This article is in three parts. This is part one.

By Peter Ryan

Moving Beyond A False Gynocentric Understanding Of Biology:

As I have discussed in previous articles, there is a widely held belief in our gynocentric culture and even in the manosphere, that women are more biologically valuable than men because they are the rate limiting factor of reproduction and men are supposedly expendable. I have explained in great detail why this is not the case in the following articles and have covered every common argument that is used to justify this false and factually incorrect claim:

• Gynocentrism and the golden uterus (part one)¹
• Gynocentrism and the golden uterus (part two)²
• Gynocentrism and the value of men (part one)³
• Gynocentrism and the value of men (part two)⁴
• The nature of male value and our gynocentric culture (part one)⁵
• The nature of male value and our gynocentric culture (part two)⁶

This claim is pervasive and is the foundation of the core belief in female superiority that drives gynocentrism in our culture. That is why I have written so much about it. Maintaining the lie that men are expendable and only women are valuable in the culture, is critical to maintaining gynocentrism. The claim of greater female biological value, is sometimes used to explain the origins of gynocentrism and even justify gynocentrism in society. Ironically this claim is actually a product of gynocentrism itself. In reality the two sexes have equal biological value, but biological value manifests itself differently in each sex. In women biological value is generally more focused on reproductive output and in men biological value is generally more focused on survival output. Of course there is considerable overlap (the sexes are more alike than different⁷) between the sexes and exceptions, but that is the general pattern.

There are some people that erroneously suggest that sexual selection is greater than natural selection and therefore reproduction is more important than survival. This is factually incorrect and can be debunked quite easily. If an organism does not survive long enough, it either does not reproduce or does not reproduce at a frequency that preserves its lineage, or its offspring die and the lineage dies with them. There is an equilibrium between sexual selection and natural selection. If the fitness benefits of sexual selection of a particular trait, are outweighed by the fitness costs of that trait arising from reduced survival, then natural selection will override sexual selection.

It is correct that certain traits can arise in a species that may enhance reproduction at the cost of reduced survival, but this can only develop to a certain degree (and the reverse can occur too where survival is enhanced at the cost of reproduction, in circumstances where the net fitness benefit of survival is greater). Positive feedback loops in sexual selection can occur, this is sometimes identified as Fisherian runaway selection⁸. However eventually such a process terminates when costs to survival become too high and natural selection pressure begins to exceed sexual selection pressure. In a species where this does not occur soon enough, a species will become extinct (like the Irish Elk). Over billions of years, evolution has eliminated species that reproduced at the expense of their own survival in an unsustainable manner. Sexual selection and reproduction are not biological absolutes that exist in a vacuum. Natural selection can override sexual selection and impacts on survival can be more important to evolutionary success than impacts on reproduction.

Each sex has its own optimal life history strategy to propagate the genome. There is overlap between the sexes, but there are also differences. One key difference between males and females, arises from the greater evolutionary success for males in taking on high risk and high effort challenges and hardships, that have a high return or benefit. A man that risks his life to earn social status or acquire resources, may win big and this may greatly increase his mating opportunities and the frequency with which he passes on his genes. Women thanks to their uteri, are limited to reproducing much more slowly and also incur a cost or risk to their primary reproductive function from taking on such risky hardships.

This basic sex difference, is just one of the reasons why men more so than women, are prepared to take on risks and challenges and engage in hardships. It is also one of the key reasons why men are less able to elicit support and protection from society and why women are more capable in doing so. Taking on risks and hardships requires self-reliance and independence from the support and protection from society. Developing traits that elicit support and protection from society, is at least to some degree (but not in an absolute sense) incompatible with male life history strategy. It is not a supposedly greater biological value of women that is behind society providing greater support and protection to women, it is a difference in the manner in which males and females optimise their evolutionary success that has in part led to this difference in societal concern.

We do have a predisposition⁹ to show greater concern for female well-being in certain contexts. That it is a reality and it has nothing to do with women being biologically more valuable than men. Eliciting support and protection from society is a strength that women possess in greater abundance than men, because it is more aligned with women’s life history strategy. A certain underlying biological bias toward supporting and protecting women over men does exist. It is important to remember though as I cited before, that whilst sex differences exist, the sexes are more similar than they are different. Both sexes for instance have evolved and display neotenous features. Our sexual dimorphism is intermediate and not huge like some other animals. So whilst an underlying bias to support and protect women over men may exist, it is not necessarily a huge chasm like sex differences in many other species. It is also important to recall as I mentioned in the normalisation of gynocentrism¹⁰, that human civilisation has arisen from a capacity to make intelligent decisions and control and where necessary inhibit our instinctual impulses. The biases and impulses that drive gynocentric behaviour can be controlled and overcome to a substantial degree.

We can overcome our biases as a society provided that:

1. We are aware of them.
2. We recognise the need to address them as beneficial and worthwhile to our society.
3. We introduce social and legal measures into our culture and society to keep them in check.
4. We recognise and counter efforts to undermine those social and legal measures (like addressing attacks on due process and freedom of speech).

Racism has a biological basis to it, as politically incorrect and as troubling as that sounds. Humans are tribalistic by nature and we have in-groups and out-groups. However we have made efforts to address racism in our culture, in our legal system and in our institutions. We are not slaves to innate biological sexism or racism, with no capacity to change our behaviour. We had slavery and legally and socially sanctioned discrimination in the West for hundreds of years based on racist bigotry and we overcame that. What change seems impossible in the present, actually is not so impossible. Slaves thought the same thing centuries ago and look where we are now.

In my previous article⁶, I mentioned that ironically in some ways feminism has actually demonstrated our capacity to override biology. Feminism has created large numbers of childless women, whose lineage will die with them. Where feminism has taken hold, many societies are pursuing a path that is in contravention to our biological imperative and the populations are failing to replace themselves and continue their lineages. Whilst culture is indeed informed by biology, it is not completely and absolutely restricted by it. Culture also can and does shape biology to some degree (read these articles here¹¹ and here¹²).

Part of the evolutionary advantage of culture, is to extend behaviour to a certain degree beyond the current evolved biological envelope and allow radical adaptation. Such radical adaptation is not possible if culture is completely unable to go beyond biological predispositions. This is why we can get things like feminism emerging in human society. It is why we can overcome our tribalistic tendencies and overcome racism. It is why we don’t have a society where it is a free-for-all and survival of the fittest. It why we are able invest in activities that are so abstract and distant from the biological activities directly related to genome propagation.

I am not suggesting that there is no biological basis to gynocentrism. What I am suggesting is that the biological basis to gynocentrism does exist and has nothing to do with women being more valuable than men and more to do with the positive and negative effects of our evolved sex differences that arose from each sex having a different strategy in passing on their genes. I am suggesting that whilst certain biases have a partial biological basis to them, like our bias toward female neoteny, we can still manage and overcome these biases. I am not suggesting we can completely eliminate gynocentrism, I am suggesting we can substantially reduce it. Just as we cannot completely eliminate racism, we can and have been able to substantially reduce it. Slavery is no longer a mainstream practice in the West as it was for centuries. Hanging people of a particular skin colour from a tree is not socially or legally acceptable either and racism is not socially or legally sanctioned in society. These are all massive leaps forward that we have taken and positive leaps. Pockets of racism exist, but racism is no longer normalised throughout mainstream society. We can do the same with gynocentrism.

The fatalistic thread of the manosphere, is not achieving anything except keeping men in a perpetual state of learned helplessness. Men are valuable and men do matter. As I mentioned at the start of this article, gynocentrism is based on the core belief women are superior to men. The belief in female superiority ultimately rests on the unquestioned axiom 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.

Briffault’s “Law”:

The notion that females determine all the conditions of the animal kingdom (or Briffault’s Law¹³), is part of this programming and 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.

Gynocentrism And The Psychological Manipulation Of Men:

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.

Please continue on to part two of this article.

References:

1. https://gynocentrism.com/2019/04/29/gynocentrism-and-the-golden-uterus-part-one/
2. https://gynocentrism.com/2019/05/02/gynocentrism-and-the-golden-uterus-part-two/
3. https://gynocentrism.com/2019/08/19/gynocentrism-and-the-value-of-men-part-one/
4. https://gynocentrism.com/2019/08/19/gynocentrism-and-the-value-of-men-part-two/
5. https://gynocentrism.com/2020/01/10/the-nature-of-male-value-and-our-gynocentric-culture-part-one/
6. https://gynocentrism.com/2020/01/10/the-nature-of-male-value-and-our-gynocentric-culture-part-two/
7. https://gynocentrism.com/2018/03/03/jordan-peterson-on-psychological-differences-similarities-between-the-sexes/
8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisherian_runaway
9. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1948550616647448
10. https://gynocentrism.com/2018/06/30/the-normalisation-of-gynocentrism/
11. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20140410-can-we-drive-our-own-evolution
12. https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10456
13. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Briffault#Pseudo-Briffault’s_law
14. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYaRb070r8E
15. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6EF00RL88M
16. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_feather#World_War_I
17. https://www.amazon.com/End-Men-Rise-Women/dp/1594488045
18. https://www.amazon.com.au/Myth-Male-Power-Warren-Farrell/dp/0425181448
19. https://www.amazon.com.au/Manipulated-Man-Esther-Vilar/dp/1905177178

There’s been a lot of discussion lately on a return to traditional gender roles as a way to reverse the ill effects of feminism. We see it promoted by advocates for traditionalism, in which men and women are called to adhere to strict ‘gender roles’ – eg. he is head of household who goes out and earns the money and protects her, while she makes babies, apple pies, and keeps the house clean. Its what many people refer to as the ‘two-spheres doctrine’ in which men and women are apportioned sovereignty over different realms – he over the political and social realm, and she over the domestic realm. This, argue the advocates of traditional gender roles, creates a delicate but eminently workable balance that has stood the test of time.

The fantasy of a return to the ‘good old days’ when men were masculine and chivalrous, and women were feminine and ladylike, has run strong through the manosphere and beyond, whether promoted by Anthony “Dream” Johnson and his traditionalism-promoting convention, or women like Suzanne Venker who specialize in promoting traditional roles for women.

I note Mike Buchanan of J4MB recently posted a link on his blog titled Tradwives – women who are bucking feminism, which leads to an article with the byline ‘Submitting to my husband like it’s 1959?: Why I became a #TradWife:

And inevitably, it has become a ‘thing’ for a woman to actually admit that she wants a role as full-time housewife and mother. It’s being called a Tradwife, short for traditional wife, though it was only ever a short-lived tradition for most people… Search the hashtag ‘#tradwife’ on social media and you’ll see images of cooked dinners and freshly-baked cakes with captions like, “A woman’s place is in the home” or “Trying to be a man is a waste of a woman”.

There is a lot to that last statement, just as it is a waste of a man trying to be a woman. As Sweden has discovered, the more you try making men and women the same, the more they will emphasise their differences.¹

I have also witnessed an occasional media article showcasing a woman who has decided to quit a stressful job to live like a 1950s housewife, insisting she’s happy to spend her day cooking and cleaning because ‘men should be spoiled by their wives.’

One such story in the UK Daily Mail describes a 30 yr old Oregon woman Katrina Holte as follows;

A woman who was stressed out by her job in a busy payroll department, decided to quit the rat race and also turn back time – deciding to live like a 1950s housewife.

Transforming her suburban home in Hillsborough, Oregon, into a working shrine to the era, Katrina Holte, 30, now loves keeping house for her engineering manager husband, Lars, 28 – cleaning, cooking and making dresses using 1950s patterns.

Spinning vinyl discs by stars of the era like Doris Day, she flits about her business, making sure dinner is on the table when Lars gets in, saying: ‘I feel like I’m living how I always wanted to. It’s my dream life and my husband shares my vision.

‘It is a lot of work. I do tons of dishes, laundry and ironing, but I love it and it’s helping to take care of my husband and that makes me really happy.²

For most working men its a no-brainer that she would be more happy in a traditional roleplay of that kind. It is, as she points out, much better than working a stressful job as required of men’s traditional role.

Whatever the trend for women to become tradwives, it is not the only alternative to feminist prescriptions, and it may not be the ‘best’ of the available alternatives either.

Here I’d like to introduce the phenomenon of “modwives” – women who have embraced multi-option lives over trad roles, and who allow, nay encourage multi-option lives for their husbands. Of course I just made up the term modwife, but they exist and are possibly also growing in number.  Both tradwife and modwife eschew feminism which is geared only to female privilege, and not to partnerships based on reciprocal labor and devotion.

Over 150 years of feminism has bequeathed to women the famed multi-option lives, a sword which shattered the more narrow traditional roles with sure and mighty strokes. But the big question is this; are women today willing to renounce their multi-option lives in favour of single-option traditional roles?

I would say not a snowfalke’s chance in Hell. And to invite them to do so today can be construed as coercive and even an abusive act. I submit that few women today are going to genuinely trade in multi-option lives for traditional roles, other than a limited few who like the idea of free time and cosplay, and who can rely on husbands to bring home a healthy wage.

This unlikelihood that women will embrace roles of yesteryear with any real commitment leads to another option mentioned above – the modwife. At best, today’s multi-option women can invite their men to do same. The modwife’s modus operandi is based on personal liberty within relationships, extending a true freedom of opportunity to her partner such as society has championed for her, even though it goes without saying that the loaded gun remains in her draw, same as it sits in the draw of the tradwife.

Yet few multi-option women today are willing to extend that multi-option liberty to men, preferring instead to pocket the advantages extended by women’s ‘liberation’ while expecting their boyfriends and husbands to remain in the mismatched role of protector and provider. There are women however, limited in number as they are, who lean toward the model of commensurate liberty for both men and women in relationships — some of them you will recognize among the supporters of the men’s rights movement.

That libetarian spirit is usually understood as belonging to the political sphere, but it is accepted by the modwife as a guiding principle in her relationship with men. It emphasizes individual choice, relative autonomy, voluntary association, individual judgement, free will, self-determination, and free labor-sharing arrangements and agreements. In a word; freedom.

Applying the concept of freedom to relationships may seem odd, especially when we consider the entrapment traditionally associated with marriage, not to mention the dangers and the restrictions on freedom that come with strict, prescribed gender roles of yesteryear.

Psychologist James Hillman speaks to the topic of freedom in his paper Marriage, Intimacy, Freedom:

Yet what does the soul want with that word Freedom which sets off such expectations? What sort of preposition accompanies and influences Freedom? Freedom from – from fear, want, and oppression, such as enunciated by the Charter that established that established the United Nations after World War Two?  Or is it Freedom of – choice, opportunity and movement, or access to today’s political language?

Or, is it Freedom to – to do as I like, to hire whom I want, to tell the boss to shove it, to go where I want, to marry whom I please–freedom of agency in the empowered and recovered adult of therapy?

Or, fourth, is it possibly Freedom in? This seems moronic or oxymoronic, for the fantasy of American, epitomized by Texan, freedom is “Don’t fence me in.” “In” means within limits or constraints of any place, time, situation, condition, such as the kitchen, in an hour, in a conversation, in a marriage.

This forth preposition,”in,” rather than freedom of, to and from, suggests that the joyful expectation arising from the soul when the bell of freedom rings is nothing other than living fully in the actuality of this or that situation, as it is, which gives to that situation wings, freeing it from a desire to be elsewhere, to escape from it, to want more, thereby sating the soul’s desire with the fullness of the present. How do I say it  “I love what I’m doing… I’m fully in it.” “I’m really into tex-mex cooking; my new computer; re-painting the house.”³

Freedom ‘in’ as Hillman puts it, allows for creative negotiation on how to set up relationships that bypass the narrow choice-dichotomy between traditional relationships and feminist-informed ones.^* For example, a man wishes to cook the food or be a stay-at-home father? So be it. She wants a career? Done. A bit of role sharing with him and her — both taking on part-time childcare, cooking and wage earning? Consider it done. This is the kind of freedom that comes with the multi-option couple, and it stands as a viable alternative to the traditional roles that we so often look back to with nostalgia.

The message of the men’s rights movement has been consistent in its commitment to more options for men and boys. That call for more options, for more rights and privileges, turns out to be a good match for the liberties most women enjoy today. Whether we use that freedom to choose life with a tradwife or a modwife – or to reject wives and relationships with women completely – the choice is ultimately ours.

References:

[1] Tradwives – women who are bucking feminism, J4MB (Jan 2019)
[2] Siofra Brennan, Woman quits her stressful job to live like a 1950s housewife, UK Daily Mail (2019)
[3] James Hillman, Marriage, Intimacy Freedom, Spring Journal of Archetype and Culture (1997)

*Note: The terms Tradwife and Modwife – and by extension Tradhusband and Modhusband are used in a lighthearted way to designate the different ways people can set up a relationship.

The following is an attractiveness rating scale based on the two factors of 1. sexual attractiveness and 2. pairbonding attractiveness, instead of the popular single rating factor of sexual attractiveness.

Preamble

Freud/psychoanalysis: “What decides the purpose of life is simply the programme of the pleasure principle.” (romantic & sexual gratification)

Object relations psychology: “The primary motivational factors in one’s life are based on human relationships, rather than sexual or aggressive triggers.” (pairbonding)

The above quotes imply two different kinds of male attractiveness, for women, and a need for two separate rating scales: 1. sexual attractiveness, and 2. pairbonding attractiveness. Sexual attractiveness is based purely on romantic attraction: a man’s status, power, looks, wealth, confidence, his overt sexual desirability & unpredictable excitement. Pairbonding attractiveness  implies the guy-next-door stereotype, more attractive for company, stability, ability to commit, pair bonding and if desired, his ability to invest in building a family.

Rating a man as  9/10 in sexual attractiveness is misleading as the only qualifier of a high quality partner, as he may score only 1/10 in the pairbonding attractiveness (or it may be the converse scores). Not that I’m into rating men, but for those who are I recommend using the dual scales mentioned here and adding the scores together to gain a more accurate, overall rating.

Two-Factor Attractiveness Scale

A two-factor attractiveness scale would work like this, and examples are arbitrary, e.g.

(Example male – who?):
5/10 for sexual attractiveness
0/10 for pairbonding attractiveness.
Score: 5|0 = total 5 

(Example male – who?):
5/10 for sexual attractiveness
1/10 for pairbonding attractiveness
Score: 5|1 = total 6

(Example male – who?):
5/10 for sexual attractiveness
7/10 for pairbonding attractiveness
Score: 5|7 = total 12

(Example male – who?):
7/10 for sexual attractiveness
5/10 for pairbonding attractiveness
Score: 7|5 = total 12

(Example male – who?):
7/10 for sexual attractiveness
6/10 for pairbonding attractiveness
Score: 7|6 = total 13

(Example male – who?):
9/10 for sexual attractiveness
-5/10 for pairbonding attractiveness
Score: 9|-5 = total 4

* Highest possible score is +20… Lowest possible score is -10.
 

SEE ALSO: TWO-FACTOR ATTRACTIVENESS SCALE FOR MEN

By Peter Ryan

This article is dedicated to the multiple men that I have known who have committed suicide or attempted to commit suicide. Men always have value and something to live for, even when they think they don’t, or how they are treated by society convinces them they don’t. 

Introduction:

The value of a human life is something that is not truly quantifiable. There is no one answer to the question on how much a human life is worth. It is a reality though, that each human life cannot be replaced and is in a sense priceless. The consciousness of a human being is unique to each individual human life. This article will be focusing on the biological value of men, but it is important to remember that all human life transcends biological value. We do not treat the disabled with less dignity or with no dignity because they are disabled. We understand that the value of human life that really has the ultimate meaning to us, does not come from the utility of the human body.

Every man and woman regardless of their abilities, has a unique a mind and a personality that conveys a unique contribution to the world. That is what we really miss when people die and that is what really forms the basis of human love. We acknowledge the real basis of the value of human life, when we consider brain death to be the death of a person. It is consciousness and not the utility of the body that ultimately matters to us. There will not be another person like you again. Our consciousness and the essence of who we are cannot be replaced.

We often do not realise the value of what we have until it is gone. Death can clarify the relative importance of many things for people (including me). A number of years ago, I watched two parents bury both their two sons. It was the saddest thing I have ever witnessed and understandably the parents were inconsolable. The sons died in an accident on their holiday in their mid-20s in the prime of their life. All of the hopes and dreams that their parents had for them, died that day. I can still remember the horrible wailing of the mother and the father, as two coffins proceeded to leave the church. I can still recall the upset I felt seeing someone I went to school with and knew had a promising future, being moved away in a coffin right past me and the finality of it all. You do not forget a tragic experience like that.

What do you say to parents that have just lost not one, but both of their two sons in a horrible accident? They can never be replaced. How many families have lost their sons at too early an age from suicide, from the effects of divorce, from fighting a war or fighting fires, or from an early accidental death or illness? The pain and sense of loss cannot be measured. Whilst we certainly can create abstract ways of measuring the value of both men and women in biological terms or otherwise, ultimately the value of human life is greater than the sum of its parts. The pain people feel from losing people they love, can be a powerful reminder of that reality.

Ultimately whether you are a man or a woman at the bottom of the distribution of utility and biological value, remember that your value as a human being transcends your utility and your biology. As I have said before, civilisation requires that we move beyond valuing human life based on its utility and biological characteristics. How quickly would civilisation descend into violent chaos if we began murdering the sick, the disabled and the elderly? Not long. We have seen how that turns out and the genocidal horrors that have unfolded from such thinking. Civilisation requires a basic unconditional level of respect for the sanctity of all human life, in order for it to function and be sustained.

So whilst I will be discussing the biological value of men in detail, please take the time to reflect on the reality that the value of human life is more than just what comes from biological value. Please take the time to reflect on how lucky you are to be alive and to simply exist, because we will all be dead one day. All of our problems and ideologies will mean little in our minds, when we face death in our final moments and are fighting for our last breath and we consider how tiny the length of our passage in this universe actually is. This is a large article and is divided into two parts, part one and part two. There is a great deal to discuss because of the amount of distortion of the truth and of the facts surrounding male value. I make no apologies for the length of this article, men deserve it.

The Biological Equality Of The Sexes:

In order for a phenotype of an organism to have value in biological terms, it must ensure sufficient copies of the genome that encoded it persist in future generations. A phenotype that results in greater copies of a genome existing after a thousand generations (or any other number of generations) than an alternative phenotype, is of a greater biological value to that genome and will be conserved to a greater degree. Biological value must also be defined in reference to the organisms investing in a phenotype and the payoff they receive from that investment.

Sex is a phenotype and parents invest in the male and female phenotype by producing male and female offspring. After any number of generations, each sex produces an exactly equal total number of copies of their parent’s genome. Consequently, males and females have exactly equal biological value. This is why there is an almost equal sex ratio of males and females produced at birth in the human population and many other species. It does not pay for parents to invest in one sex over the other, because neither sex has greater biological value for the parents investing in them. This reality is explained by Fishers principle¹. I have described the underlying evolutionary framework behind the equal biological value of the sexes at length in part one of Gynocentrism And The Value Of Men².

It is telling how gynocentric our society has become, when even significant numbers of people in the manosphere are convinced that women are more biologically valuable to the species because they have a uterus and think biology revolves solely or primarily around reproduction. If this truly were the case, then there would be a selective advantage from producing daughters instead of sons and female infants would outnumber male infants in the population. If reproduction was the sole or primary source of biological value, then humans and our hominid and mammalian ancestors would have eventually reverted back to asexual reproduction, or would not have evolved to sexually reproduce at all. Alternatively, our ancestors could have evolved to sexually reproduce as hermaphrodites (where all individuals of a population could gestate the fetus and fertilise each other’s eggs), or at the very least would have devolved into small mammals with high rates of reproduction. None of this has happened.

As I discussed in part one of Gynocentrism And The Value Of Men, the empirical evidence, established evolutionary theory and our evolutionary history, all point in the opposite direction to the assertion that women are the more biologically valuable sex because of their uterus and that reproduction is the overwhelming driver of evolutionary success. We have literally had hundreds of millions of years for a selective preference for the female sex to win out and yet it has not. Why? Reproduction is one event in a series of events required to propagate the genome and the uterus is just one organ required to ensure continuation of the lineage. In the complex two sex biological system our genome encodes to propagate itself, there are many other requirements that must be met to ensure continuation of the genome aside from reproduction and the uterus. Reproductive success does not ensure evolutionary success and they are not synonymous. I discussed all of this in detail particularly in part one of Gynocentrism And The Golden Uterus³ and in my further writings in part one and two on Gynocentrism And The Value Of Men.

The Sex Differences In Biological Value:

The biological value of men extends far beyond just their reproductive and genetic value in allowing sexual reproduction to occur. Males exist in our species in the form they do and contain half the human genome, precisely as a result of having equivalent biological value of their own and because reproduction is not the sole or exclusive source of biological value. The difference between males and females is not in the degree of overall biological value of each sex. The two key sexual differences in biological value, lie in the different manifestation of biological value in each sex and in the distribution of biological value among individuals of each sex. The sexes do not have to be the same to be equal in overall biological value and they do not have to be unequal in biological value to be different. This is a reality that feminists who assert that the sex differences are entirely due to socialisation and female supremacists that assert innate female biological superiority (and yes some people in the manosphere strangely hold the same belief), both fail to appreciate and understand. These principles can be illustrated with two simple analogies from modern life-

1. Two houses can be of the same monetary value and be vastly different.

2. The total wealth of two families can be equal, but the distribution of that wealth between individuals in each family can be different.

Whilst it would wrong to simply assert the lack of a uterus makes men less valuable than women, it would certainly be correct to identify this basic sex difference, as the ultimate source of the majority of all other biological sex differences. This would include the sex differences in the manifestation and distribution of male biological value compared to female biological value.

The greater rate of reproduction of the male as a result of lower reproductive investment, ensures the male population has a greater variance in biological value than the female population. The individuals that produce the greatest numbers of copies of their parent’s genome are male. The individuals that produce the lowest numbers of copies of their parent’s genome are male. Whilst feminists may be envious of the apex males in our society that are at the top of the social ladder that have the greatest evolutionary success, it is about time we showed some compassion for the forgotten men at the bottom of the social ladder (like the male homeless). The true value of a human life goes beyond biological value and all men regardless of their inherent biology, are deserving of being treated with dignity and respect. We afford this treatment to women and we can do the same for men.

Whilst the distribution of biological value between individuals is different for men and women, there is no difference in the total and mean biological value of each sex. Greater numbers of individual females may pass on their parent’s genome, but the males that pass on their parent’s genome do so at a greater rate per individual than the females do and consequently leave behind more genome copies per individual male than individual female. Despite this pattern, it is a mathematical reality that neither sex as a whole, can pass on more copies of their parent’s genome than the other sex.

Men and women face different sets of selective pressures to propagate their genes as a result of only one sex being capable of gestation and this consequently results in different manifestations of biological value. Men have faced sexual and natural selective pressures women have not faced and vice versa. It would be correct to say that solely in reproductive terms, females convey greater value to the species than males. It would not be correct to say that then means females are more biologically valuable than males overall. Men and their male hominid ancestors have been shaped by millions of years of evolution to convey a survival value to the species that women cannot match. If women are the rate limiting factor of reproduction, men are the rate limiting factor of survival. Survival does impact evolutionary success, not just reproduction.

Investment in both survival and reproduction together drive evolutionary success. Activities related to survival and reproduction can often conflict with each other. Activities related to survival can often involve risks and hardships and take away energy and resources, that may conflict with the requirements of pregnancy and early child rearing. In the modern world this is less of a problem of course. However this basic life history trade-off⁴ between investment in survival versus investment in reproduction, has existed for most of our evolutionary history and the evolutionary history of our ancestors. We evolved under conditions without birth control, mechanisation, electricity or modern medicine and it is a relative luxury that today the sexes are free to live differently to the paradigm our ancestors lived in for millions of years. The reality is that given the harsh selective pressures of our evolutionary past, there was a selective advantage to developing two sexes that were physiologically and psychologically adapted to specialise in either reproduction or survival, rather than being generalists that are far less effective at both.

There is especially a selective advantage, when the two sexes work together synergistically to combine their specialist abilities to perpetuate their lineage in a community, as two components in one biological system. Evolutionary gains that cannot be achieved alone by the individual males and females within a community, can be attained when males and females work cooperatively and synergistically with each other within a functional social system. This property of systems is called emergence⁵ and is something which is overlooked when we reduce all of biology down to the rate of reproduction and individual reproductive success and ignore the multitude of other factors driving evolution.

Specialisation of function and the development of systems that contain components that specialise in various functions, drives efficiency. These factors have driven the evolution of multicellular life, it is why your body has multiple systems (respiratory, circulatory system etc) specialising in particular functions. It is why our economy and the superorganism known as civilisation, is driven by specialisation to maximise economic and social efficiency. Why have only one sex gestate the fetus? Efficiency from specialisation. Why have men been specifically sexually and naturally selected to contribute to the survival of their family and community? Efficiency and specialisation. Having males that contribute to survival, allows for greater investment by females in reproduction and vice versa. Having one sex specialise in survival and another sex specialise in reproduction, maximises the survival and reproductive output of the species. When men and women pool their biological capital together cooperatively in a community, this dynamic results in an emergent evolutionary success.

What Male Value Looks Like:

Male biological value does of course have a reproductive component to it and women to at least some degree, have contributed to the survival of their family and community. Whilst there is of course overlap between the sexes, with both sexes contributing to reproduction and survival, substantial sex differences do exist in their relative contributions to survival and reproduction. Each sex has its own set of adaptations that they have acquired over evolution as a result of one sex investing more in reproduction and the other sex investing more in survival. Male biological value is focused on contributing either directly or indirectly to survival. Male biological value and the male contribution to survival, manifests itself in four main ways:

1. Competition: Men are by nature competitive, they are driven to strive for status and compete. The result of that competition often leads to innovation and social and economic developments that further the survival of society. Of course we only hear of the negative and destructive aspects of male competition and never about the positive aspects of male competition. The reality is that we would not have a functioning economy or even civilisation without competition. It is also worth reflecting on the basic fact that the world is a harsh place and playing it safe and playing it nice, does not always led to the required outcome. Even the more destructive aspects of male competition can have a positive output when applied correctly.

2. Collaboration: Men cooperate with other men to develop, run, maintain and protect civilisation and to make the discoveries and drive the innovation and exploration to further civilisation. It is frequently overlooked that the “patriarchy” or the social dominance hierarchy that men live and work in, functions only because men cooperate with each other. Patriarchy is not all about competition. Men compete but they do so within a system of male cooperation and within established rules and norms. Men work in teams in sport, in business, in the military, in science, in emergency services and a multitude of other domains. The combined efforts of thousands of men have built cities, civilisations, all of our modern infrastructure, won wars and driven humanity into space.

3. Protection and Provision For Family: Men contribute to the survival of the family. Men have been sexually selected to protect and provide for their progeny and partner. For most of human history and prehistory, male provision and protection has frequently meant the difference between their progeny and their partner living or dying, or at least thriving versus struggling to survive.

4. Paternal Investment: Men contribute to the raising of children. This is frequently overlooked in our modern culture which pretends that fatherhood conveys no benefit, despite the overwhelming empirical evidence to the contrary.

All of these four dimensions of male value produce an enormous emergent benefit when the value of individual males is pooled collectively. An emergent benefit that civilisation depends on for its continued existence. Think for a moment about the combined intergenerational consequences of all the fatherless households in Western civilisation, on the future social stability and the economy of our countries. The description of these four dimensions, is by no means exhaustive and I could go into much greater detail describing all the ways men contribute to the survival of the species and civilisation.

The reality is that males are driven by testosterone and other factors to strive for status and to engage in behaviours that enhance the survival of their families, their communities and their civilisation. Men have acquired physical and psychological traits and developed specific biological strengths from a combination of sexual and natural selective pressures, to contribute to survival. These are biological facts and no matter how hard ideologues attempt to smear men and demonise them, the good in men and the value in men will keep rising to the surface.

Of course contributing to survival is not exclusive to men and neither is contributing to reproduction exclusive to women. However the reality is that men do contribute to community survival to a much greater degree than women, just as women contribute a great deal more to reproduction. The difference in the investment each sex makes in survival and reproduction is interconnected and interdependent. The male investment in survival supports and allows the greater female investment in reproduction and vice versa. These are realities that feminists will never acknowledge: Women in general do not make up the majority of workers that are doing the bulk of the risky, hazardous and dirty work, the work done in remote locations or night work and working the 50+ hour a week jobs. Despite more than 50 years of feminist social engineering, none of the following realities have changed:

• Men design, build, maintain, renovate and demolish the vast bulk of the thousands of physical structures (buildings, infrastructure, housing, roads, rail etc) that comprise our towns and cities.
• Men run the vast bulk of our essential infrastructure that supplies our towns and cities with electricity, water, gas and petrol.
• Men design, build and repair the majority of our machines, cars, planes, trains, boats, spacecraft and electrical gadgets etc.
• Men are running and maintaining our farms, abattoirs, fishing industry and dams and making sure our towns and cities remain adequately provisioned with food and water.
• Men are running and maintaining our oil rigs, mines, refineries, factories and warehouses.
• Men are the majority of our plumbers, electricians, mechanics and technicians.
• Men run the vast bulk of our waste management that ensures our towns and cities remain clean and healthy. Men make sure we have a working sewage system, recycling, hard rubbish and garbage collection.
• Men ensure the continuous transport of goods between towns and cities. Unseen men work on our container ships, on freight trains and on planes shipping goods all over the planet. They are on the road driving our trucks and keeping our supermarkets stocked with food.
• Men are the majority of our military, coast guard, police, firefighters and emergency service workers.
• Men remain the spearhead of innovation. Men are the majority of our inventors, Nobel laureates and Fields medallists. The major technological innovations, scientific discoveries, the majority of patents and the majority of the political, economic and social developments of our time, are the result of men. It was men that invented the light bulb, the aeroplane, the car, the radio, the television, the modern computer, developed the internet, developed most of our machinery and electrical gadgets and discovered antibiotics etc. It is male genius that is the reason why we have a population of 7 billion people living in electrified cities and not a couple of 100 million people living in caves. The reality is that the bulk of the intellectually gifted are men (men dominate the upper ranges of the IQ distribution), just as the bulk of the strongest and fittest people are men. Male intellect is a reality that feminist infested academia has tried to ignore, whilst asserting men and boys are somehow defective. I do not know how long this video⁶ will remain up before it is taken down by feminist and sjw censors, but every person that has been told men and boys are stupid and bought into that lie, should watch it.
• Men are the majority of our leaders. They are the majority of our entrepeneurs, business leaders, thought leaders, leading scientists and politicians. Men have largely been responsible for starting the majority of new industries and academic disciplines (and subdisciplines), including social media platforms on the internet now taken over by feminists. Men are prepared to take massive risks, take massive responsibilities, present new revolutionary ideas that do not conform to established peer consensus at the risk of ridicule and work long hours often at the expense of the rest of their lives. This is the reality that feminists will not accept when it comes to acknowledging the cost of leadership on the individual and the personal cost of extreme feats of creative brilliance and the relative dearth of women in such pursuits.
• We could then look at the male contribution to music, writing, art, drama, philosophy and sport. I do not think I have to list the names of every man and their contribution. Imagine if there was no Shakespeare, no John Lennon, no Michelangelo and no Socrates. Men have shaped our culture in ways that have lasted thousands of years (like Jesus Christ and Buddha). Men have also invented new forms of art, music, drama, philosophy and sport and our society is much richer, more developed and more civilised because of their contribution. The male contribution to these areas in the last 50 years is staggering on its own.
• Men pay the bulk of government taxes and are the bulk of our full-time employed workforce. Men work in industries essential for maintaining GDP and that support service sector industries and government sector occupations the majority of women work in. Men either directly or indirectly finance the bulk of female consumer spending, by either providing women with the household finances directly, or indirectly through government welfare, or by working in industries that make female dominated occupations economically and technologically possible.
• Finally men are our fathers and are critical to raising physically and psychologically healthy children, with a prosperous and bright future. Fatherlessness and the breakdown of the family in the last 50 years, has done nothing but provide ample evidence for the importance of fathers.

The reality is that these differences in representation between men and women that I have just described, do at least in part reflect innate physical and psychological strengths men have over women in terms of their biology. Just as I mentioned in the previous description on the dimensions of male value, this list could be pages long and we could go through a similar list for men with our prehistory. Think for a moment about the huge impact the male contribution to survival in our history and prehistory has had on our evolutionary success and the capacity to pass on our genes.

Men have done and continue to do the work that women either cannot do or do not want to do. That is the unspoken taboo which our gynocentric society will not acknowledge until it is faced with a crisis of unimaginable proportions from placing female well-being above male well-being for decades and throwing men under the bus. Men are not superior to women and women are not superior to men, but we need to recognise that each sex has its own unique contribution to society and respect the value of both sexes and not just pedestalise women.

How many women are going to work in a sewage treatment plant? Let us be honest here. How many women are going to work on powerlines and in mines? How many women are going to work in garbage collection? How many women are going to risk their lives in actual combat or fighting fires? Men often do these things for their family and for their society, with little recognition or reward and while they are being told they are obsolete⁷. Many of the men keeping society running are invisible to society, but if they stepped away from their jobs for just one day, society would grind to a halt. That is the scary reality that is one of the factors that drives society out of fear, to con men into believing they have no value when it is the exact opposite.

The simple reality is that men do have strengths relative to women, just as women have strengths relative to men and men do things that women cannot or will not do, just as women do things men cannot or will not do. This man-hating culture does its very best to either ignore, downplay or attack these realities when it does not conform to the gynocentric overton window of female superiority. I could go through the list of valuable physical and psychological attributes that men possess to a greater degree than women, but that should not be necessary.

Yes in certain traits men are better equipped than women and can engage in particular activities with greater performance. We can also say the same about women in certain respects in relation to men and yet only that reality is politically correct to say in this gynocentric culture. Men are not allowed to be better than women at anything, but women are allowed to be better than men at everything. You can see this double standard play out socially on the street⁸ and even politically⁹ with President Donald Trump (the supposed “misogynist”). It is socially taboo to state men are better than women at anything of meaningful value in this gynocentric culture, which revolves around worshipping anything female and belittling men.

Whether people like it or not, there are certain biological realities we cannot deny and if we do continue to deny them, reality will eventually assert itself at our peril and threaten the economic and social future of society itself. Whatever social and legal barriers that may have held women back, have been removed and women have had at least 50 years to make use of all of the same opportunities men have had. Women and girls have also benefited from numerous affirmative action programs and policies in employment and education, that have placed women and girls above men and boys. Despite all of that and the massive preferential treatment women and girls have been given for decades, women have not overtaken men in any of the areas I described earlier and there is no sign that is going to change. We need to accept biological reality at some point. The sexes are biologically equal in overall value and equal before the law, but the sexes are also different. Neither sex is superior or inferior, just different.

If we want to understand and identify male biological value, we don’t have to go through the long list of valuable physical and psychological attributes men have in greater abundance than women (again for the insecure nit-pickers, women have their own set of strengths). Just open your eyes and look at the world and reflect on what happens if men disappeared for a day and we had a day without men. If male strengths offend some women, they may want to consider that women at the very least have played a role in sexually selecting men with such strengths and that ironically women have partly themselves to blame if they are offended by male competence. You selected such males as mates for millions of years! Male competence is attractive to women and sometimes like female beauty, it can intimidate some members of the other sex (and sometimes members of the same sex, like feminists who seem to have a problem with both male competence and female beauty).

There are those that will assert that technological automation and robotics will make men redundant. The same logic can be applied to women. Technology can make women just as redundant as men. Artificial uteri and artificially induced male eggs, can eventually replace female reproduction. Artificial intelligence, automation and robotics can also replace female dominated work. However this reasoning fails to account for a regular pattern observed throughout history. With all technological change new work has emerged. Men have shifted to new work and new economies multiple times over the decades and centuries.

Rather than technology making men redundant, men will simply contribute to the survival and prosperity of their communities in other ways as they have done before. Men have demonstrated a robust capacity to shift to new activities throughout history and often have been the ones pioneering new lines of work and new economies and industries. Women have been the ones following male ingenuity and pioneering, not the other way around. The capacity of men to adapt to a shifting environment and still contribute to their community, has been demonstrable throughout history. Even today despite all of this “end of men” female supremacist chest beating, we can see that it is men that comprise the majority of those that are at the spearhead of new lines of work. Regardless as to what the future may hold, as I mentioned at the start of this article, the value of human life for both men and women is greater than either their survival or reproductive utility.

Please continue now to part two of this article.

References:

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%27s_principle
2. https://www.avoiceformen.com/gynocentrism/gynocentrism-and-the-value-of-men-part-one/
3. https://www.avoiceformen.com/gynocentrism/gynocentrism-and-the-golden-uterus-part-one/
4. https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/life-history-evolution-68245673/
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence
6. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSLoiFSpp0g
7. https://www.amazon.com/End-Men-Rise-Women/dp/1594488045
8. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxpX6IQ3GY4
9. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmY5LmaZImk

Have you ever thought of Men’s Rights and feminism as competing mythologies? In what follows I will do just that, while paying special attention to the fact that the feminist myth has triumphed in capturing global imagination. By ‘mythology’ I mean those guiding stories that provide meaning and direction to the lives of all who follow them, including the men’s rights story, and the feminist story. While myth may or may not be scientifically true, it is true in the sense that people actively believe in myths and act them out in their daily lives.

In his 4-volume work¹ surveying the history of world mythologies, Joseph Campbell gives a snapshot of the evolving history of mythology from the earliest days of ‘Master Bear god’ painted on cave walls, until the present day.

Campbell demonstrates that, over and over, dominant mythologies get replaced or absorbed by newer mythologies, and such changeability appears to be the only constant in the long sweep of history. There were periods of mythological stability in all cultures, but without exception every traditional mythology was modified or replaced as forces within the culture reached critical mass.

Catalysts for myth revisions are numerous, with examples being foreign invaders who overrun a traditional culture and implant their own mythology, or alternatively it may happen that a new mythology lurking in the back waters of a culture begins to gain grassroots appreciation, leading eventually to its ascendancy and a concomitant decline of the previous mythological setup.  By yet another route the change in mythology may be instituted by a ruler who adopts a new religious belief and then mandates it as the official belief of the masses, examples being;

• Indian King Ashoka promoted Buddhist mythology across ancient Asia;
• Emperor Constantine promoted the Christian story as religion of the Roman Empire;
• Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine and her daughter crafted the mythos of romantic love and chivalry which was disseminated throughout Europe and the world.

In some situations the dominant myths did not give way to a revision for a considerable time, usually because there wasn’t a compelling mythology jostling to replace it. Even when the prevailing mythology has become somewhat stale and uninspiring, the human mind will not reject it in favor of a story vacuum: to be without some kind of guiding mythology leads the human mind into an existential paralysis, and for the most part nature refuses to tolerate such a void.

Now lets consider all of this in the light of feminism, a movement crafted from florid imaginings of the mythic imagination. To get to the heart of this myth we need to start at the medieval beginnings of those accreted layers of story that constitute the end product we know as modern feminism.

In his volume Creative Mythology,² Campbell documents how stories of chivalry and romantic love during the Middle Ages formed a new mythology that not only competed with the Christian religion for social legitimacy, but eventually surpassed it in cultural importance. Today romantic love saturates popular media, song, cinema, dance and the arts, and is the number one selling genre of literature, outselling the books of traditional religion, ie., the Qu’ran, Bible, Vedas, Bhagavad Gita, Tipitaka, Tao Te Ching and so on. Romantic love is, as Campbell states, the world’s current leading mythos.

So what does all this have to do with men’s rights and feminism?

Well, everything.

Feminists freely admit that chivalry and romantic love form ground zero of the feminist enterprise, constituting something of a Genesis Story of women’s improved social position, pedestalization and ongoing increases in power. As told by feminist Dr. Elizabeth Reid Boyd of the School of Psychology and Social Science at Edith Cowan University, romance writings can be called the “first form of feminism”:

“I muse upon arguments that romance is a form of feminism. Going back to its history in the Middle Ages and its invention by noblewomen who created the notion of courtly love, examining its contemporary popular explosion and the concurrent rise of popular romance studies in the academy that has emerged in the wake of women’s studies, and positing an empowering female future for the genre, I propose that reading and writing romantic fiction is not only personal escapism, but also political activism.

Romance has a feminist past that belies its ostensible frivolity. Romance, as most true romantics know, began in medieval times… Love songs and stories, like those of Lancelot and Guinevere, Tristan and Isolde, were soon on the lips of troubadours and minstrels all over Europe. Romance spread rapidly. It has been called the first form of feminism.”³

Reid Boyd, like so many other feminists before her, makes clear that romantic-love mythology provides bedrock for the development of feminism. Faced with that fantastical adversary, men’s advocates can argue they have excellent data demonstrating a growing narcissism among women and a neglect of men, facts that should lead right-thinking people away from the grip of feminism. However, those facts are only in the beginning stages of being woven into a story, one that might, in time, become an epic like the Bible or Mahabharata.

Axiom: ONLY STORY CAN DISPLACE OR ABSORB OTHER STORIES.

Facts be damned.

Until a new mythology rises to challenge the hegemony of feminist myth, non-gynocentric men are destined to wander the planet like lost souls in search of a place to call home.  For many men, the dominant mythology of our time has erased our story, and with it our existence in the world. Campbell talks to this problem when he declared “Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths,” concluding that when your personal understanding of life doesn’t align with the dominant public myth, your path in life will be painful:

“If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of the society, you are in good accord with your group. If it isn’t, you’ve got a long adventure in the dark forest ahead of you.”⁴

While that sums up the experience of red-pill men today, all is not lost. A growing number of voices have declared the mythology of feminism overripe for change, that it is rotting to the core as a guide to civilization, and there are in fact compelling stories poised to replace it. Before we look at alternative stories that have potential to help men and women live more harmoniously, lets first survey how the feminist mythos coincides with other mythological traditions.

As with the great civilization-building and sustaining mythologies of the past, feminism has narrated; 1. an Eden story of how ancient men and women co-existed and organized their society; 2. a fall from grace, 3. a set of laws to guide humans away from their fallen ways, and 4. liberation and future utopia.

Each of these four elements, which could be expanded to dozens more, appear in feminist mythology as follows:

1. Once upon a time, much of European society was matriarchal, peace-loving, agrarian, and Goddess worshiping, with men serving as the labor force.^5,6
2. Patriarchal tribes from the North invaded and suppressed this idyllic Eden, supplanting it with a hierarchical, patriarchal, and woman-oppressing culture.^5,6
3. Proto-feminists of the Middle Ages, followed by modern feminists, rebelled and challenged the grip of ‘the patriarchy’ and its institutions to allow women out of the wilderness and into the center of society. They created romantic love, and instituted laws, one by one, that would not only give women equal power to men, but would “compensate” women for previous losses of power.
4. Women would once again rule, as a female aristocracy, with men learning to be obedient, loving and dutiful servants, inaugurating a golden age.⁷

While these beliefs sound fanciful to the rational mind, they are documented and widely believed myths underpinning the feminist movement. With the enormous currency of feminist mythology in modern society, it constitutes ‘the story’ that we are all, to some extent, ‘in.’

Indeed there’s no outside of mythological perspectives — culturally we are all living inside them in one way or another. Those of us with a bent for factual accuracy prefer to align with stories that are truer to science, with narratives that are compatible with the facts without departing from them as myths often do. But whether we enjoy them, or rail against them as childish fantasies, the fact is that mythologies full of kooky flat-earth ideas have guided civilizations for millennia without being based on facts at all, and yet the societies they governed continued to flourish regardless.

Mythologies clearly don’t need to be factually correct to guide societies. They need only provide a shared operating system that glues people’s otherwise separate minds into one harmonious whole.

Those of us with a penchant for scientific fact can hope that a new mythology incorporates more factual data than the flat-earth science of the current gynocentric mythos — one eminently more suited to the scientific age in which we live, and one that many more people could believe in.

To prepare ourselves for inevitable new mythologies, it helps to first become aware of the dominant myths already governing our society. And as Gianni Vattimo once advised, the post-modern paradox of social-mythology is to wake up and realize that we have been dreaming, and yet continue dreaming anyway;⁷ ie. we realize we still need stories to live by but we can consciously choose the guiding narratives we wish to align with instead of going along with them unconsciously.

As men’s rights advocates, that raises questions about our own ‘mythologies.’ What are they? Have we sufficiently developed and articulated them? In light of the four elements of religious mythology listed above, lets list a rudimentary, rough sketch of the MR story to date. Before I do that, I hasten to add that this sketch is not prescriptive and may be at odds with narratives already held by devout Christian, Muslim, or XYZ-believing MRAs. However this mythological sequence focuses solely on the gender relations problem as it has been articulated by many MRAs today:

1. A ‘Genesis story’ for today can rest on any of the familiar ones offered by traditional religions: Christian, Muslim, Jewish (same root story), Hindu, Celtic, Germanic, Mayan, you name it.  To that catalogue we can add the now popular story of human evolution, a compelling narrative about our remote past and how humans clawed thier way out of the jungle to eventually build the wonders of modern science and civilization. This story comes with scientific conjectures about human biology in action – of how early men and women displayed different sexual and survival strategies, and how human offspring were protected due to biological imperatives. Its a story of cooperation between men and women as they dreamed the human adventure forward. Any and all of these Genesis stories underline ‘team family’ and the need for cooperative toil.
2. Regardless of which creation story is preferred, a ‘fall’ took place as the delicate equilibrium between men and women was unraveled by the arrival of the new gender relations mythology called romantic gynocentrism, which arose in the Middle Ages. This period marked the moment of men’s capture within a sexual relations template designed to tilt maximum power to women, with men slaving for them as Moses did for the Egyptians, and this belief system presided over the destruction of the delicate family unit.
3. Over the centuries men (and women) of iron will and good conscience mounted a resistance to gynocentrism and a desire for Exodus – to wanting to walk away from the dictates of gynocentric-feminism as free men;
4. Finally, men and women began to live the GOOD NEWS of the MR Testament: liberty, equality of opportunity, compassion and multi-options for all – this time including men.

These four sub-narratives form a larger corpus that we might call a mythology, one that would improve on the current toxic mythos of feminism. As mentioned it is given for illustrative purposes only and is not prescriptive; any new mythology will arise organically like a nighttime dream and flourish within the culture, and like dreams we never know when it will arrive or exactly what shape it will take. But the dream, the myth, will arrive…. of that we can be sure.

If we continue to expand this collection of stories, elaborating them in greater depth, continuing to tell them, and telling them again, more compelling with each recitation, then just maybe our society will have a necessary stone to jump to.

References:

[1] Joseph Campbell, Masks of God (4 volume series) (1959 – 1968)
[2] Joseph Campbell, Creative Mythology, volume 4 of Masks of God series (1968)
— Occidental Mythology, volume 3 of Masks of God series (1959)
— Transformations of Myth Through Time, (1988)
[3] Elizabeth Reid Boyd, Romancing feminism: From women’s studies to women’s fiction (2014)
[4] Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth (1988)
[5] Cynthia Eller, The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why an Invented Past Won’t Give Women a Future, (2001)
[6] Lucy Goodison, Ancient Goddesses, (1999)
[7] Peter Wright, A new Aristocracy, published at gynocentrism.com, (2018)
[8] Richard Kearney, Poetics of Imagining: Modern to Post-modern (1998)

“The long march through the institutions is complete and
feminists now occupy pivotal positions of power and decision-making
throughout the world.”

Despite being a feminist-friendly book with some of the usual agitprop, Governance Feminism: An Introduction caught my eye because I have never seen an overt discussion of feminist institutional power by a feminist. It’s a topic classified taboo for academics and authors despite the effects of that power being experienced by peoples around the planet daily .

The book intrigued and perhaps even excited me for the prospect that a veil of denial and secrecy surrounding feminist power might be perforated for the first time.

The four authors of the work dubbed their topic Governance Feminism (GF), by which they mean “every form in which feminists and feminist ideas exert a governing will within human affairs.” This definition follows Michel Foucault’s definition of governmentality in which feminists and feminist ideas “conduct the conduct of men.” Governance Feminism is proposed as a new phrase, but it deserves mentioning that MRAs have been using the synonymous phrase ‘Feminist Governance’ for many years.

The work looks at feminist infiltration into positions of institutional and cultural power – the long march through the institutions that so many of us have been monitoring. Feminists have infiltrated the UN, World Bank, International Criminal Court, every layer of national governments, and further into universities, schools, NGO volunteer orgs, and in HR departments at most medium to large scale workplaces. Not to mention Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and other social media platforms where most of the world’s people communicate with each other. We would not be off base to say that feminist gatekeeping now regulates much of the planet, from top to bottom. They are everywhere.

But of course when questioned about holding such positions of power, feminists are quick to remind us that they still work for the “oppressed” sex and are thus justified in using positions of power to correct global imbalances. Ironically feminists consider power per se to be bad, a judgment rendering any admission of their own institutional power regulated by a strict taboo – for such an admission is akin to a Catholic nun who undertook vows of chastity, and being faced with admitting she is now in a sexual relationship. The authors tell:

The first and most persistent form of resistance we have encountered is based on an idea that governance is per se bad, often expressed as an understanding that our describing governance feminism is identical with denouncing it. We do not think it is a gotcha to say that feminism rules.”

The lead author Janet Halley admits elsewhere to being an occasional feminist – in other words a feminist if/when the need arises. Nevertheless her adoption of utopic feminist narratives is apparent throughout the pages, as for example when she characterizes feminism, and more specifically Governance Feminism as an “emancipatory project”:

Feminism is by aspiration an emancipatory project, and GF is one kind of feminists’ effort to discover pathways to human emancipation. In the process, GFeminists have been, in some cases, highly successful in changing laws, institutions, and practices, very often remarkably for the better. Just scan the canonical first-wave manifesto for change, the 1848 Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments,[4] for once-impossible, now well-established changes in the legal status of U.S. women: the right to vote; the rights of married women to form contracts, to sue and be sued, to acquire and manage separate property, to select their place of residence, to be criminally and civilly responsible for their own actions, to seek a divorce and to seek child custody on formally equal footing with husbands and fathers, and other powers formerly denied to them by coverture; to formally equal access to paid employment; to formally equal  access to “wealth and distinction”[5] and to the professions; and to access to education.

These are all basic elements of a liberal feminist agenda for women. Women have devoted entire lifetimes to achieving them. None of them came easily. They are not complete emancipation, surely. But compared with lack of all franchise, coverture, and categorical exclusion from the public sphere and all but the most grinding and ill-paid work, they are immense achievements attributable almost entirely to GFeminist efforts. One reason to describe GF is to be clear about its immense emancipatory achievements.

I can hear the reader’s objections now, that Halley’s overview of three waves of feminism as ‘emancipatory’ is a laughable gloss over the violence, censorship and tyranny perpetrated throughout that history. No doubt Halley is here giving a mandatory nod to the narratives of her more powerful “sisters” in order to avoid a backlash.

Framing feminist aspirations as emancipatory, and not as an urge-to-power by ruthless gender-ideologues, softens the tyrannical use of power, painting instead a soothing pastel picture. Said more directly, feminist use of power has to most observers been far more tyrannical and destructive than this glowing characterization reveals. With that in mind the authors might equally have characterized Governance Feminism as unadulterated power-seeking (ultimately for women) and been more on point.

To be fair the authors do go on to tackle some of the excesses of Governance Feminism after their apparently mandatory hand kissing of feminist theorists, and this deeper critique is where the true value of this book lies. The authors admit that many feminist visions of “emancipation” have been left at the station when various governance trains took off, confirming that the ‘“selective engagement” of feminist ideas into governmental power has left some diamonds in the dust.’

Further, they state;

In our view it has also done some damage: some governance feminist projects strike us as terrible mistakes; others have unintended consequences that are or should be contested within feminist political life. As some Governance Feminist projects become part of established governance, we find ourselves worrying about them more, or differently, than we did when they were unorthodox, “outsider” ideas. We are, therefore, inviting a robust discussion within feminism and between feminism and its emancipatory allies about which elements are emancipatory and which may, after all, be mistakes. [italics mine]

The authors go on to critique a number of these ‘mistakes,’ while remaining at times uncritical about assumed feminist successes. As touched on above, Governance Feminists also go to great lengths to hide their grasp on power, while taking every opportunity to exaggerate and demonize male uses of power:

Gender mainstreaming has located feminists in many organizations, from the UN to college administrations, almost always as bureaucrats. Here they wield not judicial power, not the sword of punishment, but the more fine-grained power of administration. Gender mainstreaming, which aims to universalize feminist ideas in governance and convert every governmental entity into a branch of Governance Feminism, paradoxically produces gender specialists.”

For most readers this quote encapsulates the danger of feminist power. Feminist ideologues have been inserted into every institution around the globe as gatekeepers dictating who does/doesn’t get employed, get assisted, financed, approved, credentialed, included, heard and so on. It can even descend to who gets food aid, who gets to rent a house in a scarce rental market, or who gets a job as a cleaner.

As an example, Jordan Peterson recently talked about HR departments at workplaces serving as foci for the feminist social manipulations. This development is insidious because the practice is hidden in supposedly menial bureaucratic positions, ones that just happen to wield pivotal power over the work-lives of citizens and the associated family outcomes – not to mention the outcome of amplifying gendered expectations and conventions that inevitably get instituted culture-wide through this process of rewarding or punishing via biased bureaucratic decisions. With this in mind it’s no exaggeration to call feminists social engineers who have succeeded in running the world.

Beyonce? ‘Who run the world: girls’

Some years ago I read a paper on the topic of “administrative discretion” which refers to the flexible exercising of decision-making allowed to public administrators. The discretionary opportunity is made available by the wiggle-room in the bureaucrat’s code of practice, and she or he uses that to deliver preferred – and often unfair – outcomes. The use of administrative discretion typifies the modus operandi of Governance Feminism, which is utilized to implement a radical feminist ideological agenda through all levels of society. Feminism-inspired women are increasingly dominating HR roles, and as revealed by teacher-preferencing biases in elementary schools they are exploiting administrative discretion to favor females over males.

Janet Halley lays much of the blame for the failures of Governance Feminism at the feet of two forms of feminism that form an operational alliance: Power Feminism (PF) and Cultural Feminism (CF). The book provides a useful overview of both, stating that they have formed an unholy alliance that came to dominate the internal battle for supremacy between different ‘feminisms.’  Power and cultural feminism meld into each other or appear side by side, writes Halley, and together they are frequently dubbed Dominance Feminism. She adds that Dominance Feminism finds male domination in two distinct forms: in the false superiority of male values and male culture, and in the domination of all things Female by all things Male:

American dominance feminism is a top-down, bottom-up model of M/F relations: there are perpetrators (men) and victims (women); people with an individualist ethic (men) and people with an ethic of care (women); people feminists advocate for (women) and people they accuse (men). This model of right and wrong is highly assimilable to criminal law and tort law frameworks. Thus the very visible elements of Governance Feminism that use the penal powers of the state to “end” sexual violence in all its forms are saturated with dominance feminist ideas. Especially where power feminism makes its influence felt, it makes sexuality the core of the problem: dominance feminist thinking places sexual wrongs front and center, and assimilates other seemingly nonsexual wrongs to sexual ones.

This is, we think, a manifestly narrow, crabbed, and even paranoid view of the gender order in the United States, and it is hospitable to quite ethnocentric, neocolonial construals of the gender order prevailing in the global South. It is remarkably indifferent to distributional consequences. Why does it play such a large role in Governance Feminism today?”

In Chapter 3.  Halley discusses Governance Feminists’ need to reflect on generating, owning, and critiquing their own governance power, which as mentioned above is hamstrung by feminism’s denouncement of power structures combined with its own denials about both possessing and wielding real power.

When the authors first encouraged the sustained study of Governance Feminism in 2006, some feminists told them that “they simply did not understand how marginal and fragile feminist gains in state and near-state power really were… If some feminist ideas and interests had managed to find their way into law, these were crumbs from the table, compromises with patriarchy on patriarchy’s terms not worthy of the name “feminist,” tiny fragments of the full feminist agenda, which was not merely to ride along on the back of power but to transform it.”

Such a response is breathtaking in its denial, and I would add predictable, leading the authors to assert that not only do feminists hold such world-changing power, they need also to ethically critique their use of it:

We think such acts of public critique are absolutely essential now that feminists and feminist ideas are so firmly embedded in legal institutions and legal power.[25] But they can be costly: insider-insiders often feel compelled to attack any feminist who does it, at the very least by depriving her of her insider credentials and her insider job and at the very most by marshaling major institutional resources to discredit her and her ideas, defund her projects, and leave her constituents out in the cold.”

In the final chapter Halley implores Governance Feminists to develop an ethic of responsibility; to both admit to the power they preside over, assess its impact both negative and positive, and own the outcome. This lofty appeal is frankly laughable when considering the ideological agendas and unethical practices that Dominance Feminists are known for. Asking them to take a more ethical approach is as likely of success as asking Mao Zedong to develop an ethic of individual liberty and a policy of free-market capitalism.

Antifeminists around the world have a very different suggestion to that of going hat in hand imploring Dominance Feminists to show more ethical and considerate behavior. Their alternative is to shine a harsh light on the moral corruption of feminist ideologues, and work to neutralize their destructive programs via effective counter-activism. The antifeminist counter-movement is in full career and I’m certain that Governance Feminists around the world are already feeling the heat. Halley’s book contributes to that insurgency move, perhaps unwittingly, by demonstrating just how much power these ideologues have been wielding. The book is therefore useful in that it speaks the unspeakable… the cat is finally out of the bag.

The authors conclude by mentioning a second volume is in process titled Governance Feminism: Notes from the Field, which will provide case studies describing and assessing national, international, and transnational Governance Feminist projects by a range of feminists engaged in building them. No longer operating in the shadows, Governance Feminists are now being scrutinized in broad daylight…. and with that move they will have a lot of explaining to do for their transgressions.

There’s some confusion around the word gynocentrism and it’s meaning, so this piece will explore a little discussed part of the term: -centrism. This suffix makes a restrictive demand, i.e., that women are most important interest we might hold.

The Cambridge dictionary describes centrism the following way:

CENTRISM: The fact of having a particular type of person, place, or thing as your most important interest; the quality of being seen from the point of view of a particular type of person, place, or thing:

• The Academy has been accused of Eurocentrism and gender bias.
• The artist’s newest ventures embody his commitment to ecocentrism

Gynocentrism implies that our focus on the needs and wants of woman is the most important consideration; whether such focus be contained to a brief moment in time, or as applied to the entire duration of human relationships.

For example, when we celebrate Mother’s Day we can legitimately name this brief, isolated act as gyno-centric. Or for a more dramatic illustration of a brief gynocentric event, consider the scenario of a man taking on a knife-wielding maniac who is threatening to hurt his pregnant wife, while the wife retreats and does not help the husband during the fight; in this case the actions of both husband (protecting his wife) and wife (protecting herself) are rightly defined as gyno-centric.¹

Alternatively if we consider the overall relationship between the same husband and wife we might ask a new question – is the entire relationship a gyno-centric one? If that husband and wife take turns supporting each other across the duration of their relationship, then the relationship might be rightly referred to as “couple centered” — because by definition a gyno-centric relationship centers exclusively around the woman and her needs and wants. As soon as you have genuine reciprocity in a relationship, one that involves a couple-centric dynamic based on commensurate importance, the relationship can no longer be considered gynocentric.

Employing the word gynocentrism to discuss reciprocal exchanges between men and women, where women are occasional beneficiaries in certain ways, and men are beneficiaries in certain ways, is an erroneous use of the term because such exchanges, strictly speaking, do not constitute a gender centrism across the duration of the relationship – ie. its not a gyno-centric relationship.

While there can be gynocentric elements in relationships, they are historically balanced out by other elements like family-centrism, andro-centrism, child-centrism, pairbonding-centrism, or tribe-centrism. The theory that human relationships are evolutionarily gyno-centric is an exaggeration and a piece of sappy modern propaganda that even some men’s advocates fall prey to.

NOTE:

[1] After writing this essay in 2019, I’ve since become aware of Hanna Wallen’s thesis of the ‘Natural Gynocentrism Fallacy‘ which posits that even isolated, brief acts that I have described above as “gynocentric” are more accurately described as gene-centric, or family-centric behaviours. I agree with Hanna’s proposition.

Women, like ALL family members throughout evolutionary history, needed protection in order to be part of a strong, viable family team.  But that isn’t called gynocentrism; it’s called storge (the Greek word for ‘family love’). All family members were protected – as indicated in my recent poll below.

Men, too, were protected if they were injured, old, sick etc. Protection & provision was always based on the shifting needs of various family members…. whoever had the most immediate need, was catered to and cared for.

The notion of Christianity as a ‘patriarchal religion’ might need a rethink in the light of the Virgin Mary’s culture-power and her ongoing influence on how we conceptualize women. I’m reminded of an interview with Joseph Campbell¹ (perhaps the most famous expert on religions) who suggested Mary became a paramount influence from the medieval culture scheme forward. Here’s a snippet of the interview:

MOYERS: There are women today who say that the spirit of the Goddess has been in exile for five thousand years, since the…. 

CAMPBELL: You can’t put it that far back, five thousand years. She was a very potent figure in Hellenistic times in the Mediterranean, and she came back with the Virgin in the Roman Catholic tradition. You don’t have a tradition with the Goddess celebrated any more beautifully and marvelously than in the twelfth- and thirteenth-century French cathedrals, every one of which is called Notre Dame.

MOYERS: Yes, but all of those motifs and themes were controlled by males — priests, bishops — who excluded women, so whatever the form might have meant to the believer, for the purpose of power the image was in the hands of the dominant male figure.

CAMPBELL: You can put an accent on it that way, but I think it’s a little too strong because there were the great female saints. Hildegarde of Bingen — she was a match for Innocent III. And Eleanor of Aquitaine — I don’t think there is anybody in the Middle Ages who has the stature to match hers. One now can look back and quarrel with the whole situation, but the situation of women was not that bad by any means.

MOYERS: No, but none of those saints would ever become pope.

CAMPBELL: Becoming pope, that’s not much of a job, really. That’s a business position. None of the popes could ever have become the mother of Christ. There are different roles to play. It was the male’s job to protect the women.

[1] Joseph Campbell in discussion with Bill Moyers: The Power of Myth

See Also:
– Mariolatry and Gyneolatry
– Auguste Comte’s Cult of Woman