The following article was published in Justice, 1909. Note the reference to Lester F. Ward’s ‘Gynocentric theory’. In a subsequent edition of Justice, Barrister E. B. Bax replies in protest to this article, which is also printed below.
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Below is a reply by Ernest B. Bax in Justice – Saturday 18 September 1909:
The following excerpt is from the 1920 volume Taboo and genetics; a study of the biological, sociological and psychological foundation of the family. It details the popularity of what it calls “gynocentric theory” entailing a belief in the superiority of women over men, and describes how the idea had caught on widely not only in popular culture and in feminist thought, but in college reference libraries too.
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Scientific discovery, especially in biology, during the past two decades has made necessary an entire restatement of the sociological problem of sex. Ward’s so-called “gynæcocentric” theory, as sketched in Chapter 14 of his Pure Sociology, has been almost a bible on the sex problem to sociologists, in spite of the fact that modern laboratory experimentation has disproved it in almost every detail.
While a comparatively small number of people read this theory from the original source, it is still being scattered far and wide in the form of quotations, paraphrases, and interpretations by more popular writers. It is therefore necessary to gather together the biological data which are available from technical experimentation and medical research, in order that its social implications may be utilized to show the obsoleteness of this older and unscientific statement of the sex problem in society.
Lester F. Ward crystallized the arguments for [female superiority] in an article entitled “Our Better Halves” in The Forum, in 1888. This philosophy of sex, which he christened the “Gynæcocentric Theory,” is best known as expanded into the fourteenth chapter of his “Pure Sociology,“ published fifteen years later. Its publication at this late date gave it an unfortunate vitality long after its main tenets had been disproved in the biological laboratory.
Besides its faulty foundation as to facts, the old gynæcocentric theory involved a method of treatment by historical analogy which biologists have almost entirely discarded. Anyone interested in the relative value of different kinds of biological data for social problems would do well to read the opening chapter of Prof. Morgan’s “Critique of the Theory of Evolution,” for even a summary of which space is lacking here.
College reference shelves are still stocked with books on sex sociology which are totally oblivious of present-day biology. For example, Mrs. Gilman (Man-Made World), Mrs. Hartley (Truth About Woman) and the Nearings (Woman and Social Progress) adhere to Ward’s theory in substantially its primitive form, and not even sociologists like Professor Thomas (Sex and Society) have been able to entirely break away from it.
The following graphic depicting the spirit of chivalry was exhibited in Westminster Hall, London, in August 1845. The author of this image describes the scene as follows:
The spirit, or “personification” of Chivalry is surrounded by men of various pursuits — religious, military, and civil — who represent, as by an Upper Court, or House, the final acquisition of her honours and rewards. Beneath, as not having obtained, though within reach of the Crown, a young Knight vows himself to chivalric services, attended by his Page, and invited by his Lady’s favour. Beside, or around him, in various grades, other figures are introduced to connect the abstract representation of Chivalry with its general recognition of intellectual influences. Among them the Painter, the Sculptor, the Man of Science; the Bard inspiring Youth by his recitals; the Troubadour and his Mistress; the Palmer from the Holy Land; and the Poet-Historian, from whom future ages must derive their knowledge of the spirit and the deeds of Chivalry.
The following graphic depicting the spirit of chivalry was exhibited in Westminster Hall, London, in August 1845. The author of this image describes the scene as follows:
The spirit, or “personification” of Chivalry is surrounded by men of various pursuits — religious, military, and civil — who represent, as by an Upper Court, or House, the final acquisition of her honours and rewards. Beneath, as not having obtained, though within reach of the Crown, a young Knight vows himself to chivalric services, attended by his Page, and invited by his Lady’s favour. Beside, or around him, in various grades, other figures are introduced to connect the abstract representation of Chivalry with its general recognition of intellectual influences. Among them the Painter, the Sculptor, the Man of Science; the Bard inspiring Youth by his recitals; the Troubadour and his Mistress; the Palmer from the Holy Land; and the Poet-Historian, from whom future ages must derive their knowledge of the spirit and the deeds of Chivalry.
The following article, describing American culture as an epicenter of exaggerated gynocentric chivalry, was published in The London Sun, Wed 11th November, 1846.
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.
The whole attitude of courtly love has been rightly described as ‘a feudalisation of love’. ~ C.S. Lewis
Both liberal-feminist and traditional conservative views on gender relations can be imagined as two heads growing from the same Hydra. What aim do these ideologies have in common? The answer to that question is beautifully captured by C.S. Lewis’ phrase “the feudalisation of love.”
According to Lewis, the feudalisation of love refers to the medieval event when the feudal contract employed between Lords & vassals was repurposed by noblewomen who believed the feudal contract could serve as a new model to govern relations between men and women. The idea was that a woman would assume the traditional role of Lord, and man her vassal symbolised in the iconic display of a man going down on one knee to offer service to her.
This effort in social engineering was wildly successful, and after a continuous process of cultural diffusion the formula now appears in most countries and governs most interactions between men and women, such has been its remarkable power to colonize. Today we refer to this model by the name of romantic love.
Lewis states that in comparison with the revolution generated by the feudalisation of love, the Renaissance amounts to a mere ripple on the surface of literature. It forms the internal rationale of post-industrial societies, along with the subsequent waves of feminism which embraced this concept with fervor, applying its principles more aggressively with each iteration of the movement.
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Lewis gives us a precise date on the rise of love feudalism, claiming it appeared quite suddenly at the end of the eleventh century in France. He describes it as an elitist fad spreading to all the courts of Europe while subsequently permeating down the vertical axis to capture the imagination of lower classes as well. The spread was so thorough that the feudalisation of love is now regarded as a “timeless” and “natural” human arrangement, and is imagined as as a sacrosanct pillar of gender relations by layperson and academic alike.
Feudalisation of love is based on the principle male service to women. It leads to poor treatment of males, serving as root cause of the malignant outcomes tackled by men’s advocates. Among the catalogue of negative outcomes is male suicide — and yet even family members, friends and academics who have lost male loved ones to suicides remain leery about naming this lack of value directly: as caused by both the gynocentrism and misandry inherent to the feudalisation of love.
The only place where female suicide is higher is in rural China where women have lower social value than men. China is also the place where the feudalisation of love never took root because it was explicitly outlawed there by Mao during the cultural revolution, as it was viewed as a disintegrative culture product.
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Outside certain parts of Asia most cultures are decidedly gynocentric, hyper-valuing women’s identity, needs and wants. While there’s many factors that can contribute to male suicide, if we were to address men’s devalued sense of self by removing the feudalisation of love, then the majority of these men wouldn’t suicide because they would be buoyed by that magic ingredient – value. This can only happen if we voice a full throated rejection of gynocentrism and a social revalorization of men and boys.
Those who adhere to the feudalisation of love script in their relationships, please don’t be surprised when it begins to hurt or when tragedy hits. In order to regain your sense of value you will need to divest yourself of it and, in the long run, find alternative models to live by.
In light of the trend of transgender mania and woke and politically correct culture, those on the conservative traditionalist side are keen on throwing around terms like “gender cult.” This gender cult they speak of is that of gender subjectivism, denial of organic attributes of sex, and divorcing the metaphysical and behavioral aspects of sex from the biological real-world component – what progressives would like to call sex assigned at birth.
It’s not that they’re necessarily wrong here, calling this a gender cult. It is; albeit a specialized reactionary one that professes to rebel against gender norms. Ironically enough transgender identity relies on stereotyped ideas about gender to then say they are defying it.
What I want to address is the idiocy of those who claim to be fighting this gender cult, namely the hypocrisy of calling it a gender cult when they as neotraditionalists are likely to indulge and take for granted a gender cult of their own, one which is more massive and has a bigger, more longstanding history than even feminism itself.
Gynocentrism and gyneolatry contain qualities in every way attributable to an actual gender cult. The fact that it actually gave way to feminism, which in turn gave way to political transgender ideology, is evident but conveniently ignored too often by these conservatives. They don’t want to address it because, as practitioners of the gynocentric gender cult, they either are dependent on it to keep the approval of the women in their immediate lives as well as from the public, or suffer from a serious normalized case of Stockholm Syndrome.
Anyway, to the heart of the subject of this article: The gender cult that the traditional conservative promotes and refuses to denounce.
Men are expected to die in wars while the royal class of women are subject to protection by these men. That is a gender cult.
Men are expected, from the point of courtship til well after the divorce, to financially and in effect materially provide for womankind. That is a gender cult.
Men are expected at one day old to have a crucial component of their genitalia ripped off, despite the risk of infection, physical complications that follow, and death, as well as guaranteed psychological trauma manifesting itself at varying degrees later in life — apparently for the sake of anywhere from Sandra Bullock’s, Oprah’s, and Kate Beckinsale’s facial creams to the depraved whims of women sexually attracted to broken manhood. That is a gender cult. Circumcision of baby boys is a gender cult.
Women are regarded as equivalent of nature, designated as the big choosers, and the men as vassals that must commit degrading acts of altruism to earn their attention, this despite the fact that men and women are both choosers and members of nature together. This one-sided attitude is a gender cult.
Families, in particular in North America, favor supporting daughters after adulthood, whereas men are generally kicked out of the house when they reach the age of 18, expected to fend for themselves because “a man should take care of himself” else he gets shamed as a dweller in his parents’ basement with no life. Women categorically reject men at the slightest hint of them receiving assistance in any such way in the dating market, for instance. I call that a gender cult.
To engage in romance a man must first place himself in a position of self-degradation of bending his knee in front of a woman and present her with a hunk of rock, which may or may not be a blood diamond, that he has spent a ridiculous amount of his fortune on. That’s the first edge. What is either a curt rejection and no further regard by the woman for the trouble the man went through or, if she did accept, then the wedding will be even more of a fortune lost on the man’s part and it will be again when the divorce follows, which happens at this point too often to not consider it an event to expect, and practically schedule. Either way, royal woman looks down at vassal man. That is the image of the man going down on his knee and proposing. That is a gender cult.
Violence against men, especially by women, is subject to laughter. The very act of entertaining the idea of violence against women, especially by men, is grounds for ostracism at best, violent retribution at worst. Self-defense is not tolerated even if the man is faced with a rabid crazed blade wielding unhinged psycho woman on a rampage. That is a gender cult.
Happy wife, happy life. If Momma ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy. Placing women on status of maniacal ruler whose whims must be satisfied else the man’s existence is not justified. That is a gender cult.
To the traditional conservatives out there, and anyone who professes to ally with feminists and other misandrists just so they could own the trans gender cult — this discussion is for you. The gender cult which you profess to wage war on is but a fad compared to the grander gender cult that is gynocentrism that you take for granted and bask in.
I’ll close with something that I want you to get through to your head. Gynocentrism is a gender cult. It is the biggest such cult. Gyneolatry is woman-worshipping in this gender cult. Biogynocentrism is the means of rationalizing it with the alleged argument from biology and evolution in this gender cult. Male disposal is the end goal of this gender cult. Gynocentrism is a gender cult.
The headline is likely to provoke an emotional reaction from both the woke and the virulently anti-woke, but I stride forth with my flack jacket on in order to make a salient point: that far from being a fringe group of misogynistic terrorists who refuse to court the ladies, MGTOW is perfectly aligned with the LGBTQIA category ‘Aromantic’ – a term indicating a profound disinterest in romantic love.
When it comes to romantic love they simply don’t want it.
I was surprised to learn that the ‘A’ in LGBTQIA can mean either asexual or aromantic, as described in the following LGBTQIA Wiki Fandom definition:
Aromantic, often shortened to aro, describes people who do not experience romantic attraction. One of the meanings of the A in LGBTQIA+ is Aromantic.[1] Aromanticism may involve forms of attraction that are not necessarily romantic, or interests in relationships that are intimate in other ways. There is no singular experience of aromanticism.[3]
The aromantic spectrum, also known as “aro-spec”, ranges from aromantic to alloromantic, the latter referring to people who regularly and consistently experience romantic attraction.[1] People within the aromantic spectrum are part of a community that has much in common. They may use the label aromantic as a close fit for their experiences or use other labels that further describe them.
Men Going Their Own Way are unmoved by the fantasy of romantic love, viewing its latent BDSM overtones as a theatre of female dominatrixes and male subs, a model that has grown from a kind of sexual feudalism instituted by affluent ladies of the medieval era. MGTOW typically reject this model because it requires men to go down on a literal and proverbial knee before a woman. This qualifies MGTOW as Aromantic because, as stated on the LGBTQIA Wiki Fandom page, aromantic individuals “may choose to opt out of anything coded as romantic or feel discomfort with the idea of romantic relations.”
I should add, for the slow of mind, that MGTOW orientation is concerned with a wider array of issues than this. However, the romance problem forms a molten core around which many of their concerns for male self-determination revolve.
The result of ‘Men going their aromantic way’ is in some ways striking. These men have inaugurated an enduring sex strike, putting quietly into practice what women routinely threaten if they don’t get their own way – as we recently saw from Joy Behar who called for ‘sex strike’ after Supreme Court abortion law leak. As usual it seems men have beaten women to the punch:
As this graph demonstrates, young men are driving a decline in sex. Perhaps more accurately they may be rejecting the pathological contamination of sexual intimacy with romantic love – aka, the idea that men need to demonstrate obeisance and servitude toward “romantic” partners before being “rewarded” with sex.
The sex slump is not sufficiently explained by labeling reluctant men as ‘involuntary celibates,’ because the yearly baseline for numbers of incels has blown out. A more plausible explanation is that men of the West are becoming increasingly aromantic – much as they did en masse in Japan with the rise of grass eaters. This is certainly true of the growing numbers of MGTOW, who may be interested in other kinds of sex and relationship (casual relationships, intimate friendships, non-romantic intimate partnerships, relationships of peers, etc) but who are no longer moved by the false fairy-tale of romance.
Far from being a fringe group that warrants deplatforming, men going their aromantic way deserve to be embraced as a speshul minority, deserving of special rights and protections afforded to every other vulnerable demographic. Is it not true that MGTOW are bullied, harassed and treated with extreme bigotry? That should qualify them for special protections and considerations under the law.
MGTOW probably won’t be entering a Pride float anytime soon, but in theory their cause is every bit as deserving under the umbrella of that one, powerful word – AROMANTIC.
Discussion about transgender identity is all the rage, with many people railing against what they view as a Frankenstein fad, and yet others who are encouraging the trend beyond what anyone would consider reasonable limits – e.g., gender-affirming surgery for children. A third approach is that of the social phenomenologist which accounts for people (including myself) who are more interested in making sense of the phenomenon before screaming blue murder to the sky.
Most people appear eager to discover what Aristotle called the “efficient cause” that might lead men to become transwomen — with the most popular ’causes’ being those of gender dysphoria, and autogynephilia which both end up falling short of sufficient explanations, for reasons I’ll discuss below.
Autogynephilia
Autogynephilia is defined as a male’s propensity to be sexually aroused by the thought of himself as a female. It’s a paraphilia that is theorized to underlie transvestism and some forms of male-to-female transsexualism,1 as showcased in the below tweet by a transwoman.
If ‘getting off’ by appearing as the opposite sex were the only motive we might reasonably assume that occasional cross-dressing and/or erotic roleplay would scratch the itch, but transgender individuals are clearly seeking a more permanent goal. Moreover, many transgender individuals experience a loss of sexual arousal after medically transitioning, indicating that the securing of permanent autogynephilic pleasure is not a sufficient explanation for making the change.2
Gender dysphoria
Gender dysphoria is the favorite go-to for advocates of traditional gender roles who pretentiously claim the body and psyche can only be exact Xerox copies of each other. As tidy as this formula sounds on its face, even people with a rudimentary understanding of human psychology will see its failings; failings demonstrated by the fact that everyone has an imaginative and psychological identity that is, at least in some ways, at odds with bodily reality:
A stunningly beautiful woman identifies as plain, or ugly.
A fat guy identifies as muscled and skinny.
An old man identifies himself healthy, as fit as a teenager.
A little girl identifies as a world-class singer.
A little boy identifies as the best violinist in the world.
A feminist identifies as more caring than others.
A person identifies as more intelligent than others.
A person born of privilege identifies as restricted.
An underprivileged person identifies as someone who can be and do anything. Etc.
The psyche tends to ramble off in fanciful ways that do not match seamlessly with physical reality, and it has done this since way back in our evolutionary history. Psychological identity is not, and never will be, a faithful replica of physical reality…. and yet human civilization has continued to thrive in spite of this propensity.
With that human capacity for imagination in mind we can set aside those who champion seamless sex-and-gender identities, and associated social roles. We can also find some fault with Matt Walsh’s recent insistence that there can be one, and only one definition of a woman.3 While Matt is 100% correct in stating that there is only one definition of a biological woman, he conveniently omits the possibility that there may be a definition of ‘woman’ applying to a person’s psychological identity, thus essentially giving us two definitions of woman corresponding to the soma/psyche split.
To reiterate, we all see the obvious XX woman of the body, and then there’s the woman of psychological/imaginal identity which can operate somewhat independently of the former (hence transgenders, intergenders, etc). To illustrate this, Matt Walsh could have a body that looks like Matt Walsh but, hypothetically speaking, in his imaginative and psychological identity he might be more like Napoleon Bonaparte; when it comes to the human psyche anything is possible.
While all this might sound like a recipe for confusion, it isn’t really. Dictionaries attest to the ability of the human mind to accept multiple definitions of a word. I can be stoned to death by literal rocks, and I can be stoned after smoking weed. I can suffer a physical pain, or alternatively I can be in psychological pain – and those ‘two pains’ might not be seamless pains going on at the same time; they might be completely unrelated.
When it comes to the public furor around this topic, the comical part is watching traditional conservatives argue there is only soma, and the progressives argue there’s only psyche. The stupidity of these two partial arguments – and the debate between them – make for the best Punch and Judy show on offer.
If I wanted to take a more strictly phenomenological approach to our topic, I might be forced to say transwomen were both male and female. For example being a woman in one’s imaginative identity will never mean that the chromosomal body has also changed, which indicates there are two identities running concurrently, one male and one female. That said, I appreciate that imagination can override the phenomenological approach to the point of absurdum.
What we can conclude from the more narrow arguments is that they are reductionist and kneejerk responses to a complex phenomenon, and so they provide insufficient explanations for the rise of transgender identity. They may be partially correct but it may help to consider more complex equations, not to mention the approaching of each trans person as possessing a unique biography that led them to become who they are. Following this line of thought I’d like to offer two more factors below that might help to complicate the picture.
Internalized misandry, and gyneolatry
I’ve observed in the rhetoric of many transwomen both an externalized and an internalized misandry. This appears in descriptions of the men they know, and in descriptions of themselves, and they also tend to rehearse feminist depictions of maleness that portray narrow and denigrating descriptions of masculinity. Conversely, transwomen tend to idealize women and femininity (i.e., gyneolatry),4 leading to a conclusion that the feminine grass is of a greener hue.
The sense of internalized misandry was reinforced by a 1991 study which found that mothers of young boys with gender dysphoria frequently suffered psychiatric disorders and that these boys exhibited chronic suffering that was often expressed directly by them as self-hate. One such boy at age three said:
“I hate myself. I don’t want to be me. I want to be somebody else. I want to be a girl.”5
When a man’s potential masculinity is felt as toxic due to the operation of internalized misandry, it’s only natural that such a person would have a dysphoric reaction to masculine selfhood. This might be understood as a pathological reaction, but it can be equally viewed as a healthy adaptation to an unhealthy, male-denigrating environment — for if I renounce maleness I protect myself from corrosive states of imposed self-hatred, along with de-personalizing those attacks directed at me from a misandric world.
The position I have been leading to can be stated simply this way: Internalized misandry + gyneolatry + autogynephilia = transwoman. Of those three factors, I would consider autogynephilia somewhat more variable than the other two, and while often present, it is not always.
In order to render this triplicate formula more palpable, I encourage readers to watch the following Benjamin Boyce interview with former trans individual NJada6 who masterfully illustrates the operation of internalized misandry and gyneolatry in his own experiences.
In conclusion, this article claims that autogynephilia, and gender dysphoria prove insufficient as “causes” of the desire to transition but may nevertheless operate as one factor among many. As a student of gender politics I have expanded the causa efficiens to three:
Lastly, and on a more general note Kara Dansky,7 a trans-exclusionary radical feminist who is leading the charge against transgender individuals, recently tweeted, “It is, in effect, a men’s rights movement intended to objectify women’s bodies and erase us as a class. It is left-wing misogyny on steroids. I say this is as a leftist and a Democrat.”
In response I feel it important to clarify that the transgender movement is not a cause célèbre driven by men’s rights advocates, but rather the current support for transgender individuals/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.
Feminists were the ones who cleared this forest path for the global elites to walk on, and Dansky is right in the sense that it opens a window to become of benefit to men’s rights movement – ie. it dissolves customary culture privileges that have accumulated around the female sex, making those privileges available to all humans, including men and boys, for the first time.8
