The following 2008 article by Michelle Malkin is one of the few critical mentions of “gynocentrism,” prior to the revival of the term in more recent years. Seems Michelle was way ahead of the game.

The Daily Times, Friday Mar 7, 2008

When Esther Vilar published her book The Manipulated Man she was beaten up by four young women in the toilet of the Munich State Library who were angry about her perspectives.¹ According to her own statement, her emigration from Germany goes back to this. The following account detailing her ongoing experience of violence by feminists was published in the San Rafael Daily Independent Journal Newspaper in 1973.²

[1] Esther Vilar: “Liebe macht unfrei”, Die Weltwoche, Ausgabe 51/2007  [English translation]

[2] San Rafael Daily Independent Journal Newspaper Archives January 08, 1973 Page 42.

The “Me” Decade and the Third Great Awakening

By Tom Wolfe – New York Magazine – 1976

In 1961 a copywriter named Shirley Polykoff was working for the Foote, Cone & Belding advertising agency on the Clairol hair-dye account when she came up with the line: “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a blonde!” In a single slogan she had summed up what might be described as the secular side of the Me Decade. “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a—!” (You have only to fill in the blank.)

This formula accounts for much of the popularity of the women’s-liberation or feminist movement. “What does a woman want?” said Freud. Perhaps there are women who want to humble men or reduce their power or achieve equality or even superiority for themselves and their sisters. But for every one such woman, there are nine who simply want to fill in the blank as they see fit. “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as … a free spirit!” (Instead of … a house slave: a cleaning woman, a cook, a nursemaid, a station-wagon hacker, and an occasional household sex aid.)

But even that may be overstating it, because often the unconscious desire is nothing more than: Let’s talk about Me. The great unexpected dividend of the feminist movement has been to elevate an ordinary status—woman, housewife—to the level of drama. One’s very existence as a woman—as Me—becomes something all the world analyzes, agonizes over, draws cosmic conclusions from, or, in any event, takes seriously. Every woman becomes Emma Bovary, Cousin Bette, or Nora … or Erica Jong or Consuelo Saah Baehr.

Source:

The “Me” Decade and the Third Great Awakening, By Tom Wolfe (1976)

By Robert Franklin

On reading my last post, I realized that I’d glossed over an issue that I should have addressed.  So, dear reader, mea culpa.

I too hastily said that feminism, from its origins in the mid-19^th century to today, has urged the abandonment of sex roles.  That’s not completely accurate.  Feminism has always urged society to grant women the freedom to step outside of their traditional role, but has been less enthusiastic about men’s doing so.  At least until recently.

Feminism has been astonishing successful; it’s achieved far, far beyond anything its intellectual underpinnings merited.  Feminist analysis of society, power and male/female relationships has always been at odds with basic facts and should long ago have been laughed out of serious public discourse.  But that hasn’t happened and, to the contrary, basic articles of feminist faith have been incorporated into everything from statute law to our “understanding” of sex, the workplace, much of history and more.

So how did something so intellectually bankrupt come to have such a powerful influence on our society?

The answer is traditional sex roles.  Metaphorically, when women screamed “Help!”, men came running to their rescue. Feminism has always relied on men, particularly members of dominant male hierarchies, a.k.a. power elites, to play the role of the knight on the white charger, St. George versus the dragon.  So feminists have always played the maiden in distress, the better to recruit male power to their cause.  That explains why feminists so often describe women as helpless victims of the most minor, everyday events and practices, a phenomenon remarked on by countless commentators.  Why appear strong, when the appearance of weakness works so well?

Why has it worked?

Females have always been the protected sex.  That was appropriate as long as human survival was in question, as it was for countless millennia.  So men took on that role and do so to this day; evolved biology powerfully shapes behavior, so the mere fact that we no longer live in a world fraught with the perils faced by hunter-gatherer societies doesn’t mean we’ve abandoned the behaviors on which we relied for so long to survive.  Remember the YouTube videos from several years ago showing a man in a public place loudly berating his female companion?  Complete strangers – all of them men – intervened to make sure the woman wasn’t hurt.  But when the same couple, both of them actors, switched roles and it was the woman not only shouting at the man, but hitting him, no one lifted a finger.  Passersby barely glanced at the scene.

The journalist Dorothy Dix understood the dynamic perfectly.  She agitated for women to be allowed to serve on juries.  Her reason?  Because all-male juries, when faced with a lachrymose female defendant accused of murdering her husband, too often voted to acquit.  Dix understood that female jurors wouldn’t be so easily manipulated, so justice for male victims demanded that women participate in judging female defendants.

Feminism’s dark genius was and is to harness that male protective instinct for its own goals.  So the Declaration of Sentiments in 1848 was, among other things, one long cry for help – help with rights, marriage, divorce, property, etc.  So was the demand for the vote and later the Tender Years Doctrine, obtaining credit in a woman’s name, and the like.

Needless to say, many of the goals of feminism were, certainly by the standards of today, perfectly legitimate.  Male-dominated power structures were right to accede to many of their demands.  But, whether the demands were legitimate (e.g. the vote) or not (exemption from military conscription, the Tender Years Doctrine), the dynamic was the same.  Women cried “Help!” and men “rode to their rescue.”

More recent events make that dynamic painfully clear.  Indeed, it’s informative to view today’s feminism as simply testing the limits of the male inclination to protect. Perhaps air-conditioning in office buildings constitutes patriarchal oppression that “the Patriarchy” needs to change.  That garnered ridicule, but little traction.  What about “free bleeding,” i.e. abandoning tampons as more masculine oppression?  A non-starter.

Those “issues” may seem trivial, but nevertheless illustrate that the dynamic, i.e. testing to see if male power will respond to a cry for help with corrective action, continues.  Non-trivial issues demonstrate the same.

For example, we’ve known for decades that women are at least as likely as men to commit domestic violence and, since the 1970s, the male powers that be have lavished attention and money on female victims.  But that same male power has always turned a blind eye to male suffering and female perpetration.

Likewise, due process of law has been gravely compromised in response to feminists’ demand that more men go to prison when women cry “Rape!”  Every acquittal of a man accused of sexual wrongdoing is greeted with feminist outrage, regardless of the weakness of the case against him (see, e.g. the case of Gian Ghomeshi).  And academic institutions and male-dominated businesses rush to fire powerful men on the mere accusation by a woman of even minor sexual impropriety.  When writer Stephen Galloway was hounded out of his tenured position at the University of British Columbia, women levelled the accusations and men in the university’s power structure kicked him off campus and shunned him socially long before it was revealed that he’d done nothing wrong.

In short, the helpless woman/knight on the white horse dynamic is alive and well and feminists know it.  Feminist success depends on it and always has.

Therefore, the fight to turn back the worst depredations of feminism is simultaneously a fight to turn men from their traditional ways of thinking about and acting toward women.  As long as men in power respond to feminist complaints like chivalrous knights, feminists will continue to push for more and more and more.  Why wouldn’t they?

Until then, intellectual distortions blight the landscape of public discourse. When feminists don the mask of the helpless, victimized woman in order to stimulate the savior response in men, while also arguing that gender is a societal construct that must be abolished, cognitive dissonance is born.  I strongly suspect that the former cannot beget the latter, that using sex roles to abolish sex roles will never succeed.  Perhaps it’s not intended to.   Perhaps Little Nell and her rescuer are perfectly happy with their roles.

After all, as I established several posts back, feminism has always been about “more for us,” i.e. more power, more money, more rights, more privileges for women.  If traditional sex roles provide that “more,” and they do, then feminists would be foolish to do anything but continue the drama that pays so well, until someone mercifully brings the curtain down.

In the meantime, the ironies pour on us like a biblical flood.

Men and disability – Part 1
Men and disability – Part 2
Men and disability – Part 3

In part one of this series we looked at men with disabilities who achieved greatness. In part two we looked at an emerging culture of gynocentrism in the disability sector, along with the impoverished and at times hostile “support” extended to men in need of assistance. In this third and final part we look at a new kind of man with a disability – a man who says “No” to bigotry and other forms of mistreatment, and who gears his life toward the cultivation of self-respect.

To illustrate this new kind of man we will turn to the Greek myth of the goddess Hera and her disabled son Hephaestus – a son who has to challenge his mother’s ableism and bigotry before he can take his rightful place in the Olympian society. In this myth Hephaestus plays a role not unlike the hero Perseus who must stop Medusa’s hostilities before men can go about their lives again in safety and dignity.

The son of Hera and Zeus, Hephaestus was born parthenogenically – ie. from Hera alone and not from the result of a sex act with Zeus. We are told that she planed to give birth to a son after Zeus went and gave birth to Bright Eyed Athena who became a golden child of the gods. Hera was incensed that Zeus would give birth to Athena without her sexual aid, and her creation of Hephaestus was carried out in revenge. Hera’s message was essentially “You give birth without me, well I can do that too!”

Some myths suggest her son was born disabled, and others say he became disabled after his mother (or father) threw him from Mt. Olympus whereupon he landed hard on the earth and damaged his legs. In any case the dominant legend is that Hera gave birth to him already disabled, for which she was mightily disgusted in his lack of perfection.

Hera was angry and spoke thus among the assembled gods:

 “Hear from me, all gods and goddesses… my son Hephaestus whom I bore was weakly among all the blessed gods and shrivelled of foot, a shame and a disgrace to me in heaven, whom I myself took in my hands and cast out so that he fell in the great sea. But silver-shod Thetis the daughter of Nereus took and cared for him with her sisters: would that she had done other service to the blessed gods!”¹ 

Zeus gestures to his daughter Athena, while Hera hurls her disabled son from Mt. Olympus circa 200-150 B.C.

Hera was ashamed of her son’s disability, one which caused him to limp on both feet since the soles and heels were turned back to front and were not fitted for walking but only for a forward-rolling motion of the whole body.⁴ This ‘difference’ made Hephaestus a fringe person on Olympus, and threatened to put his mother on the fringes too, so she hid the secret by throwing her son to what she assumed would be his death. Fortunately he was saved by some kindly goddesses who nurtured him back to health.

After his fall from the heavens Hephaestus grew up on a secluded island and there learned the art of blacksmithing. He devoted himself to the task with such discipline that his artisan skills became the finest in the world. Despite the pride he took in these achievements he would not forget the cruel treatment of Hera who dismissed him as ugly and lacking in usefulness. Like so many men today who wish to be seen as something other than utilities for women and society, Hephaestus remains angry;

Hephaestus says: “Thetis saved me when I suffered much at the time of my great fall through the will of my own brazen-faced mother, who wanted to hide me for being lame. Then my soul would have taken much suffering had not Eurynome and Thetis caught me and held me… With them I worked nine years as a smith, and wrought many intricate things; pins that bend back, curved clasps, cups, necklaces, working there in the hollow of the cave, and the stream of Okeanos around us went on forever with its foam and its murmur.” ²

Classical sociologist Philip Slater suggests that Hera despises her son’s masculinity and his disability, preferring instead to have a son of heroic proportions who could provide her with utility and glory. Hera’s attitude provokes, in later myths, a kind of self-abasing buffoonery from Hephaestus that Slater interprets as “an appropriate response to his mother’s narcissistic resentment of males–she cannot deflate him if he is already deflated–but it is therefore all the more inappropriate for dealing with her contrary desire for him to be a display piece and an agent for the expression of her masculine strivings. It is for this reason, after all, that she threw him down from Olympus.”³

Like Hephaestus, many men with disabilities are angry. They realize that they are being doubly marginalized due to the curse of having a penis yet being unable, or perhaps unwilling, to perform as utilities for women and society – they know they are being negatively judged for it.

In her mythos Hera provides the quintessential example of gynocentric feminism, along with ableist and misandrist attitudes to boot. Her attitude represents much that is wrong with the disability sector today – an underlying bigotry that men must reject if they are to enjoy freedom, dignity and self-respect.

Challenging that bigotry is precisely what Hephaestus does. He gains redress against Hera for rejecting him by making her a magical golden throne which, when she sat on it, did not allow her to stand up. None of the other gods could release her and they begged Hephaestus to return to Olympus to let his mother go, but he refused, saying “I have no mother.”⁴

The gods were impressed with his rebuke of Hera and agree accept him back into Olympian society as one of their own. This may be viewed as a positive reappraisal of his disability – Hephaestus possesses previously unrecognized skills, is sharp of mind, humbles Hera, and is accepted by the other Olympians. Here is a synopsis of the story thus far;

After his abandonment, Thetis found him and took him to her underwater grotto and raised him as her own son.

Hephaestus had a happy childhood with dolphins as his playmates and pearls as his toys. Late in his childhood, he found the remains of a fisherman’s fire on the beach and became fascinated with an unextinguished coal, still red-hot and glowing.

Hephaestus carefully shut this precious coal in a clamshell, took it back to his underwater grotto, and made a fire with it. On the first day after that, Hephaestus stared at this fire for hours on end. On the second day, he discovered that when he made the fire hotter with bellows, certain stones sweated iron, silver or gold. On the third day he beat the cooled metal into shapes: bracelets, chains, swords and shields. Hephaestus made pearl-handled knives and spoons for his foster mother, and for himself he made a silver chariot with bridles so that seahorses could transport him quickly. He even made slave-girls of gold to wait on him and do his bidding.

Later, Thetis left her underwater grotto to attend a dinner party on Mount Olympus wearing a beautiful necklace of silver and sapphires that Hephaestus had made for her. Hera admired the necklace and asked where she could get one. Thetis became flustered, causing Hera to become suspicious; and, at last, the queen god discovered the truth: the baby she had once rejected had grown into a talented blacksmith.

Hera was furious and demanded that Hephaestus return home, a demand that he refused. However he did send Hera a beautifully constructed chair made of silver and gold, inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Hera was delighted with this gift but, as soon as she sat in it her weight triggered hidden springs and metal bands sprung forth to hold her fast. The more she shrieked and struggled the more firmly the mechanical throne gripped her; the chair was a cleverly designed trap.

For three days Hera sat fuming, still trapped in Hephaestus’s chair; she could not sleep, she could not stretch, she could not eat. It was Zeus who finally saved the day: he promised that if Hephaestus released Hera he would give him a wife, Aphrodite the goddess of love and beauty. Hephaestus agreed and married Aphrodite.⁵

After his mother rejects him for having a mobility impairment he becomes angry and he ensures that her mobility is impaired by trapping her in a throne. The gesture can be read as forcing Hera to experience a mobility challenge that she seemed utterly unable or unwilling to sympathize with.

Commenting on the story, disability advocate William Ebenstein states;

In the Hephaestus myth we can discern a positive psychology of anger that is grounded in the experience of disability. The disabled deity refuses to play the role of the passive victim. Instead he is an active creator in forging his future place in society. Hephaestus’ revenge is accomplished in such a clever and artful way that, in the end, it is enriching for the entire Olympian community.

In Hephaestus we find a character who is motivated by his anger to confront a world that has discarded him. He stages what amounts to a non-violent demonstration, an act of civil disobedience that completely shuts down Olympus. His stubborn anger does not lead to acceptance, adjustment or passivity. On the contrary it lifts him up to reclaim his dignity and civil rights. The story depicts a community that must adjust to someone who has been stigmatized, segregated, and discriminated against. It is the disabled character himself who creates the humorous situation as an effective tool to confront his oppression and challenge the existing order.⁶

Hephaestus’ anger energizes his expression of outrage in place of squashing it as a male character flaw. The problems he sees are in the world and Hephaestus takes action there, where it counts. His demonstration of outrage in response to an ugly world, or over acts of mistreatment, is mental health at its finest and similar expression needs to be encouraged and supported for all people with disabilities. In fact, speaking out of one’s anger is a perfect example of what is intended by the disability-related term self-advocacy.

Like our mythical protagonist, the ?Hephaestus man’ understands where the problem lies and will not have his concerns silenced.

Too often we see psychotherapists and rehabilitation counsellors engage in gender stereotyping, viewing positive anger as ‘male aggression,’ ‘patriarchy,’ or ‘toxic masculinity’ that in disabled and nondisabled men supposedly needs correcting. However killing the outrage is a misandric move, one that leads to a loss of personal agency in the world for men.

Thus far Hephaestus’ story has been one of rejection and redress. However the story is far more than a one-dimensional recounting of an “angrycrip” who ends up exacting revenge against his tormentors. It involves the larger vision of forging self-respect, the beginnings of which were long stirring before he sought to challenge the ableist culture among the gods.

Following his story from beginning to end we see the goal of self-respect is something Hephaestus cultivates quite independently from the respect he has won from the gods.⁷ After rejoining the Olympian hierarchy as dignified contributor – craftsman of the gods – he continues the inner work he started as a child when he located value in his own eyes, and not in the shallow eyes of others.

The key principle, one given in an incisive article by Paul Elam, is “self-respect isn’t earned, it’s taken.”⁸ When Hephaestus engages with the Olympian community, he doesn’t need to wait around for their validation, he has already wrested it by his own self-assessment.

The Hephaestus man is the one who expresses his outrage at offensive behavior, and who chooses to cultivate self-respect. By respecting himself and demanding the same from others, Hephaestus demonstrates exactly what these things mean for men in today’s world, disabled or not.

References

[1] Evelyn-White translation, Homeric Hymn to Pythian Apollo (1914)
[2] Richmond Lattimore translation, The Iliad by Homer (1951)
[3] Philip E. Slater, The Glory of Hera: Greek Mythology and The Greek Family (1968)
[4] Karl Kerenyi, The Gods of the Greeks, pp.155-158 (1951)
[5] Wikipedia, Greek myths of Hephaestus, (Roman name Vulcan changed to Hephaestus above)
[6] William Ebenstein, Toward an Archetypal Psychology of Disability Based on the Hephaestus Myth (2006)
[7] Murray Stein, Hephaistos: A pattern of introversion, in The Selected Works of Murray Stein (1973).
[8] Paul Elam, Self-respect isn’t earned, it’s taken (2015)

Men and disability – Part 1
Men and disability – Part 2
Men and disability – Part 3

As with parenting and school education, the disability sector is overwhelmingly managed and staffed by women. They are the nurses, community support workers, personal care assistants, physiotherapists, guidance counselors and so on. That domination ensures women’s views about gender govern the provision of services for most disabled men. Before discussing the problems created by this skewed situation, let’s begin with a look at the rise of the disability rights movement.

Although disability issues received varying levels of attention throughout history, they became an international cause célèbre from 1960s, this on the tail of the black civil rights movement in America, and coinciding with the rise of second wave feminism. This generated nothing short of a revolution in awareness about the lives and needs of people with disabilities.

The disability rights movement helped to secure greater access to the social and physical environment, as well as opportunities for independent living, employment, education, and housing. It also promoted freedom from abuse, neglect, and other violations, and the establishment of civil rights legislation to secure these opportunities and rights.

So far so good. However in recent years the movement has suffered mission-creep into the arena of gender politics. We are now more likely to hear about domestic violence and sexual assault against disabled women, their wage discrimination and other forms of double-disadvantage, while contrasting them with the depravity, privilege, rapiness and violence-proneness of disabled men — a narrative fostering denial of vulnerabilities men may face along with a demonizing of men to boot.

It’s a growing problem that needs to be stopped.

I’m not suggesting we should stop paying attention to issues like sexual assault and abuse against women, which absolutely must be addressed for this vulnerable demographic. But we needn’t demonize men and boys as the default perpetrator class, nor discriminate against them which we do by refusing to recognize males as victims of abuse and by dismissing or silencing those who might speak about it.

I know dozens of disabled men who have suffered serious violence or sexual abuse who have been afraid to tell someone for fear of being disbelieved, blamed or ridiculed. Marginalizing the issues of disabled men in the service of a one-sided gendered approach ultimately undermines the good work of the disability rights movement during the last 50 years – it shifts the focus from a humanitarian movement to a largely sexist one from within its own culture.

The gynocentric approach is compounded by the fact that most workers in the sector are women, who understandably have a more empathic appreciation of women’s concerns than men’s. The existence of female bias in the disability sector can be stressed in the following way: many women possess an inadequate understanding of the experiences and concerns of men with disabilities.

Poorly educated female workers, ie. those providing most of the frontline services, tend to rely on male stereotypes to guide their understandings of clientele, imposing the usual boilerplate images of males as utilitarian, rough, insensitive, sport obsessed, sex-obsessed, and so on. That vision is devoid of deeper knowledge of men generally, is at variance to the individuality of males specifically, and it tends to dictate the tone of care.

At this point readers may feel I’m being a little hard on female disability workers, which is correct. More accurately I’m being hard on the current culture of disability services because of the growing gynocentric trend, and pointing to an area of potential improvement in service provision. To be fair, I have no hesitation in admitting the existence of excellent female disability workers who do understand men’s issues and provide a very high quality of support, but these are more often the exception rather than the rule. This article however is attempting to show where disability services are failing in their duty of care for men, and the increasing gynocentric culture is, at least to my thinking, the area of greatest failure.

Having worked in the disability field for 30 years, I’ve had more opportunity than most to observe the provision of services to men. The following are six areas where gender stereotyping is failing men with disabilities.

1. Men do, women are
In a recent article I described how men are considered utilities or ‘action men’ expected to be of service to others.¹ The expectation is sadly no different for disabled men, and one of the first things female support workers often do is put him to work doing odd jobs and showing him how to be ‘useful’ to women and society. A woman with an identical disability will often get asked a different set of questions – like what do you want to do to have fun.

2. Male aggression or violence is an attempt to dominate
Both men and women with disabilities sometimes find life frustrating and lash out in anger. Typically males are lectured about how their aggression upsets other people, causes damage to the wider world, and are instructed on how to control their anger – while the disabled woman who lashes out in the same manner is calmed and asked what or who is bothering her and perhaps how the world might be rearranged so that it doesn’t upset her again. Disability support workers are less likely to consider the real distress or powerlessness that causes men to lash out.

3. Males are rarely victims of violence
Government media campaigns focusing solely on “violence against women” have encouraged the assumption that men are default perpetrators who don’t suffer violence. The belief among support workers that disabled men are safe from violence has created an environment in which abused men are less likely to speak up and seek help… there is no encouragement to do otherwise. Despite the fact that U.S. Department of Justice has reported violence crimes against disabled men and women at roughly equal rates,² a Google search for information delivers the following disparity of awareness:

• “Violence against disabled women” = 4330 results.
• “Violence against disabled men” = 9 results.

4. Males are unlikely to suffer sexual abuse or rape
As with men in prisons who experience high levels of sexual assault, disabled males are four times more likely than nondisabled men to be sexually assaulted or raped.³ The researchers of that study found that more than 5 percent of disabled men reported experiencing sexual assault during the past year, about equal to sexual assaults against disabled women.³

If ‘rape culture’ is based in social invisibility and voicelessness of a victim group, then disabled men are dealing with a legitimate rape culture – one entrenched by the people who receive a weekly pay-cheque to help lift that silence. Again a Google search speaks volumes:

• “Sexual violence against disabled women” = 1520 results.
• “Sexual violence against disabled men” = 0 results.

5. Men are less in need of assistance than women

As addressed in part one, disabled men are deemed privileged by patriarchy while women with disabilities are considered doubly disadvantaged by the same. The gynocentric privileges historically afforded to women have not yet entered the discourse – such as being recipients of living expenses drawn from male labor, or receiving greater provision and protection generally. Gynocentric prioritization is further underlined in phrases like “damsel in distress,” “ladies before gentlemen,” “girls before boys” or “ladies first,”, which are codes of chivalric and gentlemanly behavior that place disabled men in second place on the basis of their sex.

The stereotype of the cigar-smoking, brandy swilling patriarch, in combination with the custom of “ladies first,” sees that men are at a disadvantage to women in the fight for limited disability services.

6. Male sexual needs are socially unacceptable
Men’s sexual desires are gross and in need of suppressing or civilizing, so think some individuals charged with supporting men with disabilities. Cultural narratives characterizing male sexuality as dirty, violent and oppressive are clearly toxic to male self-image, however some among the mostly female workforce have adopted that negative mindset and with it created barriers to men’s attempts to enjoy healthy sexual expression.

When a disabled man desires a woman, or masturbates, or perhaps decides to hire a prostitute – all natural behaviors – female support workers tend to be unsupportive, believing sexual desires must be tamed in the service of something more civilized such as nonsexual dating and romantic love.

I have observed female staff match-make male and female clientele — treating them like Barbie & Ken in a child’s dolls house — while also instructing men in the arts of non-sexual chivalry, such as bringing gifts and flowers for a potential girlfriend or perhaps taking her to a romantic restaurant while the support worker plays hostess. While perhaps well meaning, my reading of such intervention is that it leaves out many aspects of male nature, especially male sexual needs, in favor of gynocentric themes which is ultimately an insult to the men in question.

. . .

These are just a few examples of biases men with disabilities face. Problems generated by gynocentrism and misandry within the disability sector (and beyond) are sometimes blatant and at other times subtle, but in either case they are mostly unrecognized and unquestioned by those on the front lines of service provision.

Men with disabilities receive little more empathy than their able-bodied counterparts – and in some respects they receive less. As with all men’s issues, from health funding to prostate cancer, birth control options, or homelessness, men are going to have to speak up – in fact they are going to have to shout up. Those in power might not see men’s pain, but they will hear men’s anger.

This leads to the next article in this series where we will look at a new kind of man with a disability – he is the one who says “No” to gynocentrism and other forms of mistreatment, and acts decisively to shut them down.

References

[1] Peter Wright, Don’t just do something, SIT THERE (June 2015)
[2] Harrell, E., Rand, M., Crime Against People with Disabilities, U.S. Department of Justice (2008)
[3] Mitra, Monika, Vera E. Mouradian, and Marci Diamond. Sexual Violence Victimization Against Men with Disabilities, American Journal of Preventive Medicine (2011)

Feature image: Cpl. Anthony McDaniel

Men and disability – Part 1
Men and disability – Part 2
Men and disability – Part 3

Throughout history men with disabilities have reached the heights of human achievement in personal and cultural terms, and they did so without the help of social justice warriors or modern reforms to laws, community access, or improved social attitudes toward disability.

Think of the presidents, artists, scientists, blade runners and the Everest-scaling amputees who reached for greatness, along with their less visible counterparts who went about their daily lives in less grandiose but nevertheless competent ways while living with a disability.

Disability always poses limitations on a person’s physical or mental abilities, but the disability never encompasses the entire person – there remain competencies that deserve equal recognition in the mix.

Said differently a person is never completely disabled, just as there is no such thing as a person without a disability, however mild; eg. asthma, eczema, or gluten allergy can likewise interfere with daily functioning, forcing you to buy special creams and soaps or having to skip lunch with friends because you can’t eat the food at that restaurant.

A study of high achievers illustrates the point of competency existing alongside disability. Franklin D. Roosevelt had post-polio paralysis, Ray Charles was blind, Christopher Reeve had a spinal injury, George Washington had dyslexia, Ludwig van Beethoven went deaf, Albert Einstein had Aspergers, Leonardo Da Vinci was epileptic, and the cosmologist Stephen Hawking has advanced motor neurone disease. Yet all of these men reached the top of their fields of interest.

Admiration of such men is today frowned upon by social justice warriors (SJWs) who believe the achievements misrepresent the common man with a disability and lead him to feel inferior by comparison. Referred to disparagingly as “supercrips” (super cripples), SJWs disparage high achievers as tall poppies who disrupt the level playing field, traitors who promote ableism instead of accepting their lot as sufferers without talents or abilities.

In a more reasonable use of the term, supercrip is sometimes employed as a reference to fanciful caricatures; eg. exaggerated claims about men on the autism spectrum as genius savants; or that the deaf have the sight of an eagle; or that the blind possess sonic radar abilities like dolphins or bats that help them move around the physical environment. There is no doubt, however, that the supercrip slur is also aimed at men with disabilities who genuinely achieved great things, but who are perceived as succeeding due to an unfair degree of male privilege.

Sound familiar? Most would have heard this criticism before, after 50 years of feminism’s attempts to tear down every man who has had the drive and discipline to reach the top of his field. Even our disabled heroes are not spared by feminists who refer to them as ‘privileged by patriarchy’ and thus less handicapped than disabled women:

“It will be argued in this paper that disability is a more severely handicapping condition for women than for men… [men] are relatively advantaged in that they can observe and may aspire to the advantaged place of males in today’s society. Women with disabilities are perceived as inadequate to fulfill either the economically productive roles traditionally considered appropriate for males.

“In research conducted by Mauer disabled females were more likely than disabled males to identify with a disabled storybook character; the disabled males were more likely to identify with the able-bodied character (1979). Disabled men may have a choice between a role of advantage (male) and a role of disadvantage (disability). Their decision is frequently a strategic identification with males.¹

Feminist scholars refer to this as a ‘double disadvantage’ experienced by disabled women because they suffer from both disability and sexism, while their male counterparts are presumably being served up with caviar in their patriarchally privileged, gold-plated wheelchairs. Referring to the intersectional model, many feminists would go further and talk of multiple disadvantages such as triple, quadruple, or quintuple handicaps as would be the case for a black, transgendered, albino woman with a disability….. but I digress.

Indeed, a survey of feminist-inspired literature reveals a disturbing emphasis on what is lacking in comparison to what is good in the lives of disabled individuals, with that fixation coming at the expense of recognizing the multiple competencies or abilities that disabled individuals might possess. Moreover, the practice of gender stereotyping obscures the uniqueness of the individual, as underscored by sociologist Tom Shakespeare who states, “Disabled people’s gender identity is more complex and more varied than this stereotypical view indicates. Some women feel liberated from social expectation as a result of impairment; some men feel doubly inferior.”²

The double-disadvantage meme has led to the widespread view that disabled men gain privilege at women’s expense, an advantage apparently in need of restricting in order to give disabled women a head start. In order to bring women forward we are led to believe we must push men back and downplay their extraordinary achievements.

Ridding the world of tall poppies, however, results in having no one to look up to. It forces us to lower our vision to a mean-average of attainment where social justice warriors seem bent on placing us – including those with disabilities. Some of us may be content with day-to-day existing and are not interested in pushing our personal limits, but there are others who want more. By honoring the achievements of exceptional people we understand a greater range of possibility, and can set our goals as high as we choose.

References

[1] Michelle Fine, ‘Disabled women: Sexism Without the Pedestal’ Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare (1977)
[2] Tom Shakespeare, ‘When is a man not a man? When he’s disabled,’ in Working with Men for Change, p.49 (1999)

Feature image of Stephen Hawking by Lwp Kommunikáció

On a recent Dad Talk Today Interview Dr. Warren Farrell spoke about a cultural feature of Western society called the Victim Industrial Complex:

“We have developed what some have called, and I agree with, a ‘Victim Industrial Complex’ where there’s tens of thousands of people who are making their living from the defense of women in courts, the defense of women in child custody cases, the defense of the victims, and appealing to the biological instinct that we all have to protect women, and then saying that men have the power as opposed to understanding if you are biologically programmed to protect somebody, that person who is protected is the one who has the power.”

In his book The Myth of Male Power,  Farrell refers to this problem as the creation of a Victimarchy:

But here’s the rub. When the entitled child has the majority of the votes, the issue is no longer whether we have a patriarchy or a matriarchy — we get a victimarchy. And the female-as-child genuinely feels like a victim because she never learns how to obtain for herself everything she learns to expect. Well, she learns how to obtain it for herself by saying “it’s a woman’s right” — but she doesn’t feel the mastery that comes with a lifetime of doing it for herself. And even when a quota includes her in the decision-making process, she still feels angry at the “male dominated government” because she feels both the condescension of being given “equality” and the contradiction of being given equality. She is still “the other.” So, with the majority of the votes, she is both controlling the system and angry at the system.” [The Myth of Male Power]

Elsewhere I have referred to the same phenomenon as a ‘Gynocentric Cultural Complex‘ which is comprised of three central motives: Damseling, chivalry and courtly love. Farrell’s mention of the Victim Industrial Complex taps the same three motives, especially the image of the damsel, or more accurately the ‘damsels in distress’ trope.

A cultural complex is defined as a significant configuration of culture traits that have major significance in the way people’s lives were lived. In sociology it is defined as a set of culture traits all unified and dominated by one essential trait; such as an industrial cultural complex, religious cultural complex, military cultural complex and so on. In each of these complexes we can identify a core factor – industry, religion, military – so we likewise we have core motives for the Gynocentric or Victim cultural complex in order for it to qualify for the title, and that core motive, as already mentioned, is the triad of damsels, chivalry and courtly love.

 

Dysfunctional Gynocentric Cultural Values Must Go

Black Pigeon Speaks (BPS) did a video recently titled, “ONLY Patriarchy Builds Nations * / & Other Uncomfortable Truths”¹. The video raised a number of pertinent factors to consider in what makes developed civilisations sustainable and in this article I will provide my thoughts on that and where Western society went wrong. As the societal consequences from decades of feminism become more and more apparent, there is a push in some corners of society for a return to gynocentric traditionalism².  The answer to feminism is not returning to promoting gynocentric traditionalism, by encouraging chivalry and infantilising women. Gynocentric traditionalism allowed feminism to gain traction in the first place. We got to where we are because we treat men as expendable and we do not hold women accountable for their actions and treat them like they are children. These dysfunctional gynocentric cultural values, have allowed the feminist trojan horse to take over society and have led to the marginalisation of men and boys. This marginalisation of men and boys, will eventually trigger socioeconomic collapse, or the “Fempocalypse” as Karen Straughan coined it³.

As BPS’s video addresses, there is an obvious need for the population of a country to reproduce and developed nations are at risk of dying out because of fertility rates falling below replacement levels. However I would add that investment in the survival of civilisation is just as important. There is no point breeding if there is no properly functioning civilisation, economy and infrastructure etc to support the survival of the population. Men are required for that to a much larger degree than women and always have been. Men are responsible for designing, innovating, building, maintaining, running and leading civilisation and no amount of feminist social engineering over the last 50 years has changed that. Indeed in one of BPS’s other videos⁴, he cites research on how only men pay taxes and how this covers what women as a group take out of the system. He is not the only one to point that out either. Even female consumer spending is substantially fuelled by income earned from their male partners and the result of male dominated industries and male driven economic activity and taxes, ensuring the viability of the female dominated service sector and public sector. There is much less money for women to spend and welfare to use, without men participating in the economy.

Like the low fertility rate, a silent time bomb is growing every year from the decades of neglect of boys in the education system and the epidemic of fatherlessness. We can see from the plethora of research available, the enormous costs of fatherlessness⁵ and the boy crisis in education⁶. These problems are going to have serious economic, financial and social consequences in the coming decades. Male unemployment and crime will skyrocket. These problems will eventually implode our economies into a depression, governments will default as fewer men will be in a position to pay taxes and social cohesion will erode from widespread crime, poverty, broken families and substance abuse. Society will come apart at the seams socially and economically.

We have seen what happens to societies when large numbers of men become disenfranchised. It does not end well for the society in question. Revolutions and civil war originate from such conditions and it is something to be avoided. Our civilisation runs because of men. If even one percent of men walked away from society for a day, we would have serious problems. If all men walked away from society for one day, it would collapse. Men are not expendable. It is quite the opposite and we are going to pay an enormous price as a society, if we fail to acknowledge men actually do have value. Feminism, the epidemic of fatherlessness and the boy crisis in education, have all grown in large part precisely because we treat men as expendable and do not care about the consequences that comes from marginalising men and boys. To treat men as expendable is to treat civilisation as expendable. Without healthy,  productive and well-adjusted men that can make use of their potential, there is no future for civilisation.  As I have mentioned before, even if we see men as machines, we understand the need to look after those machines to keep them working for us. If you don’t replace the oil in your car, it won’t last very long. Men are not machines, men are human beings. Looking after them properly requires more than basic parental investment. Men and boys must be treated with respect and compassion.

MGTOW is about men living life in their own way and refusing to be expendable. That is a good thing. Why? Because men have value to society and if men value themselves then they protect society and themselves from wasteful sacrifice of male potential. Men going their own way is not antithetical to civilisation. It is quite the opposite. Western civilisation was based around recognising the rights and freedoms of the individual for very good reasons. It is what made the West the success it became. Valuing individuality and respecting the rights and freedoms of the individual, is the basis of a free market economy and a free society. It generates tremendous economic prosperity and drives scientific and social progress and innovation.  These Western principles of valuing individuality and protecting individual rights and freedoms, is a very MGTOW concept. It is the group identity of the feminists and the far left, that is antithetical to MGTOW and advanced civilisation. Men naturally contribute to civilisation without coercion. It is literally in our DNA to invent, build, explore, discover, maintain, repair, protect and provide. We find it naturally fulfilling, we do it without coercion.

What MGTOW is about, is applying men’s natural gifts and desires to do these things in ways that are authentic to the man. If anything, MGTOW boosts the prosperity of society by preventing the huge waste that comes with treating men as disposable and preventing men from being exploited and used by a parasitic, corrupt and unsustainable gynocentric social system. MGTOW can instead freely apply their gifts and abilities in ways that are genuinely positive for society and for themselves (These are not automatically mutually exclusive things). There are countless men throughout history that have contributed to the advancement of their society enormously and did not get married or have children. Sir Isaac Newton, Orville and Wilbur Wright, Nikola Tesla, Ludwig van Beethoven and Adam Smith, are just a few of these men. Their scientific discoveries, intellectual and social contributions and technological breakthroughs, still have lasting impacts many years after their deaths on Western civilisation and the world. Getting married and breeding offspring is not the only contributing factor to the continuation of civilisation. Contributions to the scientific and technological knowledge base and intellectual capital and culture of civilisation, can be just as important and arguably be an even greater factor in ensuring the longevity of civilisation.

If we are going to give women equal rights as a society, then they must be held equally accountable. Otherwise it creates an imbalance that destroys society. Having reciprocity between the sexes is critical not just for individual relationships, but also for society. Treating men as expendable, provides no resistance to groups like feminists emerging and treading on men’s rights and marginalising men and boys. When men are regarded as expendable and you give women equal rights with no accountability, it does not take a genius to predict feminist groups will emerge and take advantage of that and they have.

By marginalising men and boys and treating them as expendable, you also reduce fertility rates below replacement levels. When fewer and fewer men have the finances and work status to meet the hypergamous expectations of women, thanks to the impacts of growing up in fatherless households, the boy crisis in education being unaddressed for decades and feminist initiatives like female hiring quotas, fewer and fewer children will be produced. When men are treated as expendable and put through the divorce and family court extortion and exploitation pipeline and women have no obligation to be accountable in relationships and roughly half of marriages end in divorce (the majority of which are initiated by women), many men will understandably start deciding not to marry and have families.

If we want a sustainable and prosperous society, we must recognise the value of men and boys and stop treating them as expendable. We must hold women equally accountable to men and encourage individuality over groupthink and identity politics. The parasitic feminist welfare state has to go too, which is something Stefan Molyneux has recently spoken about⁷. Like a parasite, it feeds off male taxpayers and supports lack of accountability from women (particularly from single mothers) and eventually destroys society. If you regard men as expendable and don’t hold women accountable, such a parasitic system will emerge. These dysfunctional values must go if we want civilisation to continue.

At the base of these dysfunctional values, is a belief in chivalry and the purity and superiority of women. Despite decades of feminism, chivalry is alive and well in our culture and in the corridors of power. I am not talking about men paying for dinners or opening doors for women. That type of chivalry is small potatoes compared to what we have today. I am talking about the widespread preferential treatment shown toward women by our governments, legal system, education system, health system, academia, media and culture, on the basis they are “vulnerable”, “victimised” women of the patriarchy and are in need of protection from “oppressive”, “privileged” men and thus deserve special treatment. Our modern feminist culture, is merely a modernised iteration of the same chivalrous tradition found in earlier gynocentric traditionalist cultures over past centuries.

Gynocentric Traditionalism Is Driven By Chivalry:

The core element of gynocentric traditionalism is chivalry. Chivalry is a tradition of male service to benefit women without reciprocity. It places women above men. Chivalry is a practice that takes advantage of men’s protective instincts and uses them to serve women under the guise women are the supposedly “weaker” sex. It is a tradition that encourages one standard of accountability for men and a lower standard of accountability for women toward the opposite sex. Women might be physically weaker than men, but the last time I checked they have all the same rights and privileges men do in Western society and some people make solid arguments they actually have more. Women are quite capable of being just as vicious verbally and socially as any man and many would probably argue they are more capable. Women can destroy a man’s life merely with an accusation in the post metoo# era, with no proof or legal due process required. Women are also quite capable of being physically violent and are especially adept at using the state and the legal system as a weapon of coercion on partners, husbands and fathers. Indeed it has been a principle driver of mainstream ideological feminism, to warp our legal system and shape government policy to marginalise men for the benefit of women.

Women are not the fragile powerless snowflakes some people would have men believe. Chivalry has emboldened and enabled feminist women, to rapidly warp our social norms, legal system, political system and mainstream media etc to elevate women above men. Women and girls enjoy a multi-billion dollar international feminist empire that puts their interests ahead of everything else in numerous sectors of Western society. This exclusive support for women and girls pervades the mainstream media, academia, legal system and education system, politics, private industry, government policy and public health, just to name a few areas. We even have entire government departments devoted to women and girls. There is no comparable set of organisations or level of support for men and boys. Predictably, women and girls are excelling at every level of education over men and boys and doing quite well in the workforce relative to men (especially for those under 30 years old).

I think I speak for a lot of men and boys when I say we are getting sick and tired of women and girls pretending they are weak and vulnerable creatures, when there is a wealth of evidence to the contrary. The social power women wield in society is enormous and chivalry has done nothing but enable that power to go unchecked for decades, if not centuries. Chivalry is a bigoted tradition that enabled the demonisation of men and boys in our culture. Our mainstream media and political system is awash with feminist women spreading hateful messages about men, boys and masculinity. If women in politics or in the mainstream media want to make bigoted generalisations about the opposite sex, then shielding them from the consequences with chivalry is not the answer. All it does is keep the cycle of demonising the male half of the population growing and growing without opposition. If you make bigoted remarks about the opposite sex, then you are not the victim and that suddenly does not change when the person making the bigoted remarks happens to be female. Chivalry does not have a place in a modern society where women have equal rights and freedoms to that of men. If you make bigoted remarks against men, you do not get to play the victim because the men around you respond in a manner you do not approve of.

Almost a decade ago Miranda Devine discussed a concept called, “Female Entitlement Mentality”⁸. It takes a sense of entitlement to expect men to behave like gentlemen toward women that act like bigots. Indeed Peter Wright wrote an article⁹ discussing a research study showing the link between entitlement in women and their disposition to support chivalry in men. Women have no place lecturing men about acting like gentlemen, when feminist academics write articles in the Washington Post titled, “Why can’t we hate men?”¹⁰. It is time for women to get off their pedestal and start taking accountability for their own words and behaviour. If you want men to be respectful toward you, then be respectful toward them. Two thousand years ago, a man called Jesus spoke of a simple concept to treat others the way you would like to be treated.

I certainly think women have it in them to empathise with men and accept accountability for their own choices, behaviour and words toward men. Karen Straughan’s own blog is called, “owning your shit”¹¹. The name says it all regarding accountability. There are plenty of other examples of women displaying these qualities I have come across both online and in my personal life. A more recent example for instance popped up on my YouTube feed over the weekend. Her name is Sydney Watson. Here are two videos of hers for people to look at regarding recent events in Australia concerning men and feminism, link¹² and link¹³. Of course there are the Honey Badgers, Janice Fiamengo and numerous other women.

I am not buying the idea women can’t overcome gynocentrism, any more than the false assumption men cannot overcome gynocentrism. Sure there are challenges, but gynocentism can be overcome provided it is recognised as a problem by society and a pathology that should be discouraged. As I explained in my article on normalising gynocentrism¹⁴, gynocentrism is so common because we have normalised it. Encouraging women that go against the gynocentric grain of the culture and holding women and girls accountable for their words and actions toward men and boys, would be a key step in the right direction in reducing gynocentrism in society. We most likely are never going to completely eliminate gynocentrism to absolute zero, just as we will never completely eliminate obesity. We will always have a residual level of pathological behaviour in society because human beings are imperfect. However we can reduce gynocentrism by a considerable degree from its present levels and make it far less common and a fringe behaviour rather than a normal behaviour in society. We have the behavioural control to do that as discussed in my earlier article, but only if we recognise gynocentrism for the pathological set of behaviours it is and we make an effort to reduce it.

Suggesting that feminism is the source of all men’s issues is short-sighted. Feminism grew from our past culture of gynocentric traditionalism and feminists have used chivalry and their victim ideology and revision of history, to pull the strings of the men in power for decades to get what they want. Without gynocentric traditionalism, there would be no feminism. Gynocentrism runs through both gynocentric traditionalism and feminism and is the real basis of the preferential treatment of women at the expense of the marginalisation of men.

Chivalry Is Antithetical To Freedom:

Dr. Warren Farrell had a famous saying, “women can’t hear what men do not say”. As long as men remain silent for fear of offending women, absolutely nothing is going to change and that silence will contribute to gynocentrism remaining normalised in the culture. So start speaking your mind to women if you are a man and stop self-censoring, because it is about time men found their voice. That is why A Voice For Men exists. Use the platform. Calling men and women out on their gynocentric bullshit is not spreading hate, it is generating powerful and badly needed cultural change and demanding an end to hypocrisy and sexist bigotry. People need to recognise that we are entering a stage where freedom of speech is now being undermined. Now is the time to speak while you still can. There is an authoritarian push from the left side of our political spectrum, to silence any dissent against them. It is a form of oppression and we must fight against it.

If this trend of censorship continues, then it may become illegal to even question feminist ideology, or even question any aspect of gynocentric behaviour by women or men. Chivalry at its modern extreme end, is antithetical to freedom of speech. Quashing dissenting speech in the name of protecting women, is a slippery slope that leads right to totalitarianism by a feminist authoritarian state. Once freedom of speech is lost, then the rest of our freedoms and basic rights soon vanish. If we reach that threshold and we are dangerously close to it, then the sun will set on our civilisation and what will follow will be a totalitarian dark age followed by collapse and then anarchy. We need to be speaking out now and protecting our freedom to do so while we still can.

References:

1. ONLY Patriarchy Builds Nations * / & other UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTHS. Black Pigeon Speaks. YouTube. (Accessed July 2018).
2. Traditionalism vs. traditionalism. Peter Wright & Paul Elam. A Voice For Men. (Accessed July 2018).
3. Fempocalypse!!. Girlwriteswhat. YouTube. (Accessed July 2018).
4. Research Shows ONLY MEN Pay Taxes. Black Pigeon Speaks. YouTube. (Accessed July 2018).
5. The Consequences Of Fatherlessness. National Center For Fathering. (Accessed July 2018).
6. The Boy Crisis: Why Our Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It. Dr. Warren Farrell & Dr. John Gray (2018).
7. DEATH BY WELFARE. Stefan Molyneux. FreeDomain Radio. YouTube. (Accessed July 2018).
8. Women believe they live in the age of entitlement. Miranda Devine. The Daily Telegraph. May 20^th 2012. (Accessed July 2018).
9. Can women be chivalrous? Damn right they can. Peter Wright. A Voice For Men. (Accessed July 2018).
10. Why Can’t We Hate Men? Suzanna Danuta Walters. The Washington Post. June 8^th 2018. (Accessed July 2018).
11. Karen Straughan http://owningyourshit.blogspot.com/
12. WE NEED TO TEACH MEN NOT TO RAPE?. Sydney Watson. YouTube. (Accessed July 2018).
13. 4 REASONS WHY FEMINISM IS FULL OF HYPOCRISY. Sydney Watson. YouTube. (Accessed July 2018).
14. The Normalisation Of Gynocentrism. Peter Ryan. A Voice For Men. (Accessed July 2018).

 

The following passage critiquing Briffault’s Law is excerpted from Peter Ryan’s three-part essay Gynocentrism, Sex Differences and the Manipulation of Men. – PW

____________________________________

The belief in female superiority ultimately rests on the unquestioned axiom that women are biologically valuable and men are biologically expendable, because women have a uterus and give birth and men do not. Propagating this lie is a part of normalising gynocentrism in our culture and is the foundational justification that is relied upon when gynocentric double standards are challenged.

Convincing men that they are expendable with this fictitious lie and using sophistry and twisted interpretations of biology to change men’s perception of themselves from a human being to a human doing, is a core means through which men are controlled in society. When men see themselves as expendable, then they willingly go along with their own exploitation. Even when they do not, men with this perception will not support any organised resistance to the exploitation and marginalisation of men because they perceive it as futile. The gynocentric programming has done its job in such cases- Men become paralysed in a mental prison of learned helplessness.

The notion that females determine all the conditions of the animal kingdom (or Briffault’s Law¹³), is part of that programming and is demonstrably false. Women are not omnipotent. Rape gangs exist, female sex slaves exist, female genital mutilation occurs, the murder and abortion of female infants occurs, arranged marriage exists, millions of Jewish women were exterminated along with men in death camps and the genuine marginisalisation of women exists in parts of Africa and the Middle East (and no I am not talking about Iran).

Even in highly traditional theocratic cultures like Iran, where both men and women are restricted, women cannot do as they please. Don’t believe me? Watch this documentary¹⁴ on women and divorce in Iran. Women do not call the shots in Iran and neither do men, the theocrats and the family do. Plus one for a restrictive culture and minus one for female omnipotence. Even in the West women do not always get their way. Trump got elected despite feminists and even the democrats don’t entirely follow female interests. These are not just exceptions to the rule, there are too many exceptions to count. These are chasms that cannot be explained with such an absolutist, monolithic and simplistic so-called “law”.

In dating and relationships we can see men that pump and dump women wanting marriage, or men that opt out of relationships entirely and go their own way. I have often heard women are the gatekeepers of sex, but men are far more selective when it comes to getting married and having a relationship than they are with sex. Women might only prefer the top twenty percent of men, but those same men have little incentive or desire to settle down with them. These men have an abundance of women that want them and many men in the top twenty percent can and do simply pump and dump them.

At the same time, whilst women are complaining about where all the good men went and men not earning enough and pretending like feminism has nothing to do with it, less and less men are interested in marriage and relationships. Men are becoming aware of the bias in divorce and family court and steering clear of marriage. They are also steering clear of certain women in the #metoo climate and domestic violence climate and refusing to be alone with female co-workers or mentor them. Then there is the wall, where women over 35 experience a sharp drop in their sexual mating value in contrast to the rising sexual mating value of their male counterparts. So no, women do not control every aspect of dating, relationships and how the sexes interact in the workplace. Ultimately women cannot force men to do anything and men do act at least to some degree on their own self-interest. There are too many exceptions to make the generalisation women control everything. They do not.

There is a big difference in suggesting women influence society and taking the absolutist position women control all the conditions of the animal kingdom and by extension society. Do women control every political and economic decision made by our governments? Did women cause Trump to launch an attack on an Iranian general? Did women tell the US government to bail out the banks? The reason modern evolutionary biology does not cite Briffault’s Law as a “law” or established theory, is because the facts and evidence do not support the absolutist position of female omnipotence it rests on. Evolutionary biology and psychology recognise female mate choice exists, but they also recognise male mate choice exists too and that other factors unrelated to female influence, also influence the conditions of society.

Like the Earth not being the centre of the solar system or universe and the Earth not being flat, modern 21^st century science recognises that it is a bit more complicated than women being at the centre of everything. Why does such an outdated and questionable concept like Briffault’s Law gain traction within sizeable communities of the manosphere? Men have been programmed from birth to see female approval as the mark of their worth. Mothers, sisters, female teachers, the wider culture and their female friends and partners, all inform men that their worth is tied to living up to whatever women’s preferred definition of what a man is. That’s why. It is another form of manipulation and control. In my previous article⁶ I wrote about precarious manhood and the social pressure on men to prove they are a “real man” and cited a video¹⁵ on the subject by Tom Golden. What was the “white feather”¹⁶ during World War One? What are messages like “The End Of Men”¹⁷ in the modern day? All methods to condition male identity around female approval and use precarious manhood to control men.

Naturally men have developed a perception from this programming, where they see women as the centre of the universe. This is the programming they have received their whole lives from every corner of society. That’s where this thinking comes from and the manosphere is not immune to sliding into this fatalistic line of thinking that women are the centre of everything. It is why junk concepts like Briffault’s Law still gain traction even in the manosphere. So when men like myself start writing about the fact that females do not control all the conditions of human society, some men in the manosphere perceive it as a denial of their lived experience and of their twisted and seriously flawed understanding of biological reality (which they almost never scrutinise).

It is your lived experience, it is my lived experience and the experience of every man in this gynocentric culture. I do not deny that. However even a casual observation of society shows Briffault’s law to be false. Women do not control all the conditions of society. It ain’t that simple. The fact men are conditioned from birth to assign their worth to what they do and think of themselves as expendable, does not then make them an expendable human doing any more than conditioning a human being to act like a dog makes them a dog. All it proves is that you can control how people perceive themselves by using social approval and operant conditioning. It just highlights how powerful the effects of social and psychological manipulation can be, especially when done from a young age on the target group (men and boys in this case). People are social learners and we are a social species and are susceptible to manipulation (especially when that is all we are exposed to from birth).

Men need to recognise the extent to which the lies they have been told about themselves influence their perception of themselves and of reality. Female omnipotence and male expendability are illusions our gynocentric culture uses to control men. Whilst the Myth of Male Power¹⁸ was an excellent book, an equally important book is The Manipulated Man¹⁹ by Esther Vilar. How do you convince the physically stronger sex to subordinate themselves to the physically weaker sex? Manipulation. That is the nature of the mechanism of control over men at work. How do institutions and governments exploit men whilst simultaneously relying on men to operate the system of their own exploitation? Manipulation.

Source: This excerpt taken from the longer article Gynocentrism, Sex Differences and the Manipulation of Men (Part One)