By Vernon Meigs

In late June I had published my article Biogynocentric Hypocrisy: TERF Edition (War on the Biological Male) in which I had made the following statement:

When I was noticing sponsored posts on Facebook by Matt Walsh’s page abut his new film What Is A Woman?, what grabbed my attention was the text on one of them: ‘One of the surgeons I interviewed for this documentary confessed to having mutilated the genitals of a 16 year old boy. The Left says this isn’t happening. They’re lying, as always.’

I admitted surprise at his choice of words: ‘mutilated the genitals of a 16 year old boy’. I wondered aloud, how much does he actually care about a child’s genital integrity across the board? What are Mr. Walsh’s attitudes towards routine infant circumcision? Assuming that he is just another traditional conservative, I had thought that he couldn’t give a shit about male genital mutilation and the serious consequences of it. However, I left it at that because that was all it was: an assumption. I wouldn’t speak more on it until I had concrete proof of what would be his hypocritical stance, and I’d be completely open to be proven wrong as well, delighted to be in fact.

About a week ago, I got my answer.

For clarity, the quote reads thus:

You lose credibility when you call circumcision “elective amputation”. Particularly because “amputation”, in the medical sense, generally refers to the removal of a limb. Make your point without being ridiculous. And parents frequently make decision for their infants. In fact, I’m not sure how else to raise an infant. You aren’t “infringing on their liberty.” Come on, that’s just absurd. Make your point without resorting to laughably hysterical rhetoric.

This screenshot was shared by a mutual follower on Twitter, Nikos Anti-MGM, who imparted to me that it in itself was originally something a Facebook friend of his posted. Regardless, the importance of sharing it cannot be understated. Matt Walsh, who grandstands that he is “obsessed with stopping people from mutilating and sterilizing children”, is proven to be yet another high-profile hypocrite regarding what kind of child is on the receiving end of the genital mutilation, and what ideology conducts it.

And yes, those were Walsh’s own words. Clearly he’s either not obsessed enough, or in fact obsessed strictly with refusing to admit that Americans have been making a mistake in eviscerating infant male foreskins for generations:

Some may be asking why I am spending a lot of energy going after these specific individuals who are open in their double standards about the genital mutilation of children. After all, too many Americans casually buy into the scam that calling all of them out one by one would be wasted effort. My response would be that anybody directly talking about the genital mutilation of children, especially when those are the exact terms that are used, must be consistent and deplore every context and every situation that this happens.

When they aren’t, and the likes of Walsh go forth and mock intactivists and hurl the same fallacies used to justify male infant genital mutilation, they absolutely deserve to be called out. They must be put to question whether they actually are against all forms of child mutilation, or are just tailoring their narrative to appease their large conservative fanbase that still thinks nothing about what trauma they put their infant sons through in an environment completely normalized for that.

As the backlash against woke nonsense gains more momentum and high-profile personalities such as Walsh, Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson become ever-increasingly influential voices, it is crucial to expose their shortsightedness when they are being disingenuous in their given advocacies. This is of grave concern because the mindset they are smuggling in is not only a matter of a difference of opinion, but a genuine, serious risk for infant boys’ well-being.

This is why I think we must get more serious in scrutinizing the attitudes of these personalities, and dismantle their hypocritical takes. As more of these gynocentric acts of throwing the male of the species under the bus while white knights plead for FtM trans surgery victims more so than the more numerous MtFs, if not exclusively the former, we will be on the track of casting into broad daylight the truth about their motives, none of which bode well for men and boys.

Anyway, it’s time to get into the intended focus of this article, to dissect and analyze Matt Walsh’s crude remark regarding the male foreskin and the amputation thereof. Speaking of, the subject of amputation is the first thing he blunders on.

You lose credibility when you call circumcision “elective amputation”. Particularly because “amputation”, in the medical sense, generally refers to the removal of a limb. Make your point without being ridiculous.

According to the featured expert on the subject of amputation from John Hopkins Medicine, Jaime Troyal Shores, M.D, “Amputation is the loss of removal of a body part such as a finger, to, hand, foot, arm or leg.” While the examples he immediately references include limbs because that is what tends to be in the forefront of the minds of those thinking about amputations, he appears to be clear enough that he is talking about a removal of any body part – and not exclusive to limbs. In the same web page under the entry for Amputation, under ‘Types of Lower Extremity Amputation’ a reference to pelvic amputation (hemipelvectomy) is made; last I checked, a pelvis is not itself a limb.

If this was not convincing enough, the Wikipedia page on amputations clearly states the different amputations that aren’t limbs, and unequivocally listed is the removal of the foreskin.

To add to that, a search on scholar.google.com for “amputation of the foreskin” and “foreskin amputation” would yield you over 100 results and over 70 results respectively. In short, the very act of referring to foreskin removal as an amputation is neither ridiculous nor non-credible.

For all his mockery on those who use the term “amputation” for MGM, I wonder if Walsh would at least entertain the idea that it is in fact closer to castration, especially since slaves or men on the losing side of a war have been so circumcised in lieu of actual castration. Also would he consider that children have literally lost or had their genitalia horribly damaged beyond saving due to a “botched” operation?

Recalling Walsh’s preoccupation about amputations being for limbs only; by his own logic, neither is breast removal an amputation, then. Does he not know that the breast is but a modified sweat gland to begin with? Furthermore in response to the common attitude that alleges that circumcisions are like inoculations that you do for children as a part of medical practice you generally do in caring for your infant; if circumcision makes sense so his rate of diseases can lower, then by that logic those mastectomies that these girls are having would be great things, since they’d be reducing the risk of breast cancer!

Since we’re on the subject of the argument for genital mutilation on the basis of alleged medical parental care, the next error:

And parents frequently make decision for their infants. In fact, I’m not sure how else to raise an infant.

Does that make piercing an infant girls’ ears during infancy an acceptable act? Does that qualify as raising an infant?

Let’s take a deep dive into this “decision” parents are making for their infants. Let’s make it so that even Matt Walsh can understand.

• The decision to remove not “just the tip” as commonly and falsely advertised, but 33-50% of penile skin along with the sensitive nerve endings for fine touch as well as protection of the glans which then becomes thickened like a callus.
• The decision to put the male infant through literal extreme pain resulting in brain changes due to high levels of cortisol as well as neurogenic shock (what circumcisers and their nurses euphemistically refer to as “sleeping through the operation”)
• The decision to leave the male infant with a wound that is left alone and open to infections, including but not limited to herpes, meningitis, sepsis and cysts.
• The decision to doom so early in life the prospects of a proper sexual experience during his adulthood onwards, by removing the functional gliding and sensitive component.
• The decision to consign the male infant to the increased likelihood of sexual dysfunction during his adulthood, loss of sensation, and alexithymia – “the inability to recognize or describe one’s own emotions” which is connected to depression, and even suicide if the truth about what you’ve done to him comes to light. Next time a guy tells you he’s fine after being circumcised as an infant, that’s probably the alexithymia talking.
• The decision to play American Roulette with your infant male. 

By the last part, I mean risking dying just for being born male. It’s not a gun but a knife that you play American Roulette with, and it never misses. The gamble is whether he actually dies of  infection, the blood loss, or other ensuing complications that get brushed off euphemistically as Sudden Infant Death Syndrome so the circumcisers aren’t held accountable.

If you think you’re practicing a medical act for your son by doing this, for example if you think it reduces your son’s chances of an STD or if it’s cleaner, then once again the same can be said about mastectomies, or even your run-of-the-mill female genital mutilation. And if you think you’re going to make him more appealing to ignorant American women cruel enough to self and others to prefer a “cut” penis, then you’re a sexual groomer of your own son; there is nothing else to describe you.

And finally it’s time to pick apart the last mistake of Mr. Walsh:

You aren’t “infringing on their liberty.” Come on, that’s just absurd. Make your point without resorting to laughably hysterical rhetoric.

I’ll refer back to the fact that a parent precludes his son’s ownership of his own intact sex organ before he even has developed the ability to exercise his own volition. Does Walsh understand the actual meaning and message of liberty or is he just too much of a conservative to look past his own neotraditionalist priorities and how liberty applied at large doesn’t always go the way he may want to?

Once again, let’s make clear this so even Matt Walsh can understand it:

• Self-ownership is a crucial, integral component to the philosophy of liberty.
• Self-ownership as a value applies to the human individual.
• A human is valued as such upon, and even before, birth.
• Self-ownership therefore is already in effect at infancy.

Let us also debunk the problem with the often-touted “parent’s choice”.

• Liberty is about negative rights; entitlements are positive rights.
• Negative rights are in line with self-ownership, and the right to be uninfringed by the force of others.
• Positive rights presume the “right” over another individual. Reminder that this is the opposite of liberty.
• The responsibility to the life you bring into the world is consistent with self-ownership; personal accountability and liberty are not in conflict.
• Legitimate medical practices as well as raising and caring for the child are both consistent with the aforementioned responsibility and the fact that you are cultivating the child into a being that can exercise and become aware of his own self-ownership.
• Non-medical or cosmetic acts do not count towards raising the child and depending on the lasting effect is tantamount to abuse of the child.
• Male genital mutilation is a non-medical, cosmetic, and downright harmful act – by all definitions acts of entitlement over another being.
• Self-ownership of the child is under assault by MGM as it includes both damage and theft of a crucial part of the male anatomy at a point in his life in which he is neither mentally or physically able to resist.
• The child’s liberty is infringed via the assault on his self-ownership.

In short, there is no such thing as a “parent’s choice” aside from the best practices of raising one’s own child and the responsibility to his safety. Routine infant circumcision is a betrayal of that trust, safety, and the respect of self-ownership.

Also by Walsh’s own logic, anyone who practices FGM are not assaulting girls’ liberties. Oh wait, chances may be high that he may in fact consider it such an assault. What’s the big difference in this case: “It’s much worse for a girl”, “Infants have no rights”, “We must protect the girls but boys got to learn to take it”? Gynocentrists are so predictable.

The reader may be wondering right now whether the title I gave this article, “What is a Man?”, was nothing more than a way to grab attention as well as a pastiche of Walsh’s film “What is a Woman?” I confess that my intents leaned towards provocation in this regard, but if we think about it, we can very well ask and then answer the question “What is a Man?” in the context of the subject of the intact, whole, and unsacrificed male.

“What is a man?” may as well be a question that Walsh could ask himself, but I cannot trust any answer he may have.

So what is a man, anyway? I’m not here to give you a comprehensive answer on that at this moment, furthermore as individuals a man cannot afford to be condensed to one definition or even one archetype. For that matter, women as individuals likewise cannot afford to be so condensed (so much for “What is a woman?” am I right?). However the question of archetypes and the permutation of models for men and women is a subject I will save for a future article. In the meantime, let’s clarify a few things that we can:

A man has his liberty, and his self-ownership, his free will to exercise himself in this world as an individual as well as his own expression of masculinity.

As a masculine, self-owning free being, a man has his desires – including prospects of pairing with a woman counterpart, which under proper circumstances include his expression of sexual desire. (We are speaking of the heterosexual world for the moment, though it is clear that those that aren’t have their own such expressions and desire)

A man is fully equipped with everything he needs anatomically to exercise his sexual desires peacefully. He has a foreskin that is in no way a minor detail of this anatomy, but a crucially functional one. It is not an accident of birth.

Here we now have the conceptualization of the anatomically intact man, and answers the question in this respect. The act of routine infant circumcision, then, boils down to a mitigation of the qualities that make one a male. If foreskin amputations were regarded indeed as a form of “castration lite”, it is an act that translates into making the male less of one. The answer to “What is a man?” is not “something you cut the anatomy of”. “Man up” has been the go-to form of goading and shaming to advertise the circumcision industry and cultural practice. Routine infant circumcision is not the response to “What is a man?” but rather “How to destroy a man?”

What grand irony that it is the conservative that continues to moralize and defend this practice in the same breath as he decries the trans agenda for child operations. What irony, that the conservative who talks about “real men” and how masculinity is important to keep society going is the same one who wishes to surgically lower how much of a male someone is, so early in life. This is nothing short of punishment for males for being male – the radical feminists would be proud. It is no surprise to me why conservatives like Walsh and Tucker Carlson are so eager to “establish dialogue” with Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists just to own the biological males.

A few more thoughts to close off on:

I am betting everybody in the men’s movement and intactivist movement who read this, if they aren’t instead incensed by Walsh’s hypocrisy, are howling with laughter at the prospect of him demanding “rallies outside of hospitals that butcher children” as if it were a brilliant new proposition. Clearly he hasn’t heard of Bloodstained Men and Their Friends before…or maybe he has but is instead opting to screech with eyes closed and fingers in his ears whenever someone reminds him of it. In short, Mr. Walsh – there already is a movement of which you speak of. The ball is already rolling. Frankly, you’re proving to be just an obstacle without a good point to make.

I can only hope that we can bring this hypocrisy into light so much that the likes of Matt Walsh will have no choice but to stop ignoring it. They should be made to admit their blundering attitude on the subject and the fact that they’ve disingenuously grandstanded on a subject that goes deeper than they are willing to admit themselves. It is a travesty that what is a toxic fad by comparison is the specific type of child mutilation given disproportionately more attention than the vastly practiced, normalized and casually encouraged child mutilation that is MGM. This mutilation runs so deep in the cultural practice that the men who survive it are like most male domestic abuse victims: in denial, perhaps feeling like they deserved it, and do not consider what happened to them as abuse.

If anybody takes a stand against child mutilation, routine infant circumcision is rightfully the forefront issue. Matt Walsh symbolically and literally mocks the intactivist movement as he envisions himself as the forerunner against the kind of mutilation he can conveniently strike a crusade against. Consider these points the next time you think of Walsh as “brave” for speaking out myopically on an issue he has no moral authority on.

My thanks to the following links for sources on the damage of MGM:

https://breakingtheglasses.blogspot.com/p/intactivist-links.html#.YvsaNxTMJD_

https://menarehuman.com/mgm/embed/#?secret=85aFUwMFkk#?secret=Uh2tvSjFu5

Also thanks to Peter Wright for his input as well as Nikos Anti-MGM from Twitter.

The following brief exchange appeared in the comments under an article titled C.S. Lewis: The Feudalisation of Love. In it I give a brief comment about how women’s cultivation of childlikeness contributes to gynocentric attitudes, and how this appears to be a more forceful influence than sexual and reproductive pressures.

TEXT: 

2cyar wrote:

“The primary ‘something’ that was biologically there to leverage is the child archetype in women, an innocence and moral purity feigned with cosmetics, clothing, gestures and fragility and held up as a fetish for men to worship and protect. Sexual factors do come in but are secondary in strength.”

The next question is how do we turn it off? They certainly aren’t going to self regulate, so we have to figure out how to turn off the impulse within ourselves (and all men) to render it ineffective.
___________________________________

Peter Wright wrote: 

Turning it off can happen by no longer believing that women are children deserving indulgences at men’s expense – ie. seeing it as artificially manufactured and that in reality women are grown adults. It’s the same process as no longer viewing the Santa Claus in the shopping mall as real – he’s doing theatre.

The result of that awakening is that men find themselves saying “No” to every bit of theatrical childishness put before them, realising that it’s a supernormal bait and a grift. Such a man is no longer caught in the gynocentric machinery of his mind.

This is where I part ways with a few honeybadgers and men’s advocates who believe gynocentrism is more ‘natural’ than I do, even as they accept gynocentrism as sometimes extreme and unfair to men. The “gynocentrism is natural” stance is built mostly on belief in the power of women’s sexuality and reproductive functions, while omitting more powerful & more artificial ruses such as feigning childlikeness: i.e. women may have breasts and uteri, but they are not children. 

It’s self-defeating ideology to believe sexual politics is totally unfair for men, while simultaneously believing gynocentrism is “natural.” It results in a learned impotence. Most advocates of this theory end up promoting the familiar parental lifestyle for men under the nostalgic euphemism of “honouring masculinity.” That approach pretends to free men while ultimately keeping them trapped – compliments of an unexamined and unchallenged child archetype, combined with a cultural ideology that pedestalizes women as a higher, quasi-noble class. 

* * * 

*Note: For an illuminating treatment of this topic by Honeybadger Hanna Wallen, see ‘The Natural Gynocentrism Fallacy.‘ 

SEE ALSO:
– Articles On Women’s Attraction to the Child Archetype
– Articles Exploring The Nature of Damseling Behaviors
– Fascinating Womanhood: How To Use Childlikeness to Manipulate Men (video)
– Fascinating Womanhood: Women’s Introduction To Cultivating Childlikeness (pdf)

The following overview of Lester Ward’s concept of gynæcocentric theory (1888, 1903) is from the book The Making of the Human Sciences in China, by Micah Muscolino (2019). It provides a more succinct statement of Ward’s ideology than is found in the originating chapter on the subject.

* * *

Where Ward’s chapter becomes remarkable is his claim that evidence supports a theory that human species began as female. Claiming support for this scientific fact Ward drew on Darwin, geologist Sir Charles Lyell (whose work influenced Darwin), American zoologist John A. Ryder, paleontologist Pierre-Joseph van Beneden, and other zoologists for support.

Thus, in Ward’s theory, the Arachnida or spider family is not a perversion, but an ancient form of reproductive exchange in which the female extracts sperm and consumes the sperm donor. A then popular view was that the male human, male mammals generally, and male birds in particular, are superior to the female and that the female is a form of “arrested development” in the human species where males have evolved more quickly than females. Ward’s repudiation here is ingenious. The female, he argues, “simply represents the normal condition, while the condition of the male is abnormal due to his great powers of variability.” He argues that “females cannot … vary [because] they represent the center of gravity of the biological system.”

Ward made sexual selection the more complex process. It was, he argued, nature’s mechanism to maintain female centeredness in reproduction and preserve the female as the “hereditary trunk” of what we would call DNA. While the female is the ancestral trunk, in humans, unlike other mammals, the sexes choose each other on the basis of different, functional, evolutionary mandates. The female chooses males on the basis of their superiority within the species. The males oblige females, on the basis of the mandate, to naturally select partners who show the capacity to adapt. Instinct gives the female the ability to discriminate among individuals in a species. The human male evolved from the indiscriminate release of sperm to the faculty of taste.

In other words, men have evolved to discriminate among women on the basis of innate aesthetic appeal. We can see this in lower level organisms where evolution, say of spiders, is changing the relative size of males because female spiders are consistently choosing larger sperm donors. When sexual attraction appears in species—most do not have the capacity for libido (a subjective desire for a specific mate)—the aesthetic capacity of individual males plays a functional role in natural and even perhaps in social evolution.

Females are the original humans. Males are an effusion or an extrusion that makes human evolution what it is. The female has an aesthetic that helps her to decide her sexual partner’s relative worth, and where she remains superior in human evolution is in her capacity to discriminate. In Ward’s imagination the evidence presents a situation where female humans have sex-selected for rationality in men rather than for strength or good looks. Because the criteria include rationality, women bred men who were more rational, and a gender power imbalance was the result. Ward is careful to say that both sexes in humans have rationality. But he is more interested in how evolutionary rationality in men enabled men to seize control of the children. This led to the overthrow of the mother right and the establishment of patriarchy. The evolutionary redress to this injustice is already in process. Men abuse women not because they are hateful or strong or stupid. They have simply not yet evolved the capacity that all women have, of empathy. As women begin to socially select for this quality, the obvious abuses of the patriarchal present should resolve.

SOURCE: The Making of the Human Sciences in China, by Micah Muscolino – Brill, (2019)

The following volume by Scott Nearing ‘Woman and social progress: a discussion of the biologic, domestic, industrial and social possibilities of American women‘ (1912) includes lengthy references to Lester F. Ward and his gynæcocentric theory in relation to “women’s progress.”

[googleapps domain=”drive” dir=”file/d/1xom5_2gsI7OnMWBeFEStWuwsigrX9hp4/preview” query=”” width=”640″ height=”480″ /]

The following mentions Lester Ward’s theory, from the Irish Citizen – Saturday 09 May 1914.

The following article appeared in the Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser – Friday 24 April 1914

The following excerpt is from the 1928 book The Lure of Superiority: A Study In The Psychology of Motives, by W.F. Vaughan (pp. 197-198)

The following is an excerpt from E. Belfort Bax’ The Fraud of Feminism, Chapter VI: Some Feminist Lies and Fallacies, where he examines Lester Ward’s ‘Gynœcocentric Theory’ which Bax refers to as “a fallacy of some importance.” – PW

* * *

We must now deal at some length with a fallacy of some importance, owing to the apparatus of learning with which it has been set forth, to be found in Mr Lester F. Ward’s book, entitled Pure Sociology, notwithstanding that its fallacious nature is plain enough when analysed. Mr Ward terms his speculation the “Gynœcocentric Theory,” by which he understands apparently the Feminist dogma of the supreme importance of the female in the scheme of humanity and nature generally.

His arguments are largely drawn from general biology, especially that of inferior organisms. He traces the various processes of reproduction in the lower departments of organic nature, subdivision, germination, budding, etc., up to the earlier forms of bi-sexuality, culminating in conjugation or true sexual union. His standpoint he thus states in the terms of biological origins:

“Although reproduction and sex are two distinct things, and although a creature that reproduces without sex cannot properly be called either male or female, still so completely have these conceptions become blended in the popular mind that a creature which actually brings forth offspring out of its own body, is instinctively classed as female. The female is the fertile sex, and whatever is fertile is looked upon as female. Assuredly it would be absurd to look upon an organism propagating sexually as male. Biologists have proceeded from this popular standpoint and regularly speak of ‘mother cells,’ and ‘daughter cells.’ It, therefore, does no violence to language or to science to say that life begins with the female organism and is carried on a long distance by means of females alone. In all the different forms of a-sexual reproduction, from fission to parthenogenesis, the female may in this sense be said to exist alone and perform all the functions of life, including reproduction. In a word, life begins as female.”

In the above remarks it will be seen that Mr Ward, so to say, jumps the claim of a-sexual organisms to be considered as female. This, in itself a somewhat questionable proceeding, serves him as a starting-point for his theory. The a-sexual female (?), he observes, is not only primarily the original sex, but continues throughout, the main trunk, though afterwards the male element is added “for the purposes of fertilisation.” “Among millions of humble creatures,” says Mr Ward, “the male is simply and solely a fertiliser.”

The writer goes on in his efforts to belittle the male sex in the sphere of biology. “The gigantic female spider and the tiny male fertiliser, the Mantis insect with its similarly large and ferocious female, bees, and mosquitoes,” all are pressed into the service. Even the vegetable kingdom, in so far as it shows signs of sex differentiation, is brought into the lists in favour of his theory of female supremacy, or “gynæcocentricism,” as he terms it.

This theory may be briefly stated as follows: – In the earliest organisms displaying sex differentiation, it is the female which represents the organism proper, the rudimentary male existing solely for the purpose of the fertilisation of the female. This applies to most of the lower forms of life in which the differentiation of sex obtains, and in many insects, the Mantis being one of the cases specially insisted upon by our author. The process of the development of the male sex is by means of the sexual selection of the female. From being a mere fertilising agent, gradually, as evolution proceeds, it assumes the form and characteristics of an independent organism like the original female trunk organism. But the latter continues to maintain its supremacy in the life of the species, by means chiefly of sexual selection, until the human period, i.e. more or less(!), for Mr Ward is bound to admit signs of male superiority in the higher vertebrates – viz. birds and mammals. This superiority manifests itself in size, strength, ornamentation, alertness, etc.

But it is with man, with the advent of the reasoning faculty, and, as a consequence, of human supremacy, that it becomes first unmistakably manifest. This superiority, Mr Ward contends, has been developed under the ægis of the sexual selection of the female, and enabled cruel and wicked man to subject and enslave down- trodden and oppressed woman, who has thus been crushed by a Frankenstein of her own creation. Although in various earlier phases of human organisation woman still maintains her social supremacy, this state of affairs soon changes. Androcracy establishes itself, and woman is reduced to the role of breeding the race and of being the servant of man. Thus she has remained throughout the periods of the higher barbarism and of civilisation. Our author regards the lowest point of what he terms the degradation of woman to have been reached in the past, and the last two centuries as having witnessed a movement in the opposite direction – namely, towards the emancipation of woman and equality between the sexes. (Cf. Pure Sociology, chap.xiv., and especially pp. 290-377.)

The above is a brief, but, I think, not unfair skeleton statement of the theory which Mr Lester Ward has elaborated in the work above referred to, in great detail and with immense wealth of illustration. But now I ask, granting the correctness of Mr Ward’s biological premises and the accuracy of his exposition, and I am not specialist enough to be capable of criticising these in detail: What does it all amount to? The “business end” (as the Americans would say) of the whole theory, it is quite evident, is to afford a plausible and scientific basis for the Modern Feminist Movement, and thus to further its practical pretensions.

What Mr Ward terms the androcentric theory, at least as regards man and the higher vertebrates, which is on the face of it supported by the facts of human experience and has been accepted well- nigh unanimously up to quite recent times, is, according to him, all wrong. The male element in the universe of living things is not the element of primary importance, and the female element the secondary, but the converse is the case.

For this contention Mr Ward, as already pointed out, has, by dint of his biological learning, succeeded at least in making out a case in so far as lower forms of life are concerned. He has, however, to admit – a fatal admission surely – that evolution has tended progressively to break down the superiority of the female (by means, as he contends, of her own sexual selection) and to transfer sex supremacy to the male, according to Mr Ward, hitherto a secondary being, and that this tendency becomes very obvious in most species of birds and mammals.

With the rise of man, however, out of the pithecanthropos, the homosynosis, or by whatever other designation we may call the intermediate organism between the purely animal and the purely human, and the consequent supersession of instinct as the dominant form of intelligence by reason, the question of superiority, as Mr Ward candidly admits, is no longer doubtful, and upon the unquestionable superiority of the male, in due course of time, follows the unquestioned supremacy.

It is clear then that, granting the biological premises of our author that the lowest sexual organisms are virtually female and that in the hermaphrodites the female element predominates; that in the earliest forms of bi-sexuality the fertilising or male element was merely an offshoot of the female trunk and that this offshoot develops, mainly by means of sexual selection on the part of the female, into an organism similar to the latter; that not until we reach the higher vertebrates, the birds and the mammals, do we find any traces of male superiority; and that this superiority only becomes definite and obvious, leading to male domination, in the human species – granting all this, I say, what argument can be founded upon it in support of the equal value physically, intellectually and morally of the female sex in human society, or the desirability of its possessing equal political power with men in such society? On the contrary, Mr Ward’s whole exposition, with his biological facts of illustration, would seem to point rather in the opposite direction.

We seem surely to have here, if Mr Ward’s premises be accepted as to the primitive insignificance of the male element – at first overshadowed and dominated by the female stem, but gradually evolving in importance, character and fruition, till we arrive at man the highest product of evolution up to date – a powerful argument for anti-Feminism.

On Mr Ward’s own showing, we find that incontestible superiority, both in size and power of body and brain, has manifested itself in Androcracy, when the female is relegated, in the natural course of things, to the function of child-bearing.

This, it can hardly be denied, is simply one more instance of the general process of evolution, whereby the higher being is evolved from the lower, at first weak and dependent upon its parent, the latter remaining dominant until the new being reaches maturity, when in its turn it becomes supreme, while that out of which it developed, and of which it was first the mere offshoot, falls into the background and becomes in its turn subordinate to its own product.

Source: Justice, September 4, 1909, p. 5
Section: “Our Women’s Circle”
Topic: Lester Ward’s Gynæcocentric Theory

The Evolution of Sex

One or two comrades have written me asking for more detailed information about Professor Lester Ward’s writings, and more especially about that theory of the evolution of the sexes, which he sets forth in the fourteenth chapter of “Pure Sociology.”

It is somewhat difficult to summarise within the space of an article this “Gynæcocentric Theory,” which Professor Ward takes over 150 pages to unfold; but as I do not wish to disappoint the inquiring comrades I will do my best; only adding that I hope later on, in pamphlet form, to do greater justice to and help to popularise what is such an important addition to our sociological knowledge.

Professor Lester Ward opens the subject with some introductory statements about the reproductive forces such as:

“No fact in biology is better established than that reproduction represents a specialised mode of nutrition, through the renewal of the organism …. If we recognise only two forms of nutrition, natural selection determines which form shall be employed. Individual nutrition will be continued so long as there is no danger of the individual being cut off. Ultra-individual nutrition will begin as soon as there arises a chance of the individual being cut off, and it will be emphasised by any direct threat to the life of the individual. Hence reproduction is not possible in animals to the young that are growing rapidly, not to plants that are over nourished …. Reproduction is not only ultra-nutrition, in going beyond the individual, but it is altro-nutrition, in carrying the process to and into another. It is as we shall see the beginning of altruism.”

In a later part of the chapter we read:

“The introduction of fertilisation in connection with reproduction was gradual, and was not at first at all necessary to it. It came in at the outset as an occasional resort for infusing new elements after a long series of generations through normal reproduction. This occasional fertilisation is called the alternation of generation …. So great was the advantage of fertilisation that in the animal kingdom it first came to accompany each separate act of reproduction itself. From the fact that such is the case in all the higher animals, which are the ones best known to all, the error arose that fertilisation is an essential part of reproduction, and that sex is necessary to reproduction, an error difficult to dislodge.”

These postulates granted, Professor Ward goes out to prove that the female sex in evolution has always been the important sex, because it is the female sex only that reproduces, and carries on the species or race.

“The fertilising organ or miniature sperm sac was the primitive form of what subsequently developed into the male sex, the female sex being the organism proper, which remained practically unchanged …. The selection by females of the best specimens among males and rejection of the inferior ones caused the male to rise in the scale and resemble more and more the primary organism or female. But other qualities were also selected than those that the female possessed. This was due to the early development of the aesthetic faculty in the female, and these qualities were in the nature of embellishments.

The male, therefore, while approaching the form and stature of the female, began to differ from her in these aesthetic qualities …. When the human race finally appeared, through gradual emergence from the great Simian stock, this difference in the sexes existed, and sexual selection was still going on …. Neither sex had any more idea of the connection between fertilisation and reproduction than have animals, and therefore the mother alone claimed and cared for the offspring, as is done throughout the animal kingdom below man. So long as this state of things endured the race remained in the stage called gynococracy, or female rule. That this was a very long stage is attested by a great number of facts …. As it was brain development alone which made man out of an animal by enabling him to break over faunal barriers and overspread the globe, so it was brain development that finally suggested the casual nexus between fertilisation and reproduction, and led to the recognition by man of his paternity and joint proprietorship with woman in the offspring of their loins. This produced a profound social revolution, overthrew the authority of woman, destroyed her power of selection, and finally reduced her to the condition of a mere slave of the stronger sex, although that strength had been conferred by her. The stage of gynaecocracy was succeeded by the stage of androcracy, and the subjection of woman was rendered complete.”

As will be readily seen by these quotations, Professor Lester Ward has linked up the many threads of knowledge obtained from biological and ethnological studies, and has woven therefrom an important sociological theory that “life begins as female,” and that the male was evolved much later “for the sole purpose of securing, a crossing of ancestral strains, and the consequent variation and higher development; that the male sex began as a simple fertiliser, assuming a variety of forms; that for reasons hereafter to be considered, the male in most organisms gradually assumed more importance, and ultimately came to approach the size and general nature of the female; but that throughout nearly or quite the whole of the invertebrates, and to a considerable extent among the vertebrates, the male has remained an inferior creature, and has continued to devote its existence to the one function for which it was created.”

It is almost needless to point out now why the story of Eve being made from Adam’s rib was invented, why woman was taught that her function of reproduction was something unclean, and she could only be cleansed after childbirth by religious ceremonial, why female infanticide was universally practised, and why, more especially, any form of learning was denied to the mass of subject women.

It had taken many generations and untold suffering to reduce woman to the necessary state of subjection, where she ceased to exercise selection, but was now fought for and forced to the uses of men. Every form of pressure, therefore, from tradition, from religious belief, from fear, from public opinion, and from convention, must be brought to bear on sex relations, family life, and what is known to the elect as “woman’s sphere,” in order to ensure that subjection, and keep the balance of power in life outside and inside the home on the side of the man.

D.B.M.