Gamma bias refers to a cognitive gender bias theory developed by Seager & Barry (2019).1
Gamma bias refers to the operation of two concurrent biases: alpha bias (exaggerating or magnifying gender differences) and beta bias (ignoring or minimizing gender differences). Gamma bias occurs when one gender difference is minimized while simultaneously another is magnified, resulting in a doubling of cognitive distortion.2
Gamma bias
Seager & Barry state that gamma bias works by magnifying women’s issues and achievements and minimizing men’s issues and achievements. Alternatively, the dynamic is reversed and employed to minimize negative female traits and behaviors, while magnifying or exaggerating negative male traits or behaviors.
Theories on the purpose of gamma bias
Hypotheses regarding the growth of gamma bias and the disfavoring of males include evolutionary pressures for males to protect and provide for women which involves a reluctance to view men as vulnerable. Alternatively there is the sociological explanation of ‘ingroup’ and ‘outgroup’ bias which may have developed around men and women in the form of social conventions.1
A more detailed explanation is provided by gynocentrism theory3 which posits the genesis of gamma bias in medieval Europe where feudal class distinctions between lords and their subjects were re-applied to relationships between men and women under the euphemistic labels of “chivalry” and “courtly love.” The application of such class distinctions led C.S. Lewis to refer to it as “the feudalisation of love,” making the observation that this sociological development “has left no corner of our ethics, our imagination, or our daily life untouched.”
Lewis explains that European society drifted essentially from a social feudalism to a sexual feudalism, fostering a convention of male chivalry in service to elevated Ladies of aristocratic society — a convention that moved by degrees, over time, to be embraced by all classes of people. The psychological operations supporting the ‘feudalization of love’ are numerous and involve gamma bias, male gender blindness, and misandry to name a few. The internal operations result in a gender empathy gap which reinforces the root medieval trope.
The following excerpt is from a chapter titled ‘The Archetype of The Victim’ in Lyn Cowan’s book Tracking The White Rabbit: Essays In Subversive Psychology (page.92). Here the author makes a direct correlation between victimhood identity and enactment of what Jungians refer to as the child archetype.
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As noted earlier, the root of the word victim carries an ancient meaning of “increase” or “growth.” However, I am not suggesting that victimization ought to be considered an occasion of “positive growth.” To do so minimizes the horror and fear and shame or represses them completely. The injunction to the victim to “grow” through adversity is a subtle appeal to the victim’s ego to leave the victimization experience behind (a form of denial). “Growth” in this usage is defensive, the demand of an anxious parent who does not know what to do for a child in pain (as in, “Grow up, stop crying, stop feeling sorry for yourself”).
A deeper objection to the demand on the victim to “grow” is that it keeps the experience of the victim within a fantasy of the child. Whatever complex meanings victimhood may have for the soul are obscured and reduced to false simplicity by forcing them into the single perspective of the child archetype. Thus the victim appears passively childlike or irresponsibly childish. This may be one reason why our culture takes a profoundly ambivalent attitude toward victims: either total neglect and abuse or idealization and galvanic convulsions to rescue. (Remember little Jessica McClure, who fell down a well in Texas in 1989? The whole country vicariously participated in the rescue operation.)
When perceived through the child archetype, the victim is infantilized: whatever injury has been done can now only be understood as a sign or consequence of psychological immaturity – the naïvety of a child, the innocence of a child, the carelessness of a child, the abuse of a child, the child who cries for grownups to play fair. Instead of an adult drama deep in the soul’s sacred interior, victimization is seen as one of many misfortunes that befalls a child. We demand either excessive responsibility of the victim (“She should have known better”) or expect him or her to be as helpless in trauma as a child.
By “archetype” I can only refer to the phenomenal archetype, that which manifests itself in images. The noumenal archetype per se cannot by definition be presented so that nothing whatsoever can be posited of it. In fact whatever one does say about the archetype per se is a conjecture already governed by an archetypal image. This means that the archetypal image precedes and determines the metaphysical hypothesis of a noumenal archetype. So, let us apply Occam’s razor to Kant’s noumenon. By stripping away this unnecessary theoretical encumbrance to Jung’s notion of archetype we restore full value to the archetypal image.’
(Hillman 1971).
The archetypal school rejects the noun “archetype,” even as it retains the adjective “archetypal.” For Hillman (1983), the distinction between archetypes and archetypal images, which Jung regards as comparable, respectively, to Kantian noumena and phenomena, is untenable. According to him, all that individuals ever encounter psychically are images – that is, phenomena. Hillman is a phenomenologist or an imagist: “I’m simply following the imagistic, the phenomenological way: take a thing for what it is and let it talk” (p. 14). For the archetypal school, there are no archetypes as such – no neo-Kantian categories, or noumena. There are only phenomena, or images, that may be archetypal.
For Hillman, the archetypal is not a category but a consideration – a perspectival operation that an individual may perform on any image. Thus Hillman (1977, pp. 82–83) says that “any image may be considered archetypal.” The archetypal is “a move one makes rather than a thing that is.” To consider an image archetypal is to regard it as such, from a certain perspective, to endow it operationally with typicality – or, as Hillman prefers to say, with “value.” Thus, perspectivally, an individual may “archetypalize” any image. Merely considering it so makes it so – or, as Hillman (1975/1979) says, merely capitalizing it makes it so – as in the “Sunburnt Girl” (p. 63). In effect, the archetypal school embraces what Jung tries (never, he admits, entirely with success) to avoid – that is, what he (CW 9.i, p. 59) calls “metaphysical concretism.” Jung says that “any attempt at graphic description” of an archetype inevitably succumbs to metaphysical concretism “up to a point,” because the qualitative aspect “in which it appears necessarily clings to it, so that it cannot be described at all except in terms of its specific phenomenology.” Concrete descriptive qualities cling quite obviously to an archetype like the Great Mother (less evidently to an archetype like the Anima, which is more abstract) – as they also do to the Sunburnt Girl. Most Jungians would be reluctant to dignify the Sunburnt Girl as equal in status to the Great Mother – or even to regard the image as “archetypal” at all. When Hillman capitalizes the Sunburnt Girl, he considers the image archetypal, typical, or valuable. He does not posit or infer the metaphysical existence of archetypes prior to the images. For archetypal psychologists, any and every image, even the most apparently banal, can be considered archetypal.
This post-Jungian, post-structuralist usage of the term “archetypal” is controversial. Most Jungians retain the term “archetype” and continue to define it as Jung did. One Jungian analyst, V. Walter Odajnyk (1984), criticizes Hillman for adopting the name “archetypal psychology.” According to Odajnyk, Hillman should simply have called the school “imaginal psychology” to avoid unnecessary terminological ambiguity. “Archetypal psychology,” Odajnyk (1984, p. 43) says, “sounds as though it were based on the Jungian archetypes, when in fact it isn’t.” This criticism is cogent to Jungians who remain strict structuralists. It is unpersuasive to archetypal psychologists, for they believe that the archetypal, or the typical, is in the eye of the imaginer – or in the imagination’s eye. In a sense, the archetypal is in the eye of the beholder – the subject who beholds an image – but it is also, in another sense, in the eye of the imagination, a transcendent dimension that archetypal psychologists regard as ultimately irreducible to any faculty immanent in the subject.
Source: Michael Vannoy Adams, ‘The Archetypal School,’ Chapter-6 in The Cambridge Companion to Jung. 2008
Archetypal Image
ARCHETYPAL psychology axiomatically assumes imagistic universals, comparable to the universali fantastici of Vico (Scienza Nuova, par. 381), that is, mythical figures that provide the poetic characteristics of human thought, feeling, and action, as well as the physiognomic intelligibility of the qualitative worlds of natural phenomena. By means of the archetypal image, natural phenomena present faces that speak to the imagining soul rather than only conceal hidden laws and probabilities and manifest their objectification.
A psychological universal must be considered psychologically. An archetypal image is psychologically “universal,” because its effect amplifies and depersonalizes. Even if the notion of image regards each image as an individualized, unique event, as “that image there and no other,” such an image is universal because it resonates with collective, trans-empirical importance. Thus, archetypal psychology uses “universal” as an adjective, declaring a substantive perduring value, which ontology states as a hypostasis. And, the universals problem for psychology is not whether they exist, where, and how they participate in particulars, but rather whether a personal individual event can be recognized as bearing essential and collective importance. Psychologically, the universals problem is presented by the soul itself whose perspective is harmoniously both the narrow particularity of felt experience and the universality of archetypally human experience. In Neoplatonic thought, soul could be spoken of as both my soul and world soul, and what was true of one was true of both. Thus, the universality of an archetypal image means also that the response to the image implies more than personal consequences, raising the soul itself beyond its egocentric confines (soul-making) and broadening the events of nature from discrete atomic particulars to aesthetic signatures bearing information for soul.
Because archetypal psychology gives priority to particular pattern over literal particle – and considers that particular events are always themselves imagistic and therefore ensouled – imagination too is assumed to be primordially patterned into typical themes, motifs, regions, genres, syndromes. These kinds of patterns inform all psychic life. Gilbert Durand (1960, 1979) – following upon the lines opened by Bachelard – and Durand’s Centre de Recherche sur l’Imaginaire (w3.u-grenoble3.fr/cri/) have been charting the inherent organization of the imaginary as the basis of cultural anthropology and sociology, even as the basis of psychological meaning in all consciousness. Durand’s papers published in the Eranos Yearbooks since 1964 present a range of archetypal cultural analysis.
Archetypal psychology has pressed beyond the collection of objective data and the correlation of images as verbal or visual symbols. If archetypal images are the fundamentals of fantasy, they are the means by which the world is imagined, and therefore they are the models by which all knowledge, all experiences whatsoever become possible: “Every psychic process is an image and an ‘imagining,’ otherwise no consciousness could exist …” (CW 11:?889). An archetypal image operates like the original meaning of idea (from Greek eidos and eidolon): not only “that which” one sees but also that “by means of which” one sees. The demonstration of archetypal images is therefore as much in the act of seeing as in the object seen, since the archetypal image appears in consciousness itself as the governing fantasy by means of which consciousness is possible to begin with. Gathering of data does less to demonstrate objectively the existence of archetypes than it does to demonstrate the fantasy of “objective data.”
Furthermore, unlike Jung who radically distinguishes between noumenal archetype per se and phenomenal archetypal image, archetypal psychology rigorously refuses even to speculate about a nonpresented archetype per se. Its concern is with the phenomenon: the archetypal image. This leads to the next step: “… any image can be considered archetypal. The word ‘archetypal’ rather than pointing at something … points to something, and this is value … by archetypal psychology we mean a psychology of value. And our appellative move is aimed to restore psychology to its widest, richest, and deepest volume so that it would resonate with soul in its descriptions as unfathomable, multiple, prior, generative, and necessary. As all images can gain this archetypal sense, so all psychology can be archetypal… ‘Archetypal’ here refers to a move one makes rather than to a thing that is” (Hillman 1977b).
Here, archetypal psychology “sees through” itself as strictly a psychology of archetypes, a mere analysis of structures of being (gods in their myths), and, by emphasizing the valuative function of the adjective archetypal, restores to images their primordial place as that which gives psychic value to the world. Any image termed archetypal is immediately valued as universal, trans-historical, basically profound, generative, highly intentional, and necessary.
Since “archetypal” connotes both intentional force (Jung’s “instinct”) and the mythical field of personifications (Hillman’s “gods”), an archetypal image is animated like an animal (one of Hillman’s frequent metaphors for images) and like a person whom one loves, fears, delights in, is inhibited by, and so forth. As intentional force and person, such an image presents a claim – moral, erotic, intellectual, aesthetic – and demands a response. It is an “affecting presence” (Armstrong 1971) offering an affective relationship. It seems to bear prior knowledge (coded information) and an instinctive direction for a destiny, as if prophetic, prognostic. Images in “dreams mean well for us, back us up and urge us on, understand us more deeply than we understand ourselves, expand our sensuousness and spirit, continually make up new things to give us – and this feeling of being loved by the images … call it imaginal love” (Hillman 1979a). This message-bearing experience of the image – and the feeling of blessing that an image can bring – recalls the Neoplatonic sense of images as daimones and angels (message bearers). “Perhaps – who knows? – these eternal images are what men mean by fate” (CW 7:?183).
Although an archetypal image presents itself as impacted with meaning, this is not given simply as revelation. It must be made through “image work” and “dream work” (Hillman 1977b, 1979a). The modes of this work may be concrete and physical as in art, movement, play, and occupational therapies; but more importantly (because less fixedly symbolic), this work is done by “sticking to the image” as a psychological penetration of what is actually presented including the stance of consciousness that is attempting the hermeneutic. Image work is not legitimately such unless the implicit involvement of a subjective perspective is admitted from the start, for it too is part of the image and in its fantasy.
Image work requires both aesthetic culture and a background in myths and symbols for appreciation of the universalities of images. This work also requires a series of tactical moves (Hillman and Berry 1977), frequently linguistic and phonetic (Sardello et al. 1978; Severson 1978; Kugler 1979b) and etymological (Lockhart 1978, 1980; Kugelmann 1983), and also grammatical and syntactical experimentation (Ritsema 1976; Hillman 1978a). Other tactical moves concerning emotion, texture, repetitions, reversals, and restatements have been described by Berry (1974).
The primary intention of this verbal work with images is the “recovery of soul in speech” (Sardello 1978a), which at the same time reveals the erotic and aesthetic aspect of images – that they captivate, charm, persuade, have a rhetorical effect on soul beyond their symbolic content. Image-work restores the original poetic sense to images, freeing them from serving a narrational context, having to tell a story with its linear, sequential, and causal implications that foster first-person reports of the egocentric actions and intentions of a personalistic subject. The distinction between image and narrative (Berry 1974; Miller 1976a) is fundamental to the distinction in imaginative style between archetypal polytheistic psychology and traditional psychologies that are egocentered, epic narrations (therapy).
Three further developments in theory of archetypal images are worth attention. Paul Kugler’s work (1978, 1979a) elaborates an acoustic theory of images as structures of invariant meaning apart from linguistic, etymological, semantic, and syntactical meaning. Charles Boer and Peter Kugler (1977) have correlated archetypal images with the theory of perception of J.?J. Gibson, asserting that archetypal images are afforded directly by the environment (and are not subjective), so that “archetypal psychology is mythical realism.” Casey (1979) sets forth the idea that imagination is so closely related with time, both psychologically and ontologically, that actual image-work not only takes time into soul or makes temporal events soul events but also makes time in soul.
Source: Hillman, James. Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account (Uniform Edition). Spring Publications.
Process philosophy assumes that the universe and human systems are ‘continually becoming.’ It emphasizes the elements of change and novelty as contrasted with a belief in permanence of forms, and uniformity. In the Greek tradition Heraclitus said that no person ever steps into the same river twice, because on the second attempt it is not the same river and he is not the same man.
Vaginoplasty, womb transplants, hormone blockers, hormone injections. These things represent the crowning achievement of cultural feminism, creating a kind of unforeseen gyno-dystopia resulting from the elevation of all things female. That same feminism exerts a gravitational pull that tends to filter all human events through its interpretive lens.
Many women show their participation in the feminist worldview via postures of gendered narcissism, while men might show their participation in it by acts of chivalry or, more recently, by initiating changes to their sexual and gender orientation (MtF) in order to become more like women.
Gynocentric feminism is the soil from which the transgender revolution has sprouted, and it represents nothing less than a dissolution of centuries of accumulated gender customs. As Simone de Beauvoir famously stated, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature.”
To explore the outcome of this thinking a bit further, I’lI start with a quote from the brilliant Darren J. Beattie from Revolver News:
It used to be that getting a high SAT score and getting into an elite college was the greatest path to social mobility in the United States
I think Darren’s comment is important in that it emphasizes the historical tilt toward MtF orientation as holding higher currency than FtM – particularly in the USA. That remains the case, although a more recent behavioral anomaly among teenage girls is falsely skewing the data. This representative sample from the 2021 Canadian Census tells the story:
From this table we see that a statistical anomaly results from a fad among many of the 15 – 24 age group; an experimental phase, especially among teen girls. Above this age bracket, trans-identification appears contingent on an internal sense of self as transgender. After age 29, all age brackets have more MtF which supports the theory that there are different motivations, and levels of psychological identification, per age group. I will note in passing that many parents are noticing peer pressure to transition among the younger age groups of girls, as one Mumsnet mother testifies:
The mother of an 11-year-old girl tells Mumsnet that her daughter is feeling ostracised because she is one of the few girls in her class who doesn't say she is transgender. Several of the replies are mothers saying they are experiencing this with their daughters as well pic.twitter.com/BFrWi3StTy
Putting the teenage anomaly to one side, we can say that gynocentrism remains a predominant motivator for transgender choice in the European and Anglosphere contents, especially in the USA which has for centuries been a champion of more extreme forms of gynocentrism, as demonstrated by the following prima facie observations:
In 1846 a London Sun article describes American culture as an epicenter of exaggerated gynocentrism & chivalry:
I am convinced that a lady, no matter what her age and attractions might be, could journey through the whole extent of the union, not only without experiencing a single annoyance, but aided in every possible way with unobtrusive civility. Indeed a great number of Saphonisbas and Almiras do travel about, protected only by the chivalry of their countrymen and their own undoubted propriety.
To them the best seats, the best of everything, are always allotted. A friend of mine told me of a little affair at New York Theatre, the other night, illustrative of my assertion. A stiff-necked Englishman had engaged a front place, and of course the best corner: when the curtain rose, he was duly seated, opera-glass in hand, to enjoy the performance. A lady and a gentleman came into the box shortly afterwards; the cavalier in escort, seeing that the place where our friend sat was the best, calling his attention, saying “The lady, sir,” and motioned that the corner should be vacated. The possessor, partly because he disliked the imperative mood, and partly because it bored him to be disturbed, refused. Some words ensued, which attracted the attention of the sovereign people in the pit, who magisterially enquired what was the matter?
The American came to the front of the box and said, “There is an Englishman here who will not give up his place to a lady.” Immediately their majesties swarmed up by dozens over the barriers, seized the offender, very gently though, and carried him to the entrance; he kicked, cursed, and fought all in vain: he excited neither the pity nor the anger of his stern executioners; they placed him carefully on his feet again at the steps, one man handing him his hat, another his opera glass, and a third the price he had paid for his ticket of admission, then quickly shut the door upon him, and returned to their places. The shade of the departed Judge Lynch must have rejoiced at such an angelic administration of his law! – England in the New World.
In 1856, author of Putnam’s Monthly Magazine published the following summary of the relations between men and women in America:
“Long before the cry of woman’s rights was openly raised, the powers and prerogatives of the American husband had been gradually undermined. Usage superseded law, and trampled it under foot. Sentiment put logical consistency at defiance, and the American husband has thus become a legal monster, a logical impossibility, required to fly without wings, and to run without feet.
“While the wife is thus rendered to a great extent independent of her husband, he, by a strange inconsistency is still held, both by law and public opinion, just as responsible for her as before. The old and reasonable maxim that ‘he who dances must pay the piper,’ does not apply to wives—they dance, and the husband pays. To such an extent is this carried, that if the wife beats her husband, and he, having no authority to punish her in kind, applies to the criminal courts for redress, she will be fined for assault and battery, which fine he must pay, even thought she has plenty of money of her own. or, in default of paying, go to jail! Such cases are by no means of unprecedented occurrence in our criminal courts.
In 1903 culture critic Max O’Rell observed the following about gynocentrism in the USA:
“The government of the American people is not a Republic, it is not a monarchy: it is a gynarchy, a government by the women for the women, a sort of occult power behind the scenes that rules the country.”
In England the establishment is, as a rule, at any rate from a man’s point of view, more comfortable than the American home. Americans staying any time in England, whether men or women, are impressed by the fact that it is the country of men. Likewise the English, both men and women, who visit America are impressed by the fact that America is the country of women.
The Kalgoorlie Newspaper reported the following in 1910:
“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.”
“There are people in the world who believe that we are born again and again, rising or sinking in the scale of living things at each successive incarnation according as we behave ourselves well or badly in our present state. If this creed were true, I should try very hard to be good, because I should want, next time I am born, to be an American woman. She seems to me to have a better kind of life than the women of any other nation, or, indeed, than anybody else, man or woman… American social life seems to me — the word is one to apologize for — gynocentric. It is arranged with a view to the convenience and delight of women. Men come in where and how they can…. The American woman is certainly more her own mistress than the Englishwoman, just because America does its best for women and only its second-best for men. The tendency among American humourists is to dwell a little on the greed of the Englishman, who is represented as incapable of earning money for himself. The English jester lays more stress on the American woman’s desire to be called “my lady,” and pokes sly fun at the true Democrat’s fondness for titles. The American man is reverent toward women. It is not the homage of the strong toward the weak, but the obeisance of the inferior in the presence of a superior. This difference of spirit underlies the whole relationship of men to women in England and America. The English feminist is up against chivalry and wants equality. The American woman, though she may claim rights, has no inducement to destroy reverence.
Above all things are the women who as a literal fact, dominate the entire life in America. The men take an interest in absolutely nothing at all. They work and work, the like of which I have never seen anywhere yet. For the rest they are the toy dogs of the women, who spend the money in the most unmeasurable, illimitable way and wrap themselves in a fog of extravagance. They do everything which is in the vogue, and now quite by chance they have thrown themselves on the Einstein fashion.
Summary and conclusion
Following the above collection of artifacts, we can begin to wrap these details into a more coherent conclusion, and for this I’m going to turn to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) for a template. Hegel naturally didn’t write about vaginoplasties or the transgender movement, but he did write about process philosophy and the proposition that social processes are an ever-recurring cycle which he characterized by three phases (1) an initial set of cultural beliefs called a thesis, (2) next arises dissatisfaction and a negation of that thesis called the antithesis, and lastly (3) there occurs a synthesis of culture beliefs whereby the two conflicting ideas are reconciled to form a new proposition.
Thesis – Antithesis – Synthesis.
This provides a suitable template for organizing the peculiar shifts in gender ideology we’ve been witnessing over recent centuries which, following Hegel, we can now characterize as follows:
Thesis: Centuries of gynocentrism
Antithesis: Men’s rights backlash
Synthesis: Discovery of malleability of the sexual body (hormones/surgery), accompanied by belief in gender fluidity, resulting in a dissolution of clear sexual and gender boundaries, along with all traditional culture privileges that have accumulated around biological sex. [This completes the synthesis of the two conflicting ideas]
As mentioned elsewhere, the transgender movement is not a cause célèbre driven by men’s rights advocates, as is sometimes claimed. Rather, the current support for transgender rights is derived from the power of government administrations and global regimes playing “freedom one-upmanship” – ie., the feigning of moral purity to position themselves at top of the global hierarchy.
The elites however are not the ones ultimately driving this process forward, even if they are doing the job of hastening, supporting and exploiting it. Instead, it appears to be Hegel’s mysterious process philosophy that is driving the changes, and the elites and sundry grifters are riding this gender-bender horse in a rodeo of competing cultural powers.
Where does all this leave us?
We can draw the conclusion that over the last century our framing of gendered customs has become increasingly captured by a gynocentric turf war between traditional women, and progressive feminist forces, with trans activism being an emerging force that is actively working to disrupt it. Time will tell if the transgender movement continues its disintegrative influence over traditional sex roles, however the surgical and chemical technology that has allowed this to flourish does not look like disappearing anytime soon – in fact researchers are just getting started.
The chemical invention of the birth control pill, introduced for women in the 1950s, served to crown the gynocentric culture project and to cement the dominance of its centuries-long evolution. The chemical and surgical “support” for trans-people holds equally gargantuan potential; which includes the tangential possibility of leading us past the polarizing gynocentric setup and back to a saner place where everyday men and women can be themselves without coercion and judgement… notably minus those inflated gender privileges and ideologies that have driven us into this position to begin with.
“Taking what had worked for most women in the past and seeing it as a plot against them led us to see men as “owing” women. This created Stage II entitlement: women being entitled to compensation for past oppression. This prevented us from seeing the need to make a transition from Stage I to Stage II together : the need not for a women’s movement or a men’s movement, but for a gender transition movement.”
– Myth of Male Power
A gender transition movement will be the longest of all movements because it is not proposing merely to integrate blacks or Latinos into a system that already exists; rather, it is proposing an evolutionary shift in the system itself—an end to “woman-the-protected” and “man-the-protector.” This division is rooted in our biology; it exists among animals.
Gender transition starts by opening the lace curtain and closing down feminism-as-the-one-party-system-of-gender-politics. That combination frees women to hear what men at least could say if the media, academia, and government were not frustrating the already silent sex. It would bring into communication with each other the four major gender perspectives: traditional men, traditional women, transitional men, and feminists.
What does the communication consist of? For starters, how we can allow maximum freedom for both sexes without losing sight of our commitments to our partners and children. Redistributing housework, childcare, and work outside the home within each family; solutions to domestic violence, date rape, and sexual harassment that incorporate men’s experiences. Funding the thirty-four neglected areas of men’s health; making men’s birth control a reality….
An Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) might be relabeled an Equal Rights and Responsibilities amendment (ERA) and made user-friendly to men. Such an amendments legislative guidelines might suggest that congressional districts be deprived of welfare funding if judges assigned the children to women more than 60 percent of the time in cases of contested custody; it would deprive universities of public monies as long as there were significantly more women’s studies courses than men’s studies courses; it would deprive TV stations of federal licensing if the FCC found a consistent pattern of male-bashing or consistent attention to women’s issues and neglect of men’s issues. Being user-friendly to men includes funding research on the denial of dad time, on false accusations, and on violations of due process and the Fourteenth Amendment.
The ERRA would mean a new era—an era of shared rights and shared responsibilities.
Life and Death
A gender transition movement would incorporate men’s issues. Men’s issues are issues of life and death. Why do men whose spouses die or who are divorced commit suicide ten times as often as the women? Why are men in all ten “glass cellars” of disposability (e.g., more of the street homeless than women and children combined, 94 percent of the workplace deaths, dying five years sooner) even as we only discuss “glass ceilings”? Instead of having only an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), men’s issues of life and death might best be addressed by an Equal Life Opportunity Commission (ELOC).
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“Ideally there should not be a men’s movement but a gender transition movement; Only the power of the women’s movement necessitates the temporary corrective of a men’s movement.” ~ Warren Farrell.
When I was noticing sponsored posts on Facebook by Matt Walsh’s page abut his new film What Is A Woman?, what grabbed my attention was the text on one of them: ‘One of the surgeons I interviewed for this documentary confessed to having mutilated the genitals of a 16 year old boy. The Left says this isn’t happening. They’re lying, as always.’
I admitted surprise at his choice of words: ‘mutilated the genitals of a 16 year old boy’. I wondered aloud, how much does he actually care about a child’s genital integrity across the board? What are Mr. Walsh’s attitudes towards routine infant circumcision? Assuming that he is just another traditional conservative, I had thought that he couldn’t give a shit about male genital mutilation and the serious consequences of it. However, I left it at that because that was all it was: an assumption. I wouldn’t speak more on it until I had concrete proof of what would be his hypocritical stance, and I’d be completely open to be proven wrong as well, delighted to be in fact.
About a week ago, I got my answer.
For clarity, the quote reads thus:
You lose credibility when you call circumcision “elective amputation”. Particularly because “amputation”, in the medical sense, generally refers to the removal of a limb. Make your point without being ridiculous. And parents frequently make decision for their infants. In fact, I’m not sure how else to raise an infant. You aren’t “infringing on their liberty.” Come on, that’s just absurd. Make your point without resorting to laughably hysterical rhetoric.
This screenshot was shared by a mutual follower on Twitter, Nikos Anti-MGM, who imparted to me that it in itself was originally something a Facebook friend of his posted. Regardless, the importance of sharing it cannot be understated. Matt Walsh, who grandstands that he is “obsessed with stopping people from mutilating and sterilizing children”, is proven to be yet another high-profile hypocrite regarding what kind of child is on the receiving end of the genital mutilation, and what ideology conducts it.
And yes, those were Walsh’s own words. Clearly he’s either not obsessed enough, or in fact obsessed strictly with refusing to admit that Americans have been making a mistake in eviscerating infant male foreskins for generations:
Some may be asking why I am spending a lot of energy going after these specific individuals who are open in their double standards about the genital mutilation of children. After all, too many Americans casually buy into the scam that calling all of them out one by one would be wasted effort. My response would be that anybody directly talking about the genital mutilation of children, especially when those are the exact terms that are used, must be consistent and deplore every context and every situation that this happens.
When they aren’t, and the likes of Walsh go forth and mock intactivists and hurl the same fallacies used to justify male infant genital mutilation, they absolutely deserve to be called out. They must be put to question whether they actually are against all forms of child mutilation, or are just tailoring their narrative to appease their large conservative fanbase that still thinks nothing about what trauma they put their infant sons through in an environment completely normalized for that.
As the backlash against woke nonsense gains more momentum and high-profile personalities such as Walsh, Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson become ever-increasingly influential voices, it is crucial to expose their shortsightedness when they are being disingenuous in their given advocacies. This is of grave concern because the mindset they are smuggling in is not only a matter of a difference of opinion, but a genuine, serious risk for infant boys’ well-being.
This is why I think we must get more serious in scrutinizing the attitudes of these personalities, and dismantle their hypocritical takes. As more of these gynocentric acts of throwing the male of the species under the bus while white knights plead for FtM trans surgery victims more so than the more numerous MtFs, if not exclusively the former, we will be on the track of casting into broad daylight the truth about their motives, none of which bode well for men and boys.
Anyway, it’s time to get into the intended focus of this article, to dissect and analyze Matt Walsh’s crude remark regarding the male foreskin and the amputation thereof. Speaking of, the subject of amputation is the first thing he blunders on.
You lose credibility when you call circumcision “elective amputation”. Particularly because “amputation”, in the medical sense, generally refers to the removal of a limb. Make your point without being ridiculous.
According to the featured expert on the subject of amputation from John Hopkins Medicine, Jaime Troyal Shores, M.D, “Amputation is the loss of removal of a body part such as a finger, to, hand, foot, arm or leg.” While the examples he immediately references include limbs because that is what tends to be in the forefront of the minds of those thinking about amputations, he appears to be clear enough that he is talking about a removal of any body part – and not exclusive to limbs. In the same web page under the entry for Amputation, under ‘Types of Lower Extremity Amputation’ a reference to pelvic amputation (hemipelvectomy) is made; last I checked, a pelvis is not itself a limb.
If this was not convincing enough, the Wikipedia page on amputations clearly states the different amputations that aren’t limbs, and unequivocally listed is the removal of the foreskin.
To add to that, a search on scholar.google.com for “amputation of the foreskin” and “foreskin amputation” would yield you over 100 results and over 70 results respectively. In short, the very act of referring to foreskin removal as an amputation is neither ridiculous nor non-credible.
For all his mockery on those who use the term “amputation” for MGM, I wonder if Walsh would at least entertain the idea that it is in fact closer to castration, especially since slaves or men on the losing side of a war have been so circumcised in lieu of actual castration. Also would he consider that children have literally lost or had their genitalia horribly damaged beyond saving due to a “botched” operation?
Recalling Walsh’s preoccupation about amputations being for limbs only; by his own logic, neither is breast removal an amputation, then. Does he not know that the breast is but a modified sweat gland to begin with? Furthermore in response to the common attitude that alleges that circumcisions are like inoculations that you do for children as a part of medical practice you generally do in caring for your infant; if circumcision makes sense so his rate of diseases can lower, then by that logic those mastectomies that these girls are having would be great things, since they’d be reducing the risk of breast cancer!
Since we’re on the subject of the argument for genital mutilation on the basis of alleged medical parental care, the next error:
And parents frequently make decision for their infants. In fact, I’m not sure how else to raise an infant.
Does that make piercing an infant girls’ ears during infancy an acceptable act? Does that qualify as raising an infant?
Let’s take a deep dive into this “decision” parents are making for their infants. Let’s make it so that even Matt Walsh can understand.
The decision to remove not “just the tip” as commonly and falsely advertised, but 33-50% of penile skin along with the sensitive nerve endings for fine touch as well as protection of the glans which then becomes thickened like a callus.
The decision to put the male infant through literal extreme pain resulting in brain changes due to high levels of cortisol as well as neurogenic shock (what circumcisers and their nurses euphemistically refer to as “sleeping through the operation”)
The decision to leave the male infant with a wound that is left alone and open to infections, including but not limited to herpes, meningitis, sepsis and cysts.
The decision to doom so early in life the prospects of a proper sexual experience during his adulthood onwards, by removing the functional gliding and sensitive component.
The decision to consign the male infant to the increased likelihood of sexual dysfunction during his adulthood, loss of sensation, and alexithymia – “the inability to recognize or describe one’s own emotions” which is connected to depression, and even suicide if the truth about what you’ve done to him comes to light. Next time a guy tells you he’s fine after being circumcised as an infant, that’s probably the alexithymia talking.
The decision to play American Roulette with your infant male.
By the last part, I mean risking dying just for being born male. It’s not a gun but a knife that you play American Roulette with, and it never misses. The gamble is whether he actually dies of infection, the blood loss, or other ensuing complications that get brushed off euphemistically as Sudden Infant Death Syndrome so the circumcisers aren’t held accountable.
If you think you’re practicing a medical act for your son by doing this, for example if you think it reduces your son’s chances of an STD or if it’s cleaner, then once again the same can be said about mastectomies, or even your run-of-the-mill female genital mutilation. And if you think you’re going to make him more appealing to ignorant American women cruel enough to self and others to prefer a “cut” penis, then you’re a sexual groomer of your own son; there is nothing else to describe you.
And finally it’s time to pick apart the last mistake of Mr. Walsh:
You aren’t “infringing on their liberty.” Come on, that’s just absurd. Make your point without resorting to laughably hysterical rhetoric.
I’ll refer back to the fact that a parent precludes his son’s ownership of his own intact sex organ before he even has developed the ability to exercise his own volition. Does Walsh understand the actual meaning and message of liberty or is he just too much of a conservative to look past his own neotraditionalist priorities and how liberty applied at large doesn’t always go the way he may want to?
Once again, let’s make clear this so even Matt Walsh can understand it:
Self-ownership is a crucial, integral component to the philosophy of liberty.
Self-ownership as a value applies to the human individual.
A human is valued as such upon, and even before, birth.
Self-ownership therefore is already in effect at infancy.
Let us also debunk the problem with the often-touted “parent’s choice”.
Liberty is about negative rights; entitlements are positive rights.
Negative rights are in line with self-ownership, and the right to be uninfringed by the force of others.
Positive rights presume the “right” over another individual. Reminder that this is the opposite of liberty.
The responsibility to the life you bring into the world is consistent with self-ownership; personal accountability and liberty are not in conflict.
Legitimate medical practices as well as raising and caring for the child are both consistent with the aforementioned responsibility and the fact that you are cultivating the child into a being that can exercise and become aware of his own self-ownership.
Non-medical or cosmetic acts do not count towards raising the child and depending on the lasting effect is tantamount to abuse of the child.
Male genital mutilation is a non-medical, cosmetic, and downright harmful act – by all definitions acts of entitlement over another being.
Self-ownership of the child is under assault by MGM as it includes both damage and theft of a crucial part of the male anatomy at a point in his life in which he is neither mentally or physically able to resist.
The child’s liberty is infringed via the assault on his self-ownership.
In short, there is no such thing as a “parent’s choice” aside from the best practices of raising one’s own child and the responsibility to his safety. Routine infant circumcision is a betrayal of that trust, safety, and the respect of self-ownership.
Also by Walsh’s own logic, anyone who practices FGM are not assaulting girls’ liberties. Oh wait, chances may be high that he may in fact consider it such an assault. What’s the big difference in this case: “It’s much worse for a girl”, “Infants have no rights”, “We must protect the girls but boys got to learn to take it”? Gynocentrists are so predictable.
The reader may be wondering right now whether the title I gave this article, “What is a Man?”, was nothing more than a way to grab attention as well as a pastiche of Walsh’s film “What is a Woman?” I confess that my intents leaned towards provocation in this regard, but if we think about it, we can very well ask and then answer the question “What is a Man?” in the context of the subject of the intact, whole, and unsacrificed male.
“What is a man?” may as well be a question that Walsh could ask himself, but I cannot trust any answer he may have.
So what is a man, anyway? I’m not here to give you a comprehensive answer on that at this moment, furthermore as individuals a man cannot afford to be condensed to one definition or even one archetype. For that matter, women as individuals likewise cannot afford to be so condensed (so much for “What is a woman?” am I right?). However the question of archetypes and the permutation of models for men and women is a subject I will save for a future article. In the meantime, let’s clarify a few things that we can:
A man has his liberty, and his self-ownership, his free will to exercise himself in this world as an individual as well as his own expression of masculinity.
As a masculine, self-owning free being, a man has his desires – including prospects of pairing with a woman counterpart, which under proper circumstances include his expression of sexual desire. (We are speaking of the heterosexual world for the moment, though it is clear that those that aren’t have their own such expressions and desire)
A man is fully equipped with everything he needs anatomically to exercise his sexual desires peacefully. He has a foreskin that is in no way a minor detail of this anatomy, but a crucially functional one. It is not an accident of birth.
Here we now have the conceptualization of the anatomically intact man, and answers the question in this respect. The act of routine infant circumcision, then, boils down to a mitigation of the qualities that make one a male. If foreskin amputations were regarded indeed as a form of “castration lite”, it is an act that translates into making the male less of one. The answer to “What is a man?” is not “something you cut the anatomy of”. “Man up” has been the go-to form of goading and shaming to advertise the circumcision industry and cultural practice. Routine infant circumcision is not the response to “What is a man?” but rather “How to destroy a man?”
What grand irony that it is the conservative that continues to moralize and defend this practice in the same breath as he decries the trans agenda for child operations. What irony, that the conservative who talks about “real men” and how masculinity is important to keep society going is the same one who wishes to surgically lower how much of a male someone is, so early in life. This is nothing short of punishment for males for being male – the radical feminists would be proud. It is no surprise to me why conservatives like Walsh and Tucker Carlson are so eager to “establish dialogue” with Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists just to own the biological males.
A few more thoughts to close off on:
I am betting everybody in the men’s movement and intactivist movement who read this, if they aren’t instead incensed by Walsh’s hypocrisy, are howling with laughter at the prospect of him demanding “rallies outside of hospitals that butcher children” as if it were a brilliant new proposition. Clearly he hasn’t heard of Bloodstained Men and Their Friends before…or maybe he has but is instead opting to screech with eyes closed and fingers in his ears whenever someone reminds him of it. In short, Mr. Walsh – there already is a movement of which you speak of. The ball is already rolling. Frankly, you’re proving to be just an obstacle without a good point to make.
I can only hope that we can bring this hypocrisy into light so much that the likes of Matt Walsh will have no choice but to stop ignoring it. They should be made to admit their blundering attitude on the subject and the fact that they’ve disingenuously grandstanded on a subject that goes deeper than they are willing to admit themselves. It is a travesty that what is a toxic fad by comparison is the specific type of child mutilation given disproportionately more attention than the vastly practiced, normalized and casually encouraged child mutilation that is MGM. This mutilation runs so deep in the cultural practice that the men who survive it are like most male domestic abuse victims: in denial, perhaps feeling like they deserved it, and do not consider what happened to them as abuse.
If anybody takes a stand against child mutilation, routine infant circumcision is rightfully the forefront issue. Matt Walsh symbolically and literally mocks the intactivist movement as he envisions himself as the forerunner against the kind of mutilation he can conveniently strike a crusade against. Consider these points the next time you think of Walsh as “brave” for speaking out myopically on an issue he has no moral authority on.
My thanks to the following links for sources on the damage of MGM:
The following brief exchange appeared in the comments under an article titled C.S. Lewis: The Feudalisation of Love. In it I give a brief comment about how women’s cultivation of childlikeness contributes to gynocentric attitudes, and how this appears to be a more forceful influence than sexual and reproductive pressures.
TEXT:
2cyar wrote:
“The primary ‘something’ that was biologically there to leverage is the child archetype in women, an innocence and moral purity feigned with cosmetics, clothing, gestures and fragility and held up as a fetish for men to worship and protect. Sexual factors do come in but are secondary in strength.”
The next question is how do we turn it off? They certainly aren’t going to self regulate, so we have to figure out how to turn off the impulse within ourselves (and all men) to render it ineffective. ___________________________________
Peter Wright wrote:
Turning it off can happen by no longer believing that women are children deserving indulgences at men’s expense – ie. seeing it as artificially manufactured and that in reality women are grown adults. It’s the same process as no longer viewing the Santa Claus in the shopping mall as real – he’s doing theatre.
The result of that awakening is that men find themselves saying “No” to every bit of theatrical childishness put before them, realising that it’s a supernormal bait and a grift. Such a man is no longer caught in the gynocentric machinery of his mind.
This is where I part ways with a few honeybadgers and men’s advocates who believe gynocentrism is more ‘natural’ than I do, even as they accept gynocentrism as sometimes extreme and unfair to men. The “gynocentrism is natural” stance is built mostly on belief in the power of women’s sexuality and reproductive functions, while omitting more powerful & more artificial ruses such as feigning childlikeness: i.e. women may have breasts and uteri, but they are not children.
It’s self-defeating ideology to believe sexual politics is totally unfair for men, while simultaneously believing gynocentrism is “natural.” It results in a learned impotence. Most advocates of this theory end up promoting the familiar parental lifestyle for men under the nostalgic euphemism of “honouring masculinity.” That approach pretends to free men while ultimately keeping them trapped – compliments of an unexamined and unchallenged child archetype, combined with a cultural ideology that pedestalizes women as a higher, quasi-noble class.
Where Ward’s chapter becomes remarkable is his claim that evidence supports a theory that human species began as female. Claiming support for this scientific fact Ward drew on Darwin, geologist Sir Charles Lyell (whose work influenced Darwin), American zoologist John A. Ryder, paleontologist Pierre-Joseph van Beneden, and other zoologists for support.
Thus, in Ward’s theory, the Arachnida or spider family is not a perversion, but an ancient form of reproductive exchange in which the female extracts sperm and consumes the sperm donor. A then popular view was that the male human, male mammals generally, and male birds in particular, are superior to the female and that the female is a form of “arrested development” in the human species where males have evolved more quickly than females. Ward’s repudiation here is ingenious. The female, he argues, “simply represents the normal condition, while the condition of the male is abnormal due to his great powers of variability.” He argues that “females cannot … vary [because] they represent the center of gravity of the biological system.”
Ward made sexual selection the more complex process. It was, he argued, nature’s mechanism to maintain female centeredness in reproduction and preserve the female as the “hereditary trunk” of what we would call DNA. While the female is the ancestral trunk, in humans, unlike other mammals, the sexes choose each other on the basis of different, functional, evolutionary mandates. The female chooses males on the basis of their superiority within the species. The males oblige females, on the basis of the mandate, to naturally select partners who show the capacity to adapt. Instinct gives the female the ability to discriminate among individuals in a species. The human male evolved from the indiscriminate release of sperm to the faculty of taste.
In other words, men have evolved to discriminate among women on the basis of innate aesthetic appeal. We can see this in lower level organisms where evolution, say of spiders, is changing the relative size of males because female spiders are consistently choosing larger sperm donors. When sexual attraction appears in species—most do not have the capacity for libido (a subjective desire for a specific mate)—the aesthetic capacity of individual males plays a functional role in natural and even perhaps in social evolution.
Females are the original humans. Males are an effusion or an extrusion that makes human evolution what it is. The female has an aesthetic that helps her to decide her sexual partner’s relative worth, and where she remains superior in human evolution is in her capacity to discriminate. In Ward’s imagination the evidence presents a situation where female humans have sex-selected for rationality in men rather than for strength or good looks. Because the criteria include rationality, women bred men who were more rational, and a gender power imbalance was the result. Ward is careful to say that both sexes in humans have rationality. But he is more interested in how evolutionary rationality in men enabled men to seize control of the children. This led to the overthrow of the mother right and the establishment of patriarchy. The evolutionary redress to this injustice is already in process. Men abuse women not because they are hateful or strong or stupid. They have simply not yet evolved the capacity that all women have, of empathy. As women begin to socially select for this quality, the obvious abuses of the patriarchal present should resolve.
The following volume by Scott Nearing ‘Woman and social progress: a discussion of the biologic, domestic, industrial and social possibilities of American women‘ (1912) includes lengthy references to Lester F. Ward and his gynæcocentric theory in relation to “women’s progress.”
