationships, broken up the family and caused an epidemic of single motherhood and fatherlessness. As Stardusk (or Thinking Ape) describes in this video³, our low birth rates are in many respects the result of society putting men down to lift women up and artificially elevated female hypergamy. This mismatch guarantees a low birth rate and the collapse of the welfare state Sargon is so concerned about in his video, when he discusses the pension. This is what happens when society throws men under the bus to pedestalise women. Men are the golden goose that keeps society running and society is killing the golden goose.

The support within our culture and wider society to place female well-being above male well-being and the willful ignorance of the long-term consequences of this imbalance coupled with modernity, has led to where we are now- A dying society. This is a society where men can be put in jail if they fail to pay alimony to their ex-wives (who can work) to finance their lifestyle, even if it exceeds their income or they are unemployed. This is a society where men can have their lives destroyed from a single unproven allegation by a woman and their false accusers can walk away with no consequence. This is a society where in some places⁴, boys who are statutorily raped by adult women, can later be forced to pay child support to their abusers.

This is a society of fatherlessness, where single motherhood is encouraged and fathers are denigrated in our culture and marginalised in our family courts and legal system. Multiple generations of boys and girls have now grown up through divorce and family court and many of them have been denied any meaningful relationship with their father. This is a society where the needs of boys and men in education and employment are ignored and where the needs of girls and women in these areas are prioritised.

Sargon is correct to criticise the selfishness, narcissism and solipsism arising from the culture of female entitlement. However, I cannot agree on his broad criticism of men and women that choose to remain single (like many MGTOW) and not have children. Choosing to have children is a choice and not a responsibility. Choosing not to have children in this highly dysfunctional gynocentric culture, is completely understandable and that is especially so for men.

When you bring a life into this world, you are responsible for raising them and ensuring they have a meaningful constructive future. Increasing numbers of younger people are looking at the future and have serious concerns about the trajectory society is on. Many of these younger people come from broken homes and have seen what divorce and family court does. Many have lived it and experienced the consequences of it directly. Young men in particular, have every reason to be sceptical about marriage, relationships and starting a family.

Many younger people are aware of our enormous and ever-increasing national debts, the huge unfunded government liabilities, the unaffordable housing and the reality our governments have done nothing to address these problems for decades. They are aware of the death spiral of debt the West is in and the increasing prospect of a major depression and a major global conflict with China. Massive student debt and unaffordable housing, combined with the reality of divorce and family court, just add further barriers to men and women starting families and keeping them intact (should they even start one).

Not everyone has the means to raise a child with living costs and housing being so expensive and with employment becoming increasingly volatile and unstable (especially with automation and globalisation). Many younger men in particular are struggling to get a start in life, because of the marginalisation of boy’s education, the effects of fatherlessness and the introduction of feminist employment quotas and selective hiring policies catering to women that discriminate against men. Young men obviously are going to find it more difficult to marry and raise children, when the deck has literally been stacked against them and no effort is being made to address the issues they are facing in education and employment.

No one discusses these realities and they have remained unaddressed for decades. These problems have actually worsened across the West and continue to do so. Then we wonder why people are not breeding. How responsible is it to simply breed and have no regard for the quality of life your children will have? Reproducing without having the means to properly raise children and without considering their future, is reckless and irresponsible. Not having children is sometimes the responsible thing to do.

Not all people should have children and be parents either. Some people are too irresponsible to raise children, or they simply do not have the financial means to properly support children. The continuation of Western civilisation is dependent on far more than just mindless breeding. Having children requires proper planning and investment from both individuals and from wider society, so that future generations are raised properly and preserve the society and culture. Producing large numbers of your children in single mother households with no father, ensures you will have future generations of dysfunctional adults and that your society will decline and regress. Fatherhood is required for modern, developed and advanced countries to stay modern, developed and advanced. Simply breeding with no regard for anything else, just creates countries of poor people.

Why So Many MGTOW Opt Out Of Marriage And Children

No one ever asks the question- Why do so many men that go their own way (MGTOW) choose not to marry and have children? Why is it that growing numbers of men are voluntarily walking away from getting married and starting a family?

The answer, aside from what I have already stated in this article, is that marriage is now essentially a slave contract where the human rights of men can be nullified through the divorce process at the whim of women. That is actual reality and not an exaggeration. Fathers are now reduced to temporary legal guardians that can be removed from their children by the mother at any stage and with the full force of the state. Men are not walking away from marriage and family, because these concepts now exist in name only. Men are walking away from a broken toxic gynocentric system of state sanctioned exploitation. A system that places the needs of women first and the needs of men and children last.

Childless Incels

I do not agree with Sargon either that involuntarily celibate people that by their own label want to reproduce, should be shamed for not doing so. I am frankly surprised Sargon is not able to see the logical inconsistency in his own argument. Shaming people for not doing something they clearly voluntarily want to do, is not going to achieve anything. It makes me wonder whether Sargon understood that the letter “i” in incel stands for involuntary. I think he misspoke here.

Where The Problem Really Lies

Frankly the problem of our low birth rate, does not lie with single men or single women. Sargon says this is a good society with good values that should be continued and yet it cannot replace itself. There are plenty of things to like about the West, but ultimately it is the cancer of gynocentrism in the West (which feminism is just a symptom of) that will ensure it declines. This society is dysfunctional because it allows gynocentrism to grow unopposed and the result has been the breakdown of the family, marriage and relationships and an epidemic of fatherlessness and single motherhood. If Western civilisation is so “good” and if our values are so great, then why can’t it sustain itself? Clearly there is something wrong with a society that cannot continue itself.

This is not a “good” society with “great” values. This is a dying society living off its past greatness and pretending everything is okay under a thin veneer of debt laden decadence. Great values? This is a society that abandons free speech, due process, human rights and basic morals in the face of gynocentrism. Unless something radical happens, the world will be talking about the fall of Western civilisation in a few centuries time.

Simply replacing people with new people, is just one part of continuing society and hardly all of what is required. It is imperative that society confronts and addresses problems that threaten its existence, such as gynocentrism and our over-reliance on debt and does not just keep ignoring them and kicking the can down the road (The “I will be dead by then mentality” of the boomer generation comes to mind.). It seems to me that the people so concerned about society not replacing itself, don’t seem concerned enough to confront the source of the problem- gynocentrism. How responsible is that? Think about that for a moment.

This article is not just in response to Sargon. So many other people, particularly from the “Alt-Right”, traditionalists and nationalists, are quick to judge people and particularly men that do not breed, as selfish and irresponsible. They give no consideration of the state of the debt driven society we are living in and how this toxic gynocentric environment is discouraging people and particularly men from having children. In reality many men are that responsible, they see it as irresponsible to raise children in a dying debt laden society that is living on borrowed time, treats men like slaves, rewards and even glamorises women for their bad behaviour and does not hold such women accountable.

The Sun Is Setting In The West

This video⁵ was recently made by Stardusk on the contrast between how the West and China regards single motherhood and the impact that is going to likely have on the future of the two societies. Fatherlessness and single motherhood in the West, will contribute to its fall. Sustaining your society is not just about pumping out babies. Society must ensure that they properly raise younger generations to become well-adjusted adults and that the culture and institutions are preserved to provide them with a proper future.

What we have seen over at least the last three decades, is a complete failure of the West to properly raise future generations. We have seen the rapid rise of fatherlessness and the breakdown of the family. We have also witnessed the feminist corruption and decline of our institutions, particularly at our universities and in our legal systems. The magnitude of the damage fatherlessness, the breakdown of the family and the decline of our institutions is going to leave on our civilisation in the coming decades, will be simply enormous. We have witnessed nothing yet, the jet-black storm on the horizon has been building for 50 years.

The sun will be setting in the West and rising in the East over the course of this century. The West is not the best. We actually encourage single motherhood, we have let feminism destroy our institutions and we have marginalised men, boys and fathers. Gynocentrism will play a large role in our undoing. Time to wake up and recognise that we are not as good a civilisation or culture as we think we are. The question is this- Do we value female approval more than we value the continuation of civilisation? At the moment it seems the answer is yes. For that we deserve what we get.

When I think of the future I remind myself that no one can know what the future may hold with certainty. We all have to take collective responsibility for the future of our society and hold our governments accountable for the decisions they make our behalf.

What I see at the moment, is a society on the decline and headed for a major war (possibly a world war). I see a society that prefers to live in decadence and blissful ignorance and refuses to make the hard decisions required to address the serious social and economic problems it faces. I see older generations kicking the can down the road and passing the buck onto younger generations and no one in government taking any responsibility for the long-term prosperity and security of our countries.

That does not have to be our future. We could solve a great deal of problems if society had the collective will to say no to gynocentrism and restore balance between the sexes. Valuing men is not antithetical to civilisation, it is essential to civilisation. In actuality it was treating men as disposable that led to gynocentrism running rampant to begin with and reaching a level where it now threatens the very existence of society.

A fempocalypse⁶ is not some farfetched idea, it is the logical end point to the crazy train of gynocentrism- We need to find the brakes fast.

* * *

A Follow-Up To The Article Above: Take The Loaded Gun Out Of The Room

I noticed after writing this article, that Sargon has done a follow-up video⁷ on the baby boomers and responded to some of the criticism levelled by people at his earlier video that I addressed. Consequently I would like to respond to that. It is good to see that he has identified the substantial degree of responsibility of older generations for the gynocentric and economic mess that future generations have inherited. I mentioned this as well in my own article.

I cannot agree though with Sargon’s stance on marriage in the modern cultural and legal climate and encouraging men to marry in our current gynocentric society. As I discussed, marriage is no longer marriage. Marriage is now a scam and the marital contract is now a legal instrument that can be used to extort men and enslave them. The family court and divorce process has so thoroughly undermined what marriage was, that marriage as a functional and legally binding contract to formalise a healthy mutually beneficial partnership between men and women to raise a family, simply just does not exist. Marriage is no longer marriage and this needs to be recognised.

I am not suggesting formal partnerships between men and women should not exist. I am stating the fact that modern marriage is no longer a formal partnership in which the interests of men and women are equally protected under the law. If marriage was a business partnership, no one would start a business. As long as women carry around the “loaded gun” that feminists have placed in their hands, which divorce, family court and domestic violence legislation represents, there can be no proper partnership. This is what feminists wanted and feminists have succeeded. They have succeeded because our gynocentric culture places female well-being above male well-being and female interests above male interests.

The notion by Sargon that women should show “restraint” in not exercising the power they have thanks to the gynocentric bias in family court, divorce and domestic violence legislation, in order to encourage men to marry, is not a solution. We are talking about men’s basic human rights being infringed upon by women with the full force of the state and there is no justification for half-measures. If things were in reverse, we would not be asking men to “restrain themselves” to encourage young women to marry them. We would not be finding ways to make this system “work”, if women were treated in divorce and family court like men are. We would be tearing the whole system down, encouraging women not to marry and marching in the streets with torches.

The mere possibility that women at their whim, can use the state to imprison men that displease them, alienate fathers from their own children and turn men into indentured servants to finance their lifestyles, is a disgusting indefensible crime. It is an abuse of human rights and this modern system of marriage and divorce has no place in a supposedly civilised society. There is no justification for this system and “marriage” in its present form (which is now marriage in name only), regardless as to whether women show “restraint”- Take the loaded gun out of the room. No ifs, no buts, no excuses, no half-measures. Men have a right not to have their basic rights threatened.

Men should not be put in a secondary position to women when it comes to marriage, the family, divorce, family court and the law. That should just be assumed, it should not even have to be stated. Sargon recognises that there needs to be change and I would wholeheartedly agree. There needs to be fundamental reform of divorce and family court. There needs to be reform in our legal system regarding correcting the imbalance introduced by feminist domestic violence legislation and feminist driven policy. There needs to be renewed respect for fathers and men in general. The list is a mile long with things that need to be changed. Until that happens, marriage in its present form is not marriage and it is about time we stopped living in denial about that. It is time society confronted the stench coming from the family court and divorce extortion industry and bureaucracy.

References:

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtYO4zJQw2c
2. https://www.avoiceformen.com/gynocentrism/diagnosing-gynocentrism/
3. https://www.avoiceformen.com/feminism/feminist-governance-feminism/legally-obscene/
4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jtybXWGhFw
5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_If9t9FLTs
6. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w__PJ8ymliw
7. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3v67IrYtvw

A sentimental continuation of coverture

November 6, 2019October 10, 2023 / Peter Wright / 1 Comment

Most of us have observed the baffling refusal of women to take responsibility for mistakes, or for outright shitty behavior. More accurately said, we’ve all observed women’s tendency to impute responsibility for their transgressions to others; especially to men. Thousands of people recognize the tendency; they discuss it, make jokes about it, suffer it in their marriages, and every single day you can read hundreds of new anecdotes demonstrating it in action. In short, it’s definitely a thing.

Where the hell does does this behavior originate?

Some might view it as a genetic phenomenon, that women’s refusal to take responsibility arises from a genetic imperative. Or perhaps we might accept a pretzel-shaped argument from an Evolutionary Psychologist finding that women’s shirking of responsibility is a necessary sexual or survival strategy. Unfortunately such hypotheses do little more than mirror the traditionalist custom of absolving women of responsibility.

For this article I’m going to pose a simpler, culturally rooted explanation: coverture.

The doctrine of coverture, in its most basic definition, dictates that husbands are to take responsibility for wives’ wellbeing, and also to suffer proxy punishment for her social and legal transgressions – all responsibility rests with the husband whether he likes it or not.

As a social policy, the doctrine of coverture began to develop from approximately the 11th century, gaining currency throughout the British Isles from where it was imported to the wider world via English colonies. Douglas Galbi summarises the intent of coverture as follows:

Coverture was the idea that husband and wife are one under law. More specifically, coverture assigned to the husband responsibility and punishment under law for his wife’s criminal acts. Coverture also protected women from mass imprisonment for debt in early modern England…

Coverture was among a range of institutions and ideas that generated highly disproportionate imprisonment of men. Legal history conventionally interprets coverture as a legal concept oppressing women. Coverture oppressed women in the same way that men-only Selective Service registration oppresses women today…

Coverture has been badly misunderstood in legal history. Coverture assigned to husbands responsibility for their wives’ criminal acts and their wives’ debts. Coverture increased the criminalization of men… Anti-men bias in invoking coverture is a general rhetorical pattern built upon deep structures of gynocentrism.¹

According to the Oxford Dictionary, coverture originally referred to anything used as a cover, such as a shelter, the lid of a cup or dish, the cover of a book, or the cover of a bed, and is synonymous with the general and collective sense of ‘covering.’

In its wider sense, the purpose of a coverture is described as any device used to provide protection, shelter, or adornment. Interestingly, it can also mean to conceal as in a veil or disguise used to foster covert conduct or to deceive. In the latter sense coverture “covers a multitude of sins,” thereby offering a pretense, a justification, and a defense for egregious conduct.

The social doctrine of coverture saw that men “covered” for women’s sins in exchange for the husband’s supposed privilege of authority; a privilege we could justifiably read as a poisoned chalice when one considers the number of men that went to the gallows in place of their wives.

Fast forward to the 19th century when coverture laws were still in place, and the advent of feminism was beginning. Feminists hit upon a plan to remove the “male authority” facet of the coverture doctrine, but to retain the “male responsibility for women’s wrongdoing” aspect of it. In effect they split coverture down the middle, trashing one half of the doctrine and continuing to preserve the other. As E. B. Bax observed:

“For it is a significant and amusing fact that no mention is ever made by the advocate of women’s claims of the privileges which have always been accorded the “weaker sex.” These privileges are quietly pocketed as a matter of course, without any sort of acknowledgment, much less any suggestion of surrender.” Some Heterodox Notes on the Women Question (1887)

“This public opinion regards it as axiomatic that women are capable of everything men are capable of, that they ought to have full responsibility in all honourable and lucrative functions and callings. There is only one thing for which unlimited allowance ought to be made on the ground of their otherwise non-existent womanly inferiority, and that is their own criminal or tortious acts! In a word, they are not to be held responsible, in the sense that men are, for their own actions when these entail unpleasant consequences for themselves. On the contrary, the obloquy and, where possible, the penalty for the wrong-doing is to be shifted on to the nearest wretched man with whom they have consorted.”
Why I Am an Anti-Suffragist (1909)

“To men all duties and no rights, to women all rights and no duties, is the basic principle underlying Modern Feminism, Suffragism, and the bastard chivalry it is so fond of invoking.”
The Fraud of Feminism, Chapter VII: The Psychology of the Movement (1913)

Further to Bax’s claim that the penalty for women’s wrongdoing got shifted onto the nearest wretched man, we appear to have come in the 21st century to not only maintaining, but amplifying the blame game in an effort to retain the “dignity, esteem, and reputation” of today’s women — a blame game that has its unbroken root in the tradition of coverture.

If the theory of ongoing-coverture satisfies the baffling question of why women shirk responsibility, then we at least have an answer. Women want to maintain the historical tradition of having their transgressions excised, hidden and covered by men, while they go about securing the gynocentric utopia they have been so effective at building.

Maintenance of sentimental coverture rightly belongs to gynocentrism theory. For how could gynocentrism survive if women took more responsibility, if they were more accountable for their acts? Quite simply gynocentrism couldn’t survive on that basis, particularly if their aim is one of fairness and equality which can only be achieved by truly emancipating women and holding them responsible for their actions.

So as a working model lets add sentimental coverture as one of 5 pillars of a gynocentric temple, which would look something like this:

1. Chivalry,
2. Courtly/romantic love,
3. Gender narcissism,
4. Coverture, and lastly
5. Power-seeking (via the long march through the institutions of power, this strategy being evident for centuries before Marxism was dreamed up, as for example in the writing of Christine De Pizan and her ‘City of Ladies’).

In summary, this article posits that coverture has survived long beyond its historical use in law, becoming a social custom divested of its original legal framework. Whatever the merits of its original purpose, the sentimental continuation of coverture provides an enduring custom encouraging women’s shirking of personal responsibility – this thanks in no small part to the activism of the feminist movement which postures as progressive, but turns out to be the same as it ever was.

References:

[1] Galbi, Douglass, Coverture, Domestic Violence & Criminalization of Men (2015)

The wonders of feminism combined with the sentimental continuation of coverture

Elizabeth Hobson on ‘proto-feminism’

March 8, 2019March 8, 2019 / rtbavfm / 2 Comments

The following is an excerpt from Elizabeth Hobson’s latest article in PoliQuads Magazine.

Feminists Do Not Get To Define Feminism

By Elizabeth Hobson

Proto-feminism arose in the late Middle Ages. Queen consort of France and England, Eleanor of Acquitaine spearheaded a movement within her court to subvert the chivalric code (which had traditionally governed relations between knights and lords) to regulate the behaviour of men towards women. These women initiated a system of romantic feudalism wherein noble men were under irresistible pressure to identify a lady as midons (my lord) and to submit to her will and delicately accept any scorn that her midons saw fit to extend to him. Eleanor established “Courts of Love” in which she and her noble women would administer “justice” in romantic disputes. Not only may many men in particular recognise this state of gender relations, but the modus operandi that Eleanor and company used to achieve their supremacy is entirely familiar: generalizations about all men based on the poor behaviour of a minority, asserting that women need protection from men’s violations, and a narrative of women’s moral superiority justifying their dictatorship. Within 200 years, Eleanors’ ideas had spread and saturated throughout Europe and throughout the class system….. [continued]

*The rest of this article exploring the various waves of feminism can be read in PoliQuads Magazine

Gynocentrism and misandry

January 22, 2019July 13, 2020 / Peter Ryan / 2 Comments

By Peter Ryan

In my previous article “Perversions of gynocentrism”¹, I discussed the void of respect for men and boys. We live in a culture that does not respect the male half of the human race. To call this truth out is to attract the ire of feminists and be labelled a whinger and a misogynist that is just angry his supposed “privilege” has been taken away. The contempt that our gynocentric society has for men and boys is a forbidden topic to discuss.

This hostile reaction to discussing men’s issues and their well-being and labelling any men that discusses them a whinger, is not just seen from feminists. It is also expressed from a substantial number of men and women in society. It is an ugly reality of human nature that people do not like to confront their own bigotry and when they are confronted, it generally elicits a hostile response. The reality is that the misandry that feminism vomits out into society, is just a symptom of a much more deeply rooted problem in our culture.

Men and boys cannot read a newspaper, watch television, go online, listen to the radio, go to work, or to college or school, or even socialise with their peers, without being regularly bombarded with hateful and bigoted messages that there is something inherently toxic about them or wrong with them because they happen to be male. There is a feminist campaign of psychological warfare directed at men and boys. Tom Golden has compared it² to the communist brainwashing of political dissidents in China and made a compelling argument feminists are using the same techniques.

In my article “Diagnosing Gynocentrism”³, I discussed how gynocentrism is associated with a belief in female superiority. This belief holds that women and girls are naturally and inherently superior to men and boys based on being female. This belief emerges from two attitudes. There is an underlying attitude that masculinity is inherently flawed and that masculinity is toxic, violent, predatory, destructive and primitive. There is also a corresponding attitude that femininity is flawless, pure, peaceful, empathetic, life-giving and civilised. Gynocentric slogans like “women civilise men”⁴ and feminist terms like “toxic masculinity”⁵, are just two expressions of this same belief system. Female superiority is a belief system that leads to the dehumanisation of men and boys and the deification of women and girls.

Within one week of me publishing “Perversions of Gynocentrism”, the American Psychological Association released their guidelines on dealing with men and boys, which pathologises traditional masculinity. Ex-Navy Seal Jocko Willink, has written a brilliant article debunking this nonsense⁶ and I highly recommend people take time to read it. Numerous psychologists such as Dr. Gad Saad⁷, Dr. Shawn Smith⁸ and Dr. David Ley⁹ in Psychology Today, have strongly criticised these guidelines and the demonisation of masculinity and the feminist ideological bias within them. A few days later, Gillette releases their new ad¹⁰ on how men need to reform themselves and evolve past their primitive, violent and predatory ways (because apparently all men in general are now represented by the actions of a handful of predatory, backwards and violent men). These examples of demonising men and masculinity are nothing new. This has been going on for decades.

Where I live, we have government funded man-bashing ads on TV on a regular basis¹¹, holding men in general collectively responsible for domestic violence. If one woman is murdered by a man, the media are quick to collectively hold all men¹² as sharing responsibility for their death. There is of course no discussion of female violence toward men. This is despite the abundance of research available¹³ that shows it is hardly a tiny fraction of domestic violence, but actually a substantial portion of it.

There is of course no collective blame directed at women in society for the actions of individual women that commit child abuse and physically attack their male partners. There should not be either, because all women and all men are not responsible for the actions of individual men and individual women. Of course this is understood when we look at female violence toward men and children, but not in the case of male violence toward women and children. That is just one gynocentric double standard that helps keep reinforcing the bigoted attitudes we have about men and women, which in turn drives the belief in female superiority.

Man bashing ads are like grains of sand on the beach. Books¹⁴and research papers¹⁵ have even been written on how pervasive the negative portrayal of men and masculinity is in this culture. The institutionalisation of misandry is also widespread in our society. Misandry is present in our political system, our universities, our family courts, our legal system, our schools, our universities, our corporations, our mainstream media and our government departments. It is in our policy, in our laws, in our news, in our entertainment, in school and university syllabus and academic scholarship and it is increasingly invading our personal spaces and social interactions.

None of this is new. What is new is the level of outrage the Gillette ad has generated. 2019 will mark the ten year anniversary of A Voice For Men. Ten years ago the Gillette ad would barely have created a ripple. There would have been some criticism, but hardly to the level we are presently seeing. This change in societal attitudes is a new phenomenon and an emerging trend. People have finally had enough. People are starting to notice the impact of what disrespecting the male half of the human race has in their own lives and they are recognising the true face of feminism. We have a long, long way to go, before we unlearn centuries of gynocentric programming. We are however starting to see society question the cultural narrative that something is inherently flawed about masculinity and also feminist ideology.

I did leave a comment on the Gillette ad. I responded as follows:

“Is this ad the best a man can get? Imagine if this ad generalised all black people or all women by the actions of a few individuals. Would such bigotry even get past production and be released? So why is it suddenly ok to generalise the male half of the human race by the actions of a few men? This is wrong. It is not “some” men doing the right thing, it is actually most men. Inspiring men to do better, requires respecting men to begin with. Seeing the worst in men and using shame and guilt to inspire them to do better, just creates the understandable level of hostility we see toward this ad. Men are not toxic, this message and messages like it are toxic. Inspiring men to do better, requires portraying a positive image of masculinity to your audience and not deriding them. Such simple logic.”

Predictably feminists attempted to gaslight me. That is their predictable (all so predictable) response when they get challenged on their own double standards. There is nothing wrong with what they are doing, it must be me and the million or so other people like me that expressed a problem with the ad. Not in one instance in the replies under my comment, did feminists answer my question about whether this ad would have even got past production if it had of portrayed black people or women in this way.

Gillette would have us believe “some” men but not most men, are doing the right thing by others. It is implied through omission that the majority of men need to reform themselves. The ad clearly exploits a perceptual bias called anchoring¹⁶, to set the perceptual frame in the viewers minds right from the beginning, that men in general are to be found guilty for the actions and behaviour of a handful of predatory and violent men. Then it proceeds to lecture men from a morally self-righteous position, on what men should be doing to redeem themselves. I will ask the question again, would feminists approve of this ad if an ad like this was made about women? I think we all know the answer to that and their silence to that simple question is deafening.

Feminists were predictably quite quick to obfuscate an examination of their own double standards and bigotry, by accusing people of having a problem with men acting like decent human beings, or even going as far as insinuating that I was somehow one of those toxic men portrayed in the ad. This is the predictable game feminist ideologues play- They set the bait to elicit anger from men, there is an angry reaction from men and then they frame themselves as victims of male aggression. It is all in your head, there is something wrong with you etcetera, etcetera. Gaslighting is a preferred tactic by feminists. But the central question that I asked still remains unanswered. Would these same feminist ideologues be perfectly fine with a comparable video being made about women? Indeed people have noted that double standard and have produced such videos¹⁷.

Men and women do not have a problem with the message of men acting like decent human beings. They do have a problem with an ad framing men in general as violent, primitive, predators and that only “some” men are doing the right thing. They do have a problem with an ad that takes such a pompous and morally self-righteous position to judge and shame it’s male customer base and then dare to lecture them on how they should behave. The ad like most feminist inspired ads, is dripping with condescension toward men¹⁸.

Paul Elam did an excellent response to the ad linked here¹⁹. I also left a comment on that video as follows:

“When I wrote about there been a void of respect for men, I was not saying that as a minor footnote. We live in a society that is so gynocentric it pathologises the very type of men and masculine traits it depends on to exist. They say fish rots from the head and it certainly does. This ad is nothing new, just more of the same. The misandry in ads has been going on for decades.

Feminist ideology is the religion of the corporate kleptocracy we live in. The steady progression of this toxic ideology through our public institutions and businesses, is the product of decades of general apathy from the public toward the well-being of men and boys. Society gave feminism the green light to demonise and dehumanise men and boys and marginalise them in the name of equality decades ago. Business executives and politicians go along with it because society mostly does not care and has shown zero concern for decades. Is anyone going to protest outside their HQ? Is anyone going to make a formal complaint or take legal action over this ad? Is this really going to lead to any serious and long-term boycott of their products? Is there going to be any real tangible consequences for this business and any well organised movement to pushback against this misandry?

There were many ads, articles, books and shows like this before and most people said nothing. Only now is the rotten stench of feminism starting to bother people.

You reap what you sow. This will continue to worsen until people confront and correct their own gynocentric programming. Exactly how bad the stench of feminism needs to get before that occurs, depends on how much people are willing to suffer for their own gynocentric stupidity. The moral laziness of society toward gynocentrism is really to blame, not a business that just reflects the fashionable bigotry of the day. Look in the mirror people.”

One year ago there was another video that attracted similar levels of controversy. Does anyone care to guess what it was? It was the Jordan Peterson interview with Kathy Newman on Channel 4²⁰. So you were saying? So you were saying? So you were saying? Remember? Strawman, gaslight, strawman, gaslight. Precisely the same feminist tactics of painting men as villains and portraying themselves as victims, was on full display a year ago from that interview and in its aftermath. Just like now, there were millions of people that heavily criticised that interview. The cycle of misandry repeats itself over and over again each year and it will continue to escalate.

So my question to people is what are you going to do now? This is not a new problem. I can pretty much guarantee with certainty that the bigotry and contempt that our feminist controlled society has towards men, is going to keep continuing and keep escalating. You can expect more ads like this. What we are presently facing is not something that just grew overnight. The demonisation and the marginalisation of men and masculinity, has been going on for decades. It was the apathy and the indifference of the general population to what feminists were doing then, that allowed the pervasive misandry in our society to be normalised by feminists and grow to the point we are observing today.

I want people to really think about how deeply entrenched the hatred of men would have to be in our society, for the American Psychological Association to come up with their feminist inspired guidelines toward treating men and boys. I went through multiple examples in “Perversions of Gynocentrism”, on describing the world we now live in and how they illustrate a void of respect we have for men and boys. It is not hyperbolic for me to say that if I replaced men with Jews in some of the hateful content coming from our feminist media, academics and politicians, it would not look at all out of place in Nazi Germany. Could you imagine the outrage if the Washington Post article, “Why Can’t We Hate Men?”²¹ was written about Jews? Antisemitism is reprehensible and so is misandry. The fact you can write such hateful drivel about men in a major mainstream media publication, goes to show you just how depraved our society has become.

To get to this level of feminist depravity and hatred towards men in society, the general population had to be apathetic and indifferent enough to the well-being of men to permit it. That is the disgusting truth that no one wants to acknowledge. Even a substantial number of antifeminists will stop short of examining the reasons why feminists have been so successful in implementing their agenda, with next to no resistance from the population. All of these mothers and fathers with sons did nothing for generations, while feminism gradually infected and then spread through our institutions, companies, politics, media, legal system and public and private organisations. Despite the massive outcry over this one ad that goes for less than 2 minutes, the concern and outrage from the public over a multitude of far more serious examples of systemic and institutional misandry in society, is relatively little.

Men and boys are far behind girls at every level of education from kindergarten to postgraduate education. They have been struggling academically for decades in a feminist controlled education system that prioritises women and girls learning needs and avoids and silences any attempt to address this imbalance. Young men have seen their rights to due process eliminated on college campuses and their lives ruined from false allegations, thanks to biased feminist university policies and kangaroo tribunals. Husbands and fathers face severe bias in the family court and divorce process and many of them lose everything- wife, kids, house and sometimes their lives. Countless fathers are killing themselves on a regular basis from being alienated from their children. Men are now facing a social climate thanks to metoo# and changes to the legal system, where a woman can virtually point the finger at a man and based on an unproven accusation from more than 20 years ago and with no trial, the man can have his life destroyed. The list goes on and on.

Many of these problems have been around for decades and they are systemic in nature and have impacted millions of men and boys. The silence from our society to these issues has been deafening, because mostly no one cares. Like I said, the Gillette ad that went for less than 2 minutes, got more attention in one week than any of those men’s issues I just mentioned have gotten from society in twenty years! If these things were happening to women, we would be up in arms and there would be a revolution. The indifference to the suffering and marginalisation of men and boys, is a readily observable feature of society. This is the gender empathy gap²².

It is a stark and surreal claim to talk about men being privileged in a society that bends over backwards on every occasion to cater to feminist demands to prioritise female well-being (even to the point of spending money on stopping “manspreading” on public transport), while at the same time shaming and ostracising men and boys and showing such indifference to their suffering. So whilst I am glad to see the reaction to the Gillette ad, that reaction is just a blip on the radar screen. In contrast the reaction from society in general toward the systemic misandry within it, has been one of silence, indifference and in some cases encouragement. If people want to see real change, then that will have to change.

Feminism has been able to spread through the public and private sectors of our society with ease, because our leaders have correctly perceived that they will receive greater consequences from feminists for not going ahead with the feminist agenda, than from the general public if they do. Politicians will gladly parrot feminist talking points on domestic violence for example, because they know the attacks they will get from feminists in the media and elsewhere if they do not, will be orders of magnitude more detrimental to their political careers, than the consequences they will receive from the general public by doing so. I noticed Stardusk has raised this very same point in relation to his response to the Gillette ad²³ and also emphasised the importance of saying “no” to these feminist ideologues. It is the same situation in any big organisation that feminists infest.

Our society has been slowly rotting away from the inside year after year and decade after decade, from the slow and gradual feminist subversion of our institutions, academia, media, legal system, political system and corporations etc. The feminist capture of the universities has been essential to feminisms spread throughout society, ensuring that our future politicians, policy and law makers, business professionals, mental health professionals and educators, are thoroughly indoctrinated in feminist ideology and go on to work at senior levels where they can spread feminist ideology within the private and public organisations they work for.

In many ways modern society today resembles a termite infested house. The feminist infestation has gone by unimpeded for decades and now suddenly the damage is starting to appear on the surface. What people need to realise is the Gillette ad is just the tip of the iceberg of this problem. We now have a situation where the public and private sectors of our society, blatantly express the female supremacist values of feminist ideology and the general population is disgusted by what it sees. But what the general population is disgusted by, is really just a reflection of its own gynocentric double standards. All that was required for this to occur, was for people to remain indifferent to male-being for long enough to let feminism implement their agenda and entrench themselves in our institutions and corporations etc.

In “Perversions Of Gynocentrism” and “The Normalisation Of Gynocentrism”²⁴, I explained at a social and cultural level how the spread of feminism and gynocentrism has been achieved. Gynocentrism is at the heart of the pervasive misandry we are observing today and feminism is merely a political manifestation of gynocentrism. We are not going to overcome feminism by simply limiting our focus to criticising feminist ideology. We have to ask serious questions about why society has been so easily overtaken by feminism. We have to confront our own apathy toward male well-being. We have to confront our pedestalisation and deification of women and girls. We have to confront our own gynocentric programming and how that programming taps into basic sexual and emotional drives and short-circuits them. If we are not prepared to confront our own gynocentrism, then feminism will continue to degrade our society until it inevitably collapses from a fempocalypse²⁵.

Only if society cares enough about male well-being to react in a manner that leads to serious consequences for our politicians, businesses and academics etc to lead them to change their ways and resist feminism, will we see any change. Until then it will remain business as usual and feminism will keep on escalating the misandry in our society. Feminism has had several decades to infest every branch of society and has a great deal of political and financial momentum behind it. Feminism will not be defeated by a single protest or a single boycott or a single march or a single legal battle. It is going to take a sustained effort on multiple fronts to remove the decades of feminist rot in our society. It is going to take a society prepared to rise above its own gynocentrism and its one-sided concern for only female well-being, to generate a strong enough response to defeat feminism. Half measures will not be enough. If people truly have had enough of misandry like the Gillette ad, then we have to go the whole way and question our own double standards that prioritise female well-being and ignore male-being.

The gynocentric seeds of our own destruction bore the fruit of feminism. Feminism is just an extension and a reflection of our own bigotry. We have an underlying belief in female superiority embedded in our culture which we do not want to look at, because we do not like the reflection that stares back at us. We have bigoted attitudes toward men and toward women engrained in our culture. The women are wonderful effect²⁶ and the female in-group bias²⁷, are real measurable phenomena in our society and are the subject of scientific enquiry. We need to unlearn those attitudes. Men are not collectively responsible for the actions of mass murderers and serial rapists. Women and girls are not all sugar and spice and men and boys are not all primitive violent Neanderthals. The notion of women and children first and the complete disregard for male well-being, is indefensible in a modern developed society where women enjoy the same rights as men.

The underlying belief in female superiority that has gradually been embedded in our gynocentric culture and the attitudes it is based upon, need to be confronted and eradicated. Masculinity is not toxic, these gynocentric elements of our culture are toxic.

References:

A New Psychology for Men

January 11, 2019June 4, 2023 / Peter Wright / Leave a comment

By Peter Wright (first published in 2015)

Psychology clings to a universal model – that men are incorrigibly flawed and require a dismantling of their identities, habits, and preferences before being reconstructed according to a feminist model of masculinity. All modern therapies have this basic premise in common.

For example, one of the more popular models of men and masculinity to emerge in the last 20 years, promoted as A New Psychology of Men, is described in the following terms by one of its founders:

The new psychology of men has emerged over the past 15 years within the larger fields of men’s studies and gender studies. Informed by the academic breakthroughs of feminist scholarship, the new psychology of men examines masculinity not as a normative referent, but rather as a problematic construct. In so doing, it provides a framework for a psychological approach to men and masculinity that questions traditional norms of the male role and views some male problems as unfortunate byproducts of the male gender role socialization process.¹

Since it’s inception this “new” psychology of men has restated traditional gender stereotypes about men; that they are flawed, violent, emotional primitives in need of reconstruction. This supposedly “new” model has also been developed into a training course teaching therapists how to effectively work with men.

The course, designed by former American Psychological Association President Ronald Levant, is based on two principles held almost universally by therapists working with men; a). that patriarchy theory represents the real world, and b). that males are stunted in their emotional processing abilities. Let’s look at these two pillars of therapy.

Patriarchy theory

As with most psychologists and therapists today, Levant is informed by feminist-inspired patriarchy theory which posits that all men have power over all women and that such power is enforced by men’s violence. The theoretical vision, trumpets Levant, provides a “new” way of looking at men:

What scholars in the area of men’s psychology have attempted is nothing less than a reconstruction of masculinity. It starts from the recognition that there is a problem, and locates the roots of that problem in the male gender role… The new psychology of men strives to address the feminist critique of patriarchy while remaining empathetic to men.²

As many readers will know there is nothing “new” in this characterization of men, which we can summarize with the phrase, ‘Women have problems, and men are the problem.’ As Levant stresses, the primary approach to therapy with men is first to problematize them; “It starts from the recognition that there is a problem.”

In this model men are viewed as being problems before they even meet the therapist, who ignores the possibility that men’s problems may lie outside themselves in a world of grief they did nothing to deserve.

In other words, whatever the presenting complaints of the client they are immediately dismissed by the practitioner in order to coerce the client into an ideological mold of manhood. The practitioner, depending on their degree of indoctrination, may actually believe this will address the client’s issues but even a cursory examination of the “masculinity as identified problem” approach reveals numerous, deep flaws. In fact, this approach proves to be abusive in any reasonable interpretation of the word.

As I explain below there are other approaches to working with men that don’t presume they are flawed and need fixing. That approach begins with asking men what they experience in life, and what they might want to achieve in therapy, and actually listening to their answers. Therapists may be interested to hear men speak of a range of experiences and goals wholly unrelated to patriarchal domination of women and children.

Men as emotionally dumb

Referring to men as dumb has the double-meaning of both lacking in intelligence and being mute. This forms the basis of Levant’s theory that men possess little emotional awareness about themselves or others, that they are lacking in emotional intelligence, and that even were they to discover some emotional awareness they would not know how to express it in words, such is the depth of male lacuna. He refers to this problem in men as alexithymia – a Greek term meaning no words for emotions, insisting that most North American males suffer from this syndrome.

Levant states that “it is so very widespread among men that I have called it normative male alexithymia,”³ a syndrome that by definition only men and boys can be labelled with. There even exists a Normative Male Alexithymia Scale used to assess the depth of men’s need for therapeutic correction. Levant states,

One of the most far-reaching consequences of male gender-role socialization is the high incidence among men of… the inability to identify and describe one’s feelings in words… men are often genuinely unaware of their emotions. Lacking this emotional awareness, when asked to identify their feelings, they tend to rely on their cognition to try to logically deduce how they should feel. They cannot do what is automatic for most women -simply sense inwardly, feel the feeling, and let the verbal description come to mind.⁴

This claim, that men are “unaware of their emotions,” an assumption so typical of psychology’s view of men, has been a cornerstone of the therapeutic world for the last 40 years. And it is demonstrably wrong.

According to the vast majority of studies on emotional processing, men and boys are able to identify emotional arousal in themselves and others equally to women, emotions like jealousy, love, anger, sadness, anxiety, etc. But men and boys choose to regulate that emotional arousal not by verbalizing it so much (women’s preferred method) but by taking intelligent action. A woman for example might talk with her melancholic friend about what is worrying her in order to cheer her up; the man may invite the same melancholic friend to the movies; both responses -talking, or acting- serve to intelligently modulate emotions.

What Levant has failed to discriminate are 1. recognizing emotions, and 2. verbalizing them. He, and so many psychologists who came before and after him, assume that by not verbalizing emotion males must also have failed to recognize emotions. Countless studies however show this to be a false conclusion.⁵ Men, like women, can sense the full range of emotions – but they may choose to respond to that knowledge in a different manner to women.

Breaking with the past – starting afresh

Repackaging patriarchy theory is a move we no longer wish to make – at least not if we wish to genuinely help men. Increasing numbers of men are tired of waiting for the psychotherapeutic industry to drag its collective ass out of gynocentrism-land to develop a genuine new model for tackling male psychology.

To attain that model there has to occur a break with patriarchy theory and assumptions that men and boys are emotional dummies. As in a court of law we begin the new therapy with an assumption that men are not only innocent until proven guilty, but that ‘men are good’ to use Tom Golden’s iconic phrase.

Nor will work with men be savvy until it admits the realities of cultural misandry, gynocentrism and their undeniably crushing effects on modern males. The daily assaults on men and boys from advertizing, mental health services, media, family courts, pharmaceutical companies, education from grade school to grad school, anti-male bigots and ideologically driven governance must be included in the picture.

These are problems which are deleterious to all aspects of men’s lives, including mental health. The mental health industry is a huge part of that problem, not a part of the solution.

A sane alternative to all this must disabuse men, women and society of the following myths:

men belong to a patriarchy and take that model as their life script;
men are emotionally inept;
men are default potential sexual predators;
men are violent and uncaring;
men are not necessary as parents;
men are unable to commit;
men are emotionally unavailable;
men are not as human or deserving as women.

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The things we do want to include in a new mental health model are:

enhanced understanding of misandry, gynocentrism and their consequences;
recognizing and honoring men’s emotional acumen;
recognizing and combating misandry and gynocentrism in the mental health industry;
professional understanding of the ways men differ from women in how they cope with life;
a prohibition on the practice of expecting men to emulate women’s emotional processes;
an allowance of men’s legitimate anger without infecting them with ideological shame;
the steadfast belief that men’s issues, pain and needs are as important as anyone else’s.

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These points alone are sufficient to create a revolution in the way we work with men. As a truly new approach to men’s welfare and psychological health, An Ear For Men has been launched and the coming Men’s Mental Health Network will be promoting these principles and providing a range of specialized services from professionals who have been thoroughly vetted in their knowledge of men’s issues, and in their compassion for the same.

References:

[1] Ronald F. Levant, ‘The new psychology of men,’ in Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, Vol 27(3), Jun 1996, 259-265
[2] Ronald F. Levant, Men and Emotions: A psychoeducational approach – course material, Newbridge Publications, p.4, 1997
[3] Ronald F. Levant, Men and Emotions: A psychoeducational approach – course material, Newbridge Publications, p.9, 1997
[4] Ronald F. Levant, William S Pollack, A New Psychology of Men, pp.238-239, 1995
[5] For example, this Finnish study shows that while women were more proficient at verbalizing feelings, men and women were equally proficient at identifying feelings: Salminen, J. K. ‘Prevalence of alexithymia and its association with sociodemographic variables in the general population of Finland,’ Journal of psychosomatic research, vol. 46, no1, pp. 75-82, 1999

See also: Narrative Therapy with Men by Paul Elam and Peter Wright

Gynocentric Feminism – by Iris Young

January 10, 2019January 26, 2019 / rtbavfm / Leave a comment

Below is an excerpt from a 1985 paper entitled “Humanism, Gynocentrism, and Feminist Politics” by feminist Iris M. Young – PW.

Iris M. Young

Gynocentric feminism defines the oppression of women very differently from humanist feminism. Women’s oppression consists not of being prevented from participating in full humanity, but of the denial and devaluation of specifically feminine virtues and activities by an overly instrumentalized and authoritarian masculinist culture. Unlike humanist feminism, gynocentric feminism does not focus its analysis on the impediments to women’s self-development and the exclusion of women from the spheres of power, prestige, and creativity. Instead, gynocentric feminism focuses its critique on the values expressed in the dominant social spheres themselves.

The male-dominated activities with the greatest prestige in our society — politics, science, technology, warfare, business — threaten the survival of the planet and the human race. That our society affords these activities the highest value only indicates the deep perversity of patriarchal culture. Masculine values exalt death, violence, competition, selfishness, a repression of the body, sexuality, and affectivity.

Feminism finds in women’s bodies and traditionally feminine activity the source of positive values. Women’s reproductive processes keep us linked with nature and the promotion of life to a greater degree than men’s. Female eroticism is more fluid, diffuse, and loving than violence-prone male sexuality. Our feminine socialization and traditional roles as mothers give us the capacity to nurture and a sense of social cooperation that may be the only salvation of the planet.

Gynocentric feminism thus defines the oppression of women quite differently from the way humanistic feminism defines it. Femininity is not the problem, not the source of women’s oppression, but indeed within traditional femininity lie the values that we should promote for a better society. Women’s oppression consists of the devaluation and repression of women’s nature and female activity by the patriarchal culture.

? ? ?

Gynocentric feminism has received a number of expressions in the United States women’s movement in recent years. Artists and poets have been among the leaders in developing images of celebration of this more positive understanding of women’s history and contemporary self-understanding. Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, for example, laboriously and beautifully recovers whole aspects of women’s history and locates them within images of female genitalia and objects that rely on traditionally female arts.

Within the sphere of political activism, gynocentric feminism perhaps is best represented in the feminist antimilitarist and ecology movements of the past five years. In the Women’s Pentagon Action or the action at the Seneca Army Depot, for example, a major aspect of the political protest has been the use of symbols and actions that invoke traditional labor, such as weaving, spinning, birthing, mothering. Feminist antimilitarist and ecological analysis has argued that the dangers to the planet that have been produced by the nuclear arms race and industrial technology are essentially tied to masculinist values. The burgeoning movement of feminist spirituality entails a similar analysis and promotes values associated with traditional femininity.

A number of prominent recent theories of contemporary feminism express a gynocentric feminism. I see Susan Griffin’s Woman and Nature as one of the first written statements of gynocentric feminism in the second wave. It shows that one of the first steps of gynocentrism is to deny the nature/culture dichotomy held by humanists such as Beauvoir and to affirmatively assert the connection of women and nature. Daly’s Gyn/Ecology I see as a transition work. In it Daly asserts an analysis of the victimization of women by femininity that outdoes Beauvoir, but she also proposes a new gynocentric language.

Carol Gilligan’s critique of male theories of moral development has had a strong influence on the formation of gynocentric analysis. She questions dominant assumptions about moral valuation and affirms forms of moral reasoning associated with traditional femininity. Following Chodorow, she argues that gender socialization creates in women a relational communal orientation toward others, while it creates in men a more oppositional and competitive mode of relating to others. These gender differences produce two different forms of moral rationality: a masculine ethic of rights and justice, and a feminine ethic of responsibility and care.

Traditional moral theory has ignored and repressed the particularistic ethic of care as being pre-moral. Women’s moral oppression consists of being measured against male standards, according to Gilligan, in the silencing of women’s different voice. The dominance of those male centered values of abstract reasoning, instrumentality, and individualism, moreover, produce a cold, uncaring, competitive world. Both the liberation of women and the restructuring of social relations require tempering these values with the communally oriented values derived from women’s ethic of care. While Gilligan herself would reject the label of gynocentric feminist, her work has exerted an enormous influence on feminists in fields as diverse as mathematics and philosophy, providing the foundation for a revaluation of attributes associated with femininity.

Mary O’Brien articulates a gynocentric critique of traditional political theory starting from the bio-logical fact that the reproductive process gives women a living continuity with their offspring that it does not give men. Women thus have a temporal consciousness that is continuous, whereas male temporal consciousness is discontinuous. Arising from the alienation from the child they experience in the reproductive process, masculine thought emphasizes dualism and separation. Men establish a public realm in which they give spiritual birth to a second nature, transcending the private realm of mere physicality and reproduction to which they confine women.

Patriarchy develops an ideology of the male potency principle, which installs the father as ruler of the family and men as rulers of society, and substitutes an intellectual notion of creativity for the female principle of life generation. The contemporary women’s movement has the potential to overturn such a conception of politics that is separated from life continuity because out of female reproductive consciousness can come a politics based on women’s experience of life processes and species continuity.

Nancy Hartsock’s theory of the feminist stand-point from which she analyzes patriarchal culture is a more sweeping version of gynocentric feminism. She argues that the sexual division of labor provides men and women with differing experiences that structure different standpoints upon nature and social relations. Based on Chodorow’s theory of the development of gender personalities, Hartsock argues that men experience the relation of self and other as one of hostility and struggle.

The sexual division of labor also removes men from the needs of the body, from the vulnerability and basic demands of children and the aged, and provides men with an instrumentally calculative reltion to nature. This division of labor, she argues, produces a way of thinking about the world that Hartsock calls abstract masculinity, which organizes experience and social relations into binary oppositions in which one term carries greater value than the other.

This standpoint of abstract masculinity has determined the primary structure of Western social relations and culture. This male dominated culture’s values are both partial and perverse. It embodies sexuality where desire for fusion with the other takes the form of domination of the other. Masculine consciousness denies and fears the body and associates birth with death. The only sense of community generated by abstract masculinity, moreover, is the community of warriors in preparation for combat.

From women’s experience, Hartsock claims, we can both criticize masculinity values and conceptualization and develop a better vision of social relations. The gender personalities women develop in relation to their mothers give them a propensity to feel more connected with others than men do. The experiences of menstruation, coitus, pregnancy, and lactation, which challenge body boundaries, give women a greater experience of continuity with nature.

Women’s labor in caring for men and children and producing basic values in the home, finally, gives them a greater rootedness in nature than men’s work gives them, a more basic understanding of life processes. These attributes of women’s experience can ground, Hartsock argues, a form of conceptualization that does not depend on dichotomous thinking and that values connections among persons more than their separation, as does abstract masculinity.

While Sara Ruddick is careful to claim that any recovery and revaluation of traditionally feminine attributes must be infused with a feminist politics, her notion of maternal thinking provides another example of a gynocentric feminist analysis. She argues that the specific daily practices of mothering generate specific modes of thinking motivated by the interests in preservation, growth, and the acceptability of the child to the society. Maternal practice is not restricted to mothers, but exists wherever such nurturing and preservation interests prevail. She suggests that maternal thinking provides antimilitarist values that feminists can use in promoting a politics of peace.

Writing within a very different intellectual current from American feminists, using rather different assumptions and style, several women in France in recent years have developed distinctive versions of gynocentric feminism. I shall mention only Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. Like a number of other contemporary French thinkers, Irigaray describes phallocentric culture as preoccupied by a meta-physics of identity dominated by visual metaphors. Male thinking begins by positing the One, the same, the essence, that generates binary oppositions in which the second term is defined by the first as what it is not, thus reducing it to its identity.

Phallogocentric discourse defines the opposition male/female in just this way—woman is only not a man, a lack, a deficiency. Preoccupied with the straight, the true, the proper, men establish relations of property and exchange in which accounts are balanced. Women in the phallocentric system have been silenced and separated, exchanged as goods among men. Irigaray pro-poses that women must find and speak the specificity of female desire, which has completely different values from those of phallic thinking.

Women’s eroticism is neither one nor two but plural, as women’s bodies themselves experience arousal and pleasure in a multiplicity of places that cannot all be identified. Touch, not sight, predominates, the autoeroticism of vaginal lips touching clitoris, of intimate bodies touching. A genuinely feminine language moves and twists, starts over again from different perspectives, does not go straight to the point. Such a language can displace the sterility and oppressiveness of phallogocentric categorization.

Kristeva also focuses on language and the repression of specifically female experience. Language has two moments: the symbolic, the capacity of language to represent and define, to be literal; and the semiotic, those elements of language that slip and play in ambiguities and nuance. Certain linguistic practices, such as poetry, make most explicit use of the semiotic, but for the most part the playful, the musical in language is repressed in Western culture and the symbolic, rational, legalistic discourse rules.

For Kristeva this repression concerns the repression of the body and the installation of order, hierarchy, and authority. Repression of the body and the semiotic entails repression of the pre-oedipal experience of the maternal body before the subject emerges with a self-identical ego, as well as denial by the culture of the specificity and difference that the female body exhibits. Challenge to the dominant oppressions, to capitalism, racism, sexism, must come not only from specific demands within the political arena, but also from changing the speaking subject.

Kristeva finds in the repressed feminine the potential for such change, where feminine means at least two things: first, women’s specific experience as female bodies, the daughters of mothers, and often mothers themselves, an experience of a decentered subject; second, the aspects of language and behavior Western culture has devalued and repressed: the poetic, rhythmic, musical, nurturant, and soothing, but also contradictory and shifting ways of being, that fickleness that women have been accused of. This revolution of the feminine Kristeva finds in anumber of male avant-garde writers. The women’s movement, however, also carries the possibility of displacing the rigidity of a subject that loves authority, provided that women do not fall into that humanist feminism by which they simply demand to get in on the masculinist power game.

To summarize, humanist feminism defines femininity as the source of women’s oppression and calls upon male-dominated institutions to allow women the opportunity to participate fully in public world-making activities of industry, politics, art, and science. In contrast, gynocentric feminism questions the values of these traditional public activities that have been dominated by men. Women’s oppression consists not of being prevented from participating in full humanity, but of the denial and devaluation of specifically feminine virtues and activities by an overly instrumentalized and authoritarian masculinist culture. Femininity is not the problem for gynocentric feminism, and indeed is the source of a conception of society and the subject that can not only liberate women, but also all persons.

Diagnosing Gynocentrism

December 4, 2018January 25, 2021 / Peter Ryan / Leave a comment

By Peter Ryan

When we discuss men’s issues in the manosphere, the term “gynocentrism” is often attributed as the primary causal factor driving the marginalisation of men and boys in society. Understanding the nature of the force men are fighting, is a critically important step in developing effective strategies and possible solutions to the numerous issues men and boys are facing in society. Peter Wright at Gynocentrism.com ¹, defines and describes gynocentrism and discusses its cultural origins and biological underpinnings on his website.

Gynocentrism manifests itself in relationships and the culture in many ways. However, this is not always obvious. One of the powerful characteristics of gynocentrism is how subtle it is and how easily gynocentric bigotry can be disguised and hidden from our perception. Society is complex and often there are a multitude of variables involved in any activity, practice or set of behaviours etc. Gynocentrism can blend in with these other variables and the complexity of society can help push it into the background of our perception.

The biological drivers of gynocentrism ², also play a role in masking it from our perception. Gynocentrism is the product of superresponses to sexual and emotional superstimuli and these responses undoubtedly filter our perception, as well as produce the behaviours that give rise to gynocentrism. Intense cultural conditioning also plays a major role from cradle to grave, in training the brain to filter information through a gynocentric lens (the blue pill perspective). The gynocentric mobius strip is a readily observable social phenomenon.

As a result of these factors, there are examples in society where gynocentrism is obvious to many people (like radical feminism) and there are many examples where gynocentrism is not so obvious. There are also examples where an activity can be mistaken to be non-gynocentric and vice versa. It can often take years to train perception in adults to a point where gynocentrism can be readily identified (taking the red pill) and overcome the years of cultural conditioning and the acquired biological short circuits (the superresponses and positive feedback loops) that drive gynocentrism.

Gynocentrism is a slippery beast and defining it has been the subject of discussion in the manosphere (please see Paul Elam and Alison Tieman’s talk on this subject linked here ³). If we are to slay the gynocentric dragon, then we must first develop a refined definition of gynocentrism and diagnostic criteria for identifying it in society and relationships. It is important to define problems as precisely as possible, so we can develop effective targeted solutions. This article will be the first in a series of articles exploring the nature of gynocentrism.

In this article I will present a refined definition of gynocentrism and provide a simple set of diagnostic criteria for identifying it in society and relationships. I will provide practical examples of the operation of this definition and criteria, then discuss whether certain aspects of the culture are gynocentric and then describe a model of measuring the intensity of gynocentrism in the culture. It is my hope that this article and the following series of articles, will assist people in the manosphere in explaining what gynocentrism is to people unfamiliar with the concept and in relation to men’s issues. Solving a social problem requires spreading an awareness of the problem and this in turn requires properly identifying what it is.

What Is Gynocentrism?

I define gynocentrism as the following: The set of elements of society and relationships that are directed by the intent to prioritise female well-being over male well-being, based solely or partly on the sex of the intended beneficiary(ies) being female and for which there are no equivalent efforts made to provide corresponding commensurate benefits to males.

I define well-being as the quality of the overall condition of the life of an individual or group, that is based on taking their mental and physical health and life satisfaction into consideration.

The diagnostic criteria that must be met for an element of society or relationships to be considered gynocentric are the following:

The element must be driven by the intent to prioritise female well-being over male well-being.
This intent must be solely or partly based on the sex of the intended beneficiary(ies) being female.
There must be no equivalent efforts made to provide commensurate benefits to males for instances where female well-being is prioritised over male well-being.

Evaluating an element of society or relationships against these three criteria, requires some investigation to confirm the intent driving it and whether that intent is based on the sex of the group or individual that is meant to benefit from it. Quite often this information is overtly virtue signalled (like policies advocating female hiring quotas or domestic violence campaigns). On other occasions it is not and gynocentrism has to be identified through careful observation of the element in question and through a process of elimination.

The core belief that gynocentrism is associated with is female superiority. It is also associated with female entitlement mentality ⁴. Gynocentrism is a form of bigotry based on sex and is not a morally justifiable aspect of society or relationships. For those people that have doubts, please substitute “male” with black people and “female” with white people in the definition of gynocentrism, or simply reverse the sexes. Those individuals that appeal to nature to justify gynocentrism, should look up what a naturalistic fallacy is. We can appeal to nature to justify rape and that does not morally justify it or mean that we should accept it. Gynocentrism is not defensible and should not be normalised in the culture.

I called myself “theantigynocentrist” for this very reason and because I wanted to make it abundantly clear exactly what I am fighting against. Feminism is the political manifestation of gynocentrism and is just the tip of the iceberg of the problem I am standing up against. There are those that would prefer men just stop at feminism and not question anything beyond that. Heaven forbid men get the idea in their heads that they deserve to be treated fairly (The scene from Oliver Twist asking for more comes to mind. How dare men ask to be treated fairly! The horror.). Some so-called “antifeminists” are worried the gravy train of exploiting men might stop if men look beyond feminism and go to the root of the problem.

Armed with this refined definition of gynocentrism and the diagnostic criteria described earlier, it becomes possible to identify gynocentrism in society and relationships in a tangible way. What gynocentrism is and is not, can be illustrated with the following examples:

Example 1.

A man and a woman are both involved in a car accident. The woman is critically injured and at risk of death without immediate medical treatment and the man is walking around conscious with a few scratches and is in a stable condition. The woman is treated first.

This is not an example of gynocentrism. The paramedics prioritise the woman’s well-being over the man’s well-being, as the woman is objectively in greater need of immediate medical assistance and the man is not.

Example 2.

A man and a woman are both involved in a car accident. The man is critically injured and at risk of death without immediate medical treatment and the woman is walking around conscious with a few scratches and is in a stable condition. The woman is treated first, as the paramedics mutter women and children first.

This is gynocentrism. The paramedics prioritise the woman’s well-being over the man’s well-being, even though the man is objectively in greater need of immediate medical assistance.

Example 3.

A family celebrates Mother’s Day and then celebrates Father’s Day later in the same year.

This is not gynocentrism. There is a corresponding day for male parents.

Example 4.

An organisation celebrates International Women’s Day and does not celebrate International Men’s Day.

This is gynocentrism. There is no corresponding day of celebration for men at this organisation.

Example 5.

A company decides to implement a female hiring quota for their board that requires 50% of positions to be given to female candidates. The number of applicants is 90% male.

This is gynocentric. Female candidates are prioritised over male candidates and this is because they are female.

Example 6.

A company decides to implement a female hiring quota for their board that requires 50% of positions to be given to female candidates and 50% of positions to be given to male candidates. The number of applicants is 90% male.

This is gynocentric. Whilst men are given a corresponding benefit, this benefit is not commensurate with the benefit given to women. 90% of the applicants are male and yet only half of the positions are available to those men.

Example 7.

A company decides to implement a multifaceted policy to boost gender diversity on their board. The company develops a mentoring network for senior female managers to mentor younger women and offers them secondment opportunities in higher positions. An equivalent mentoring network is set up for men and the same secondment opportunities are offered. The company makes changes to provide equal amounts of maternity and paternity leave to male and female employees. Flexible work hours, subsidised childcare located at the workplace and the option to work remotely from home three days of the week, is provided to both male and female employees.

Whilst there might be other problems with the feasibility of this policy, it is not gynocentric. The intent driving this policy does not prioritise female well-being over male-wellbeing. The benefits given to women and men are balanced and the aim to prioritise gender diversity is not skewed in favour of either sex. However, the initiatives in this policy may increase female representation at senior managerial levels and have a flow on effect at board level.

Example 8.

A man and a woman with equal salary go out for dinner on a date. During the date the woman repeatedly makes it known they expect chivalry from the man. Despite desiring to pay half the bill, the man pays the entire bill to gain female approval and bows to the pressure to conform.

This is gynocentric. The woman’s well-being is prioritised over the man’s well-being because she is female.

Example 9.

A man and a woman with equal salary go out for dinner on a date. During the date the woman and the man chat and have a great relaxing time. The man has a generous character and enjoys giving gifts to people. Out of his own personal desire and generosity, he pays the entire bill. He feels very happy about this and suffers no detriment to his health and does not put his finances in jeopardy. The benefit to his well-being in his individual case, is commensurate with the benefit to the woman’s well-being.

This is not gynocentric. In this case the man is acting in an authentic manner that makes him happy and improves his well-being and his well-being is not given a secondary priority. Not all men will react the same way to the same situation. What may decrease one man’s well-being, may actually increase another man’s well-being. Men must be their authentic selves (provided they do not harm others, including themselves, unless in self-defence).

Example 10.

A man and a woman with equal salary go out for dinner on a date. During the date the woman and the man chat and have a great relaxing time. The man has a generous character and enjoys giving gifts to people. Out of his own personal desire and generosity he pays the entire bill. They go out on further dates to expensive restaurants and the man continues to pay the whole bill on each occasion. He also buys his date expensive jewellery every month. The man starts to fall into debt and starts to default on payments. He becomes stressed and depressed.

This is gynocentric. In this case the man may be getting some short-term satisfaction out of being so generous, but in general his life satisfaction and mental health are declining because of the growing debt he is accumulating. The net result is that his well-being (or the quality of the overall condition of his life) is in decline.

There is nuance to life and these examples demonstrate that there is nuance to gynocentrism. What may appear healthy on the surface may actually be unhealthy and what may appear an unhealthy behaviour to some people, may be actually healthy for that particular person. These examples illustrate why it becomes important to define concepts along lines that reflect what they are intended to describe. The central recurring principle driving the discussion facing men’s issues is fairness.

Is it fair that men receive far lower funding for their health than women and yet have significantly shorter lifespans and generally have a higher disease burden? Is it fair that we have engineered our entire education systems to cater to the needs of girls over the needs of boys? Is it fair that women receive considerably shorter and more lenient sentences for committing exactly the same crimes as men, even after controlling for other variables? In many respects, men are simply demanding to be treated fairly and not to be treated in a discriminatory fashion simply for being male. Men are demanding an end to gynocentrism.

Is Chivalry Gynocentric?

As has been discussed on many occasions in the manosphere, gynocentrism has been around longer than modern feminism. Romantic chivalry ⁵ is often cited as an example of historical gynocentrism and indeed it is. But why? It is not the actions alone that pedestalise women, that make chivalry gynocentric. It is the fact that chivalry is also a series of socially enforced expectations that men are expected to live up to, whether they want to or not. Chivalry is a code of behaviour that is still part of our culture and enforced to some degree, even today.

What individual men personally desire to do is not taken into consideration and therefore their well-being is treated as secondary to female well-being. If some men desire on their own accord without social pressure, to do things like pay a bill for a dinner and if this makes them happy to a degree that their well-being benefits to the same degree as their female counterpart (provided it is not pathological like in example 10), then that is not gynocentric. What might make some men unhappy, may make other men happy and vice versa. This is a critically important distinction to make.

Chivalry is gynocentric because it puts men’s wishes and their well-being secondary to women’s. It is not the respectful and generous actions directed toward women on their own that define chivalry. It is theoretically possible for a small fraction of men to be generous toward women in relationships because they are women, with no reciprocal generosity shown by the women and yet objectively increase their own well-being to the same degree as their female counterpart. It is not likely, but it is possible (perhaps an example could be men into female domination, whatever floats their boat). One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Who am I or anyone for that matter, to tell a man what is in his best interests unless I have clear objective factual evidence to the contrary? With that said, men should certainly decide for themselves, but not lie to themselves like in example 10.

To clarify this point further, if a man decides to be generous exclusively toward women and this selective behaviour extends beyond the relationship, then that is gynocentric even if his well-being objectively benefits to the same degree as the woman. He is placing the well-being of women above the well-being of men in his social sphere, because they are women and he is making no equivalent effort to provide commensurate generosity toward men. Even if he derives happiness from being exclusively generous toward women simply because they are female, the overall effect of his behaviour in society, is that women’s well-being in his social sphere is elevated above men. He is contributing to gynocentrism, reinforcing gynocentric double standards and causing social harm.

Is Benevolent Sexism Gynocentric?

Feminists are often quick to rebut instances where supposed sexism benefits women and instead claim they actually hurt women. It is correct to point out that elements of society and relationships can bring both benefits and costs to women’s well-being. Indeed, this was an important point in the discussion Paul Elam and Alison Tieman had about the nature of gynocentrism. To determine whether something is gynocentric, we must consider the impact on well-being in a holistic sense. That is why I defined well-being in an overall context. We also have to consider the intent behind the element of society or relationships in question, rather than just considering the outcome. That is why intent forms part of the refined definition of gynocentrism.

One could make a valid argument that female hiring quota’s actually reduce female well-being ⁶ inevitably over the long term, or that protecting women at the cost of their freedom hurts women. However, the intent of such policies and practices is clearly to prioritise female well-being over male well-being. Intent matters. To borrow a line from feminists and flip it-Gynocentrism hurts women too.

Similarly, one could make the argument that taking only women off a sinking ship against their will because they are women (there actually were some women ⁷ that would not leave their husbands on the Titanic, even as officers tried to force them to do so), is an example of benevolent sexism. Whilst women may indeed experience great emotional distress from such practices, there is no question that the intent is to prioritise female well-being in an overall sense over male well-being and in this case save as many women as possible.

Are Traditional Relationships Gynocentric?

Like romantic chivalry, traditional relationships can be gynocentric. But are they always? If a man and a woman have a traditional division of labour and traditional roles and both the man and the woman’s well-being are given equal priority and are both enhanced by the relationship to the same degree, then that is not gynocentric. If however the woman’s well-being is prioritised over the man’s well-being, then that is a gynocentric relationship. Traditional relationships can certainly be gynocentric, but not just simply because they are traditional. It is because they can be lopsided to elevate the well-being of women above the well-being of men. Please see this classic MGTOW video ⁸ on the subject of gynocentrism and traditional relationships and commensurate benefits by Barbarossa.

Can traditional relationships be balanced to benefit both male and female well-being? Yes. Provided men have the self-respect to demand it and women have the integrity and level of respect for men to accept nothing less. It is worth noting that a relationship does not have to be traditional to be gynocentric. Relationships where the female is the breadwinner, or where both partners work full-time, can be just as gynocentric and often even more so.

Is Male Disposability Always The Result Of Gynocentrism?

In different contexts in our society, male life and well-being is treated as disposable and in many instances gyoncentrism plays a role in diminishing the societal concern for male suffering. However, it is not the only factor that contributes to male disposability in society. Greed and the psychopathy of numerous tyrants and regimes can attest to that. Sometimes historical accounts of invading armies killing all of the men in a community and raping all of the women, is given as an example of gynocentrism.

Remember that intent matters. Are the actions of the invading armies driven by the intent to prioritise female well-being over male well-being, solely or partly on the basis of a group being female rather than male? In some instances that may indeed be the case and in other instances that may not be the case. An invading army may kill all of the men in a community because they want to remove the military threat of a counterattack, rather than simply because they are not female or because they want to prioritise female well-being. Female well-being may not be the priority they have in mind that is inspiring their actions, when they spare the women and then rape them. Human evil comes in many forms.

Gynocentrism is just one expression of evil, but it is not the only form of evil. Yes, real sexism against women and girls does exist. Female infanticide does happen in some societies on a significant scale and genocides of both men and women do occur. Some companies do carelessly produce products that leach endocrine disruptors that impair the health, development and onset of puberty, of not just boys, but girls as well.

The Gynocentrism Index

So far we have looked at gynocentrism at the micro level. The same definition of gynocentrism is also applicable at the macro level of society and entire nations. However, it is also useful at the macro level to develop metrics that quantify such concepts so we can measure and analyse them. We often hear about the so-called “gender inequality index”⁹. In this article I would like to propose a basic model for a gynocentrism index, that could be measured for each country or a given population just like the gender inequality index.

In our society gynocentrism manifests itself along five major dimensions between the sexes. These include the following:

The empathy gap– More concern is shown for females than for males ¹⁰. Female interests, needs, wants, perspectives, happiness, safety, health, wealth and welfare etc is prioritised over the males. Entire government departments are set up to address these matters and billions of dollars spent on them. Even in education where women and girls are thriving relative to men and boys that are struggling, virtually all of the initiatives and policies in education are focused on supporting female learning and academic achievement.

The accountability gap– Females are held to a lower standard of accountability than males ¹¹. The sentencing gap between males and females ¹² that commit the same crimes and after controlling for other variables, is six times greater ¹³ than the sentencing gap between black people and white people (yes you read that correctly). This lack of female accountability, is particularly pronounced when it comes to their behaviour toward males. Whilst there is a great social taboo toward males committing acts of physical and sexual violence against females, female physical and sexual violence against male victims is either dismissed or excused. A woman cutting off a man’s penis ¹⁴ is even laughed about on national TV.

The reward for merit gap– Females receive more reward than men for the same merit or the same reward for less merit. A number of businesses and government organisations are implementing, or have implemented female hiring quotas and introduced lower entry standards exclusively for female applicants. Some businesses actually now pay women more superannuation ¹⁵, simply because they are women (yes you read that correctly-more super for women because they are female). Contrary to popular opinion, there is also evidence of discrimination in hiring favouring women in a number of instances ¹⁶, even in STEM fields ¹⁷.

The women are wonderful effect– Mainstream media, entertainment, ads, academia, schooling and politics, are constantly saturated with messages promoting female superiority and overt misandry ¹⁸. Books and news articles like, “The End of Men: And The Rise of Women”¹⁹ are abundant and are a daily feature in society. Boys in school are having particularly bad experiences with this phenomenon and I would encourage people to read this article ²⁰ and watch this video ²¹ of the accounts of two boys experiencing this in school. This has been going on a long time. The women are wonderful effect is systemic in our society, culture and relationships and has profound impacts on how we perceive men and women and boys and girls and how we treat them.

Greater female in-group bias– Research has demonstrated ²² that women have an in-group bias that is 4.5 times stronger than men. Women show a bias favouring other women over men and men also show a deference to women. Men are “othered” in our gynocentric society. The female in-group bias is why millions of women will go on a “Women’s march” on the street for 2 years in a row, simply because someone with a vagina did not become US President. It is also one of the key reasons why feminism has become such a powerful force in society. You may have heard the phrase, “Because I am a woman” given as some justification for gynocentric double standards and outright bigotry. You may have heard the phrase or come across the mentality, “Believe the woman” from the female metoo# mob and their white knights, that want to dispense with due process and the rule of law. That is gynocentrism and female in-group bias talking.

In gynocentric societies women are treated with more empathy, have less accountability, receive more reward for their efforts (if they put any effort in at all), are treated and spoken about with reverence as men’s superiors or betters and women display a substantially stronger in-group bias than men do. These gaps are most likely correlated with each other. If women are treated with more empathy in a given society, then they will also be treated with less accountability, receive greater reward for their efforts and the women are wonderful effect and female in-group bias will be stronger.

These five dimensions can be measured. For example, we could measure the empathy gap by comparing the disparity in funding for men’s health versus women’s health after accounting for the death rate and disease burden. The accountability gap can be measured by looking at the sentencing gap between men and women, after controlling for relevant variables. The reward for effort gap could be measured by counting the number of affirmative action hiring programs that target female applicants to meet female hiring quotas. The women are wonderful effect could be measured by examining the number of instances in mainstream media and entertainment material that women are portrayed as or implied to be superior to men. The relative size of the female in-group bias, could be measured through existing psychological tools. These examples are by no means an exhaustive list. Numerous other sources of data could be added to this list and used in the analysis to calculate a gynocentrism index.

Once a proper and agreed upon scientific methodology, formula and model is developed to calculate a gynocentrism index from the data and a comprehensive amount of data is collected, then studies could be conducted. I have little doubt such studies would produce fascinating results if they were done. This is the sort of conceptual framework and analysis that is inevitably is going to be required to solve the huge problems facing men and boys. It would interesting to plot such a gynocentrism index against national IQ, national sex ratios (particularly the operational sex ratios), age and cultural demographics, population density, education levels, rates of fatherlessness, crime rate, GDP per capita, over time and even the gender inequality index.

As long as gynocentrism remains unanalysed and masked from society, then society will continue to rush towards the gynocentric abyss and an inevitable fempocalypse ²³. The first step in the process of solving a problem, is identifying that there is a problem and the second step is understanding precisely what that problem is. Gynocentrism is in many ways like a virus. The immune system of society has to be trained to identify the pathogen that is destroying it. Developing an effective vaccine requires identifying the antigens of the virus that trigger an immune response.

Developing a refined definition of gynocentrism, diagnostic criteria to screen for it and analytical methods of measuring and examining gynocentrism, are the first few steps in that process. The scientific method should form the basis of any research into this social phenomenon, if we are to develop an accurate model of the problem and design an effective solution from that model. Feminist ideology has given us numerous examples of what happens when facts, evidence and science are ignored. We should consider those examples as a warning of what not to do.

If any serious investigation and academic research is going to be made into gynocentrism, the scientific method will need to be restored in the social sciences at the universities (particularly in the psychological sciences) and the feminist ideological bloc that has taken them over will need to be removed. Substantial political, media and financial pressure will need to be applied on our universities to achieve this. So much of government policy, law, journalism, education, employment and industrial relations policies etc, is based on faulty feminist research coming from the social sciences of the universities. If the decay of academic research is not resolved, then society will need to collapse before it can return to a sustainable paradigm.

Men and boys are not an inferior group of people and are equally deserving of respect, empathy and love. Societies that do not accept that, do not deserve them.²⁴

References

Feminism: Constructing A New Aristocracy

April 29, 2018December 16, 2023 / Peter Wright / Leave a comment

When Marxist activist Rudi Dutschke looked at ways to stage a neo-Marxist revolution he hit on the plan of “a long march through the institutions of power to create radical change from within government and society by becoming an integral part of the machinery.” His strategy was to work against the established institutions while working surreptitiously within them. Evidence of the attempt to implement his plan can be seen today through many levels of society – especially in universities.

Marxists however are not the only ones to use this strategy. In fact when we look at the numerous political forces attempting to infiltrate and influence our cultural institutions we see that another, much more influential candidate, has twisted its tendrils through every layer of society – and it existed long before Marx and Marxism were born. That force is political feminism,¹ whose culture project has been in play now for several hundred years.

Protofeminists like Lucrezia Marinella, Mary Wollstoncraft, Margaret Cavendish, Modesta Pozzo, or Christine de Pizan were advocating a ‘long march’ through institutions for centuries before Marxism emerged and began its tragic experiment. Pizan’s main book for example titled A City of Ladies sketched an imaginary city whose institutions were controlled completely by women, and each of the protofeminists advanced some theory of female rule or ‘integration’ of women into governing institutions. Later feminists followed suit, such as Charlotte Perkins Gillman wrote the famed book HerLand (1915) envisioning a society run entirely by women who reproduce by parthenogenesis (asexual reproduction), resulting in an ideal (utopic) social order free from war, conflict, and male domination.

A survey of protofeminist writings reveals consistent advocacy for the superior abilities of women as functionaries: women’s greater compassion, virtue, nonviolence, intelligence, patience, superior morality and so on, combined with a concomitant descriptions of male destructiveness, insensitivity and inferiority as we see continued in the rhetoric of modern feminists.

Via that polarizing narrative feminists sought to grab not just a big slice of the governance pie; as contemporary feminists have shown they would stop at nothing but the whole pie. Nothing but complete dominance of the gendered landscape would satisfy their lust for control, and it appears they have succeeded.

We see that dominance in women’s occupation of pivotal bureaucratic positions throughout the world, from the UN and World Bank all the way down through national governments, schools and universities, and HR departments in most medium to large workplaces. Feminists not only govern the world via these roles, but as surveyed in Janet Halley’s recent book Governance Feminism: An Introduction, that governance is far from the utopia early feminist promised.

The long feminist tradition underlines the danger of viewing ‘the march through the institutions’ as a Cultural Marxism project, because it deflects us from the historically longer, more powerful, more dangerous and ultimately more successful project that is political feminism.

Moreover, the protagonists of Marxist and feminist worldviews are not one and the same; the former aims to dismantle social-class oppression, and the latter gender oppression. While there are some individuals working to amalgamate these two contrary theories into a hybrid of Frankenstein proportions, their basic theoretical aims remain distinct.

Like Marxism, feminism too can be imagined as a socio-political ideology, in this case modelling itself on a medieval feudalism which was structured with two social classes: 1. A noble class of aristocrats, priests, princes and princesses, and 2. a peasant class of serfs and slaves overseen by indentured vassals.

Stripped of its medieval context we see the purveyors of political feminism working to institute a new sex-stratified version of feudalism which serves to maximize the power of women. With this move we have seen an increased tendency to emphasize women’s “power,” “dignity,” “honor,” “esteem” and “respect” – descriptors historically reserved for dignitaries.

As in medieval times, the assets and wealth generated by the labour class – predominately men – are taxed and redistributed to the new quasi-aristocratic class via a plethora of social spending programs of governments, or alternatively via asset transfers like alimony, child support, divorce settlements and other court mandated conventions. Children themselves form part of that asset portfolio which men are often forced to relinquish to women in the event of divorce. In the face of such practices men are reminded that women’s “dignity” is very much at stake, and their acquiescence mandatory.

The push to establish a female aristocratic class has long been recognized, as mentioned by the following writer from more than a century ago (1896), who in his ‘Letter To The editor’ observed the granting of unequal social privileges to female prisoners;

“A paragraph in your issue of the week before last stated that oakum-picking as a prison task had been abolished for women and the amusement of dressing dolls substituted. This is an interesting illustration of the way we are going at present, and gives cause to some reflection as to the rate at which a sex aristocracy is being established in our midst. While the inhumanity of our English prison system, in so far as it affects men, stands out as a disgrace to the age in the eyes of all Europe, houses of correction for female convicts are being converted into agreeable boudoirs and pleasant lounges…

I am personally in favour of the abolition of corporal punishment, as I am of existing prison inhumanities, for both sexes, but the snivelling sentiment which exempts females on the ground of sex from every disagreeable consequence of their actions, only strengthens on the one side every abuse which it touches on the other. Yet we are continuously having the din of the “women’s rights” agitation in our ears. I think it is time we gave a little attention to men’s rights, and equality between the sexes from the male point of view.–YoursYours, &c.,, A MANLY PROTESTOR,”²

Another comes from a 1910 Kalgoorlie Miner which reported a push to set up a female aristocracy in America. It was entitled The New Aristocracy:

A question of deep human interest has been raised by The Independent.

“To be successful in the cultivation of culture a country must have a leisure class,” says the editor. “We Americans recognise this fact, but we are going about the getting of this leisure class in a new way.

“In Europe the aristocracy is largely relieved from drudgery in order that they may cultivate the graces of life. In America the attempt is being made to relieve the women of all classes from drudgery, and we are glad to see that some of them at least are making good use of the leisure thus afforded them. It is a project involving unprecedented daring and self-sacrifice on the part of American men, this making an aristocracy of half the race. That it is possible yet remains to be proved. Whether it is desirable depends upon whether this new feminine aristocracy avoids the faults of the aristocracy of the Old World, such as frivolousness and snobbishness.”³

Lastly a comment from Adam Kostakis who gives an eloquent summary of feminism’s preference for a neo-feudal society in his Gynocentrism Theory Lectures:

“It would not be inappropriate to call such a system sexual feudalism, and every time I read a feminist article, this is the impression that I get: that they aim to construct a new aristocracy, comprised only of women, while men stand at the gate, till in the fields, fight in their armies, and grovel at their feet for starvation wages. All feminist innovation and legislation creates new rights for women and new duties for men; thus it tends towards the creation of a male underclass.”⁴

By many accounts what we’ve achieved today under feminist modelling is the establishment of a neo-feudal society with women representing an aristocratic class and men the labour class of serfs, slaves and peasants who too often spend their lives looking up from the proverbial glass cellar. When men do rule, it is usually not with a life “free of drudgery” as mentioned above, but with hard-work as CEOs, executives and prime ministers in service of the ruling female class who are busy with little more than lifting their lattes.

This gendered enterprise is now several hundred years in the making, enjoying further consolidations with every passing year of feminist governance. That a widespread female aristocracy now exists is undeniable, at least in the Western world, although we remain reluctant to name it as such for fear of offending our moral betters. We can only hope that the recent petition to abolish the House of Lords becomes infectious and begins to tackle the unearned privileges of those new aristocrats who serve nobody but themselves.

Sources:

[1]. Ernest Belfort Bax coined the phrase ‘political feminism’ in his book The Fraud of Feminism. London: Grant Richards Ltd, 1913
[2]. A Privileged and Pampered Sex, Letter to the Editor, Reynolds Newspaper, 1896
[3] New Feminine Aristocracy; Narrowly Trained Men, Kalgoorlie Miner, Wednesday 5 January 1910, page 2 (3)
[4]. Adam Kostakis, Lecture 11: The Eventual Outcome of Feminism –II, Gynocentrism Theory Lectures, 2011

*An earlier version of the above article was published in my book Feminism And The Creation of a Female Aristocracy.