Down the aisle again on the marriage question: Is it still relevant?

May 18, 2015April 29, 2024 / Peter Wright / Leave a comment

Once again I find myself walking into the murky waters of marriage, not in real life but in print… praise angels. I recently had a conversation about marriage with August Løvenskiolds which unearthed some alternative ways of looking at it. On several points our understanding aligned, and on others they diverged. So rather than rely on August’s perspective alone, I’d like to lay down my own thoughts.

The conversation was partly stimulated by a comment I made elsewhere, which we decided to unpack – and here I hope to unpack it further in this article (quote):

Aside from those differences over origins, both sides agree that gynocentric marriage – its culture, customs, laws, taboos – must be utterly abandoned, not reformed. Notice here I refer to gynocentric marriage and not to a marriage of the minds, hearts, dreams, goals, projects, and bodies that might come with non-gynocentric relationships.

The contention of this paragraph is, hypothetically speaking, that a marriage can be based on different priorities than those of gynocentrism. But before getting further into this idea lets start with the widest definition of marriage from the Oxford Dictionary, which is:

“any intimate association or union”

This definition covers pretty much all unions in which two or more things are brought together – whether in physics, biology, linguistics, or culture. In the case of this article we are referring to human unions, and while some of the accompanying customs and behavior go well beyond this basic Oxford definition, they each conform to this minimum requirement in order to satisfy for the label marriage.

There are two main orders of human union to consider: 1. culturally prescribed marriage customs, vs. 2. the unadorned biological demand for intimate association.

During our discussion, and also in his recent article on this topic, August proposed several combinations of words (portmanteaus) to describe many different kinds of marriage. For the sake of simplicity I’m only going to tackle the two primary terms he covered which are Gynomarriage, and Biomarriage.

Gynomarriage

Gynomarriage, (portmanteau of gynocentrism + marriage) describes the typical union between men and women today. It is based on the culturally prescribed roles of female superiority served by male-chivalry, a combination otherwise referred to as romantic love. This is the modern basis for marriage.

During the time this marriage has existed, laws have evolved to buttress and enforce the gynocentric version, laws tilted almost exclusively to favor wives both during the marriage, and especially in the case of its downfall.

As a social construct gynomarriage has not been around forever, with other periods in history generating different forms of marriage as was outlined by August. During the last 800 years however, and ongoing today, gynomarriage has ruled- so that’s what we’ll concern ourselves with in the rest of this article. To better understand it let’s contrast it with another, far more important ‘marriage’ that remains relevant today:

Biomarriage

Biomarriage (biology + marriage) is a very different idea involving not cultural constructs, but biological necessities built into our DNA. The ‘marriage’ urged by biology is based on three factors: sexual pleasure; intimate bonding/attachment; and reproduction with the concomitant parenting instinct.

Each of these imperatives has operated since our remote hominid past and will continue to compel our behavior for long after gynocentric culture ceases to exist. Like gynomarriage, biomarriage takes place between two adults, but in this case has done so for literally millions of years (and not just a few hundred years as in the case of gynomarriages).

Most of what I have described here is mediated by what the Greeks called storge, which is a feeling of affection that arises during intimate associations or unions which tends to strengthen over time.

I’ll spend the remainder of this piece talking about biomarriage because gynomarriage belongs, as any men’s advocate worth the name will tell you, in the scrap bin of history. People can easily get by without it, but the same cannot be said about biomarriage because the compulsion for human bonding, affection, and sexual desires are far too powerful to ignore.

Some MGTOW refuse to consider even a biomarriage with a woman, which is a serious but otherwise understandable choice to make in an environment that exposes men to being savaged by the in-creep of gynocentric exploitation.

However, if a man refuses the possibility of a non-gynocentric relationship with a woman, then what’s required is, at bare minimum, alternative avenues for expressing his biological imperative. He can satisfy sexual needs with porn, with fantasy, prostitutes, fleshlights or fuck-buddies. Likewise, he can satisfy his needs for affection and attachment with close friends, family, or perhaps with a dog or some other pet. He can satisfy parental desires via fathering, if the urge is there, any young among us — teaching school children, working in a daycare center, caring for the disabled, mentoring a fatherless child, coaching little league, looking after orphaned animals, or again buying a puppy.

Are these replacement measures enough? Yes, they meet the minimum standard for maintaining physical and emotional stability. But it requires a strong understanding of one’s biological needs, an awareness, and a willingness to work hard on meeting those needs. Rather than satisfying our biological needs via “an intimate association or union” we can use a bricolage of band-aids to ensure our biological and psychological health remains intact.

Summary

So while you may legitimately think you can reject, nay should reject gynomarriage, it’s not wise to reject the elements I’ve detailed under the heading biomarriage unless you want to risk your health, and life.

We need to realize that while history has been full of amazing men who never married and eschewed relationships with women (and no man should be shamed for taking this course), it also pays to remind men that choosing isolation from affection and intimate bonds has a cost, and shouldn’t be viewed as something trivial to do to yourself. Loneliness can lead to depression, anxiety, paranoia, suicide and must be protected against. Most people can probably do it, but they’ll need more than video games and YouTube in the long run to pull it off. It’s going to involve things like meditation, consciously working to both acknowledge your urges, and to cater to them in creative ways.

We can employ alternatives to satisfy our biological urges, but we might also revisit the question of whether there’s a way to conduct a biomarriage with a real flesh-n-blood human being minus the gynocentrism; you could perhaps think of it as a relationship based on the biological necessities of human being. I’d like to think that’s still possible, if not now then sometime in the future when both the government and gynocentrism are no longer part of the deal.

Chimpanzees regularly kiss and groom each other as part of an instinctual process of bonding

Feature image by Phoenix Comicon

The gynæcocentric theory, by Lester Ward (1903)

May 6, 2015June 26, 2023 / Peter Wright / 1 Comment

Lester F. Ward (1841 – 1913) was among the first to champion a biological theory of gynocentrism. Ward is now considered a feminist writer by historians such as Ann Taylor Allen.¹ The following is an excerpt from his longer work entitled Pure Sociology, published in 1903. – PW

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The gynæcocentric theory

The gynæcocentric theory is the view that the female sex is primary and the male secondary in the organic scheme, that originally and normally all things center, as it were, about the female, and that the male, though not necessary in carrying out the scheme, was developed under the operation of the principle of advantage to secure organic progress through the crossing of strains. The theory further claims that the apparent male superiority in the human race and in certain of the higher animals and birds is the result of specialization in extra-normal directions due to adventitious causes which have nothing to do with the general scheme, but which can be explained on biological and psychological principles; that it only applies to certain characters, and to a relatively small number of genera and families. It accounts for the prevalence of the androcentric theory by the superficial character of human knowledge of such subjects, chiefly influenced by the illusion of the near, but largely, in the case of man at least, by tradition, convention, and prejudice.

History of the Theory

As this theory is not only new but novel, and perhaps somewhat startling, it seems proper to give a brief account of its inception and history, if it can be said to have such. As the theory, so far as I have ever heard, is wholly my own, no one else having proposed or even defended it, scarcely any one accepting it, and no one certainly coveting it, it would be folly for me to pretend indifference to it. At the same time it must rest on facts that cannot be disputed, and the question of its acceptance or rejection must become one of interpreting the facts.

In the year 1888 there existed in Washington what was called the Six o’clock Club, which consisted of a dinner at a hotel followed by speeches by the members of the Club according to a programme. The Fourteenth Dinner of the Club took place on April 26, 1888, at Willard’s Hotel. It was known to the managers that certain distinguished women would be in Washington on that day, and they were invited to the Club. Among these were Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Miss Phoebe Couzins, Mrs. Croly (Jennie June), Mrs. N. P. Willis, and a number of others equally well known. On their account the subject of Sex Equality was selected for discussion, and I was appointed to open the debate. Although in a humorous vein, I set forth the greater part of the principles and many of the facts of what I now call the gynæcocentric theory.

Professor C. V. Riley was present and, I think, took part in the discussion. Many of my facts were drawn from insect life, and especially interested him. I mention this because a long time afterward he brought me a newspaper clipping from the Household Companion for June, 1888, containing a brief report of my remarks copied from the St. Louis Globe, but crediting them to him; and he apologized for its appearance saying that he could not explain the mistake. The reporter had fairly seized the salient points of the theory and presented them in a manner to which I could not object. This, therefore, was the first time the theory can be said to have been stated in print. The exact date at which it appeared in the Globe I have not yet learned, but presume it was shortly after the meeting of the Club. Professor Riley did not hesitate to announce himself a convert to the theory, and we often discussed it together.

I had long been reflecting along this line, and these events only heightened my interest in the subject. The editor of the Forum had solicited an article from me, and I decided to devote it to a popular but serious presentation of the idea. The result was my article entitled, “Our Better Halves.” ³ That article, therefore, constitutes the first authorized statement of the gynæcocentric theory that was published, and as a matter of fact it is almost the only one. Mr. Grant Allen answered my argument on certain points in the same magazine,⁴ and I was asked to put in a rejoinder, which I did,⁵ but these discussions related chiefly to certain differences between the mind of man and woman and did not deal with the question of origin. I alluded to it in my first presidential address before the Biological Society of Washington,⁶ and it came up several times in writing the “Psychic Factors” (Chapters XIV, XXVI).

Such is the exceedingly brief history of the gynæcocentric theory, and if it is entirely personal to myself, this is no fault of mine. Nothing pleases me more than to see in the writings of others any intimation, however vague and obscure, that the principle has been perceived, and I have faithfully searched for such indications and noted all I have seen. The idea has not wholly escaped the human mind, but it is never presented in any systematic way. It is only occasionally shadowed forth in connection with certain specific facts that call forth some passing reflection looking in this general direction. In introducing a few of these adumbrations I omit the facts, which will be considered under the several heads into which the subject will naturally fall, and confine myself for the most part to the reflections to which they have given rise. Many of these latter, however, are of a very general character, and not based on specific facts. In fact thus far the theory has had rather the form of a prophetic idea than of a scientific hypothesis.

We may begin as far back as Condorcet, who brushed aside the conventional error that intellect and the power of abstract reasoning are the only marks of superiority and caught a glimpse of the truth that lies below them when he said: –

If we try to compare the moral energy of women with that of men, taking into consideration the necessary effect of the inequality with which the two sexes have been treated by laws, institutions, customs, and prejudices, and fix our attention on the numerous examples that they have furnished of contempt for death and suffering, of constancy in their resolutions and their convictions, of courage and intrepidity, and of greatness of mind, we shall see that we are far from having the proof of their alleged inferiority. Only through new observations can a trite light be shed upon the question of the natural inequality of the two sexes.⁷

Comte, as all know, changed his attitude toward women after his experiences with Clotilde de Vaux, but even in his “Positive Philosophy,” in which he declared them to be in a state of “perpetual infancy,” and of “fundamental inferiority,” be admitted that they had a “secondary superiority considered from the social point of view.”⁸ In his “Positive Polity” he expressed himself much more strongly, saying that the female sex “is certainly superior to ours in the most fundamental attribute of the human species, the tendency to make sociability prevail over personality.”⁹ He also says that “feminine supremacy becomes evident when we consider the spontaneous disposition of the affectionate sex (sexe aimant) always to further morality, the sole end of all our conceptions.”¹⁰

Of all modern writers the one most free from the androcentric bias, so far as I am aware, is Mr. Havelock Ellis. In his excellent book “Man and Woman,” be has pointed out many of the fallacies of that Weltanschauung, and without apparent leaning toward anything but the truth has placed woman in a far more favorable light than it is customary to view her. While usually confining himself to the facts, he occasionally indicates that their deeper meaning has not escaped him. Thus he says: “The female is the mother of the new generation, and has a closer and more permanent connection with the care of the young; she is thus of greater importance than the male from Nature’s point of view” (pp. 383-384). To him is also due, the complete refutation of the “arrested development” theory, above mentioned, by showing that the child, and the young generally, represent the most advanced type of development, while the adult male represents a reversion to an inferior early type, and this in man is a more bestial type.

In the sayings quoted thus far we have little more than opinions, or general philosophical tenets, of which it would be much easier to find passages with the opposite import. In fact statements of the androcentric theory are to be met with everywhere. Not only do philosophers and popular writers never tire of repeating its main propositions, but anthropologists and biologists will go out of their way to defend it while at the same time heaping up facts that really contradict it and strongly support the gynæcocentric theory. This is due entirely to the power of a predominant world view (Weltanschauung). The androcentric theory is such a world view that is deeply stamped upon the popular mind, and the history of human thought has demonstrated many times that scarcely any number of facts opposed to such a world view can shake it. It amounts to a social structure and has the attribute of stability in common with other social structures. Only occasionally will a thinking investigator pause to consider the true import of the facts he is himself bringing to light.

Bachofen, McLennan, Morgan, and the other ethnologists who have contributed to our knowledge of the remarkable institution or historic phase called the matriarchate, all stop short of stating the full significance of these phenomena, and the facts of amazonism that are so often referred to as so many singular anomalies and reversals of the natural order of things, are never looked at philosophically as residual facts that must be explained even if they overthrow many current beliefs. Occasionally some one will take such facts seriously and dare to intimate a doubt as to the prevailing theory. Thus I find in Ratzenhofer’s work the following remark: –

It is probable that in the horde there existed a certain individual equality between man and woman; the results of our investigation leave it doubtful whether the man always had a superior position. There is much to indicate that the woman was the uniting element in the community; the mode of development of reproduction in the animal world and the latest investigations into the natural differences between man and woman give rise to the assumption that the woman of to-day is the atavistic product of the race, while the man varies more frequently and more widely. This view agrees perfectly with the nature of the social process, for in the horde, as the social form out of which the human race has developed, there existed an individual equality which has only been removed by social disturbances which chiefly concern the man.

All the secondary sexual differences in men are undoubtedly explained by the struggle for existence and the position of man in the community as conditioned thereby. Even the security of the horde from predatory animals, and still more the necessity of fighting with other men for the preservation of the group, developed individual superiority in general, both mental and physical, and especially in man. But any individual superiority disturbed the equality existing in the elements of the horde; woman from her sexual nature took only a passive part in these disturbances. The sexual life as well as the mode of subsistence no longer has its former peaceful character. Disturbances due to the demands of superior individuals thrive up to a certain point, beyond which the differentiation of the group into several takes place.¹¹

Among biologists the philosophical significance of residual facts opposed to current beliefs is still less frequently reflected upon. I have stated that Professor Riley fully accepted the view that I set forth and admitted that the facts of entomology sustained it, yet, although somewhat of a philosopher himself, and living in the midst of the facts, the idea had not previously occurred to him. Among botanists, Professor Mechan was the only one in whose writings I have found an adumbration of the gynæcocentric theory. He several times called attention to a certain form of female superiority in plants. In describing certain peculiarities in the Early Meadow Rue and comparing the development of the male and female flowers he observed differences due to sex. After describing the female flowers he says: –

By turning to the male flowers (Fig. 2) we see a much greater number of bracts or small leaves scattered through the panicle, and find the pedicels longer than in the female; and this shows a much slighter effort – a less expenditure of force – to be required in forming male than female flowers. A male flower, as we see clearly here, is an intermediate stage between a perfect leaf and a perfect, or we may say, a female flower. It seems as if there might be as much truth as poetry in the expression of Burns, –

Her ‘prentice han’ she tried on man,
An’ then she made the lasses, O,

— at least in so far as the flowers are concerned, and in the sense of a higher effort of vital power.¹²

It is singular, but suggestive that he should have quoted the lines from Burns in this connection, as they are an undoubted echo of the androcentric world view, a mere variation upon the Biblical myth of the rib. Of course he could find nothing on his side in the classic literature of the world, but wishing to embellish the idea in a popular work, he tried to make these somewhat ambiguous lines do duty in this capacity. The fact cited is only one of thousands that stand out clearly before the botanist, but not according with the accepted view of the relations of the sexes they are brushed aside as worthless anomalies and “exceptions that prove the rule.” In fact in all branches of biology the progress of truth has been greatly impeded by this spirit. All modern anatomists know how the facts that are now regarded as demonstrating the horizontal position of the ancestors of man, and in general those that establish the doctrine of evolution, were treated by the older students of the human body — rejected, ignored, and disliked, as intruders that interfered with their investigations. It is exactly so now with gynaecocentric facts, and we are probably in about the same position and stage with reference to the questions of sex as were the men of the eighteenth century with reference to the question of evolution. Indeed, the androcentric theory may be profitably compared with the geocentric theory, and the gynaecocentric with the heliocentric. The advancement of truth has always been in the direction of supplanting the superficial and apparent by the fundamental and real, and the gynaecocentric truth may be classed among the “paradoxes of nature.”

***

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

The further development of life serves to strengthen this gynæcocentric point of view. It consists, as we might say, exclusively in the history of the subsequent origin and development of the male sex. The female sex, which existed from the beginning, continues unchanged, but the male sex, which did not exist at the beginning, makes its appearance at a certain stage, and has a certain history and development, but never became universal, so but that, as already remarked, there are probably many more living beings without it than with it, even in the present life of the globe. The female is not only the primary and original sex but continues throughout as the main trunk, while to it a male element is afterward added for the purposes above explained. The male is therefore, as it were, a mere afterthought of nature. Moreover, the male sex was at first and for a long period, and still throughout many of the lower orders of beings, devoted exclusively to the function for which it was created, viz., that of fertilization. Among millions of humble creatures the male is simply and solely a fertilizer.

The simplest type of sexuality consists in the normal continuance of the original female form with the addition of an insignificant and inconspicuous male fertilizer, incapable of any other function. In sexual cells there is no character in which the differentiation goes so far as in that of size. The female or germ cell is always much larger than the male or sperm cell. In the human species, for example, an ovum is about 3000 times as large as a spermatozoon. In the parasitic Sphcerularia Bombi the female is a thousand or many thousand times the size of the male. The Cirripedia present remarkable examples of female superiority, or rather of the existence of minute male fertilizers in connection with normal development in the female. Darwin was perhaps the first to call attention to this fact in a letter to Sir Charles Lyell, dated Sept. 14, 1849, in which he said : —

The other day I got a curious case of a unisexual, instead of hermaphrodite cirripede, in which the female had the common cirripedial character, and in two valves of her shell had two little pockets, in each of which she kept a little husband ; I do not know of any other case where a female invariably has two husbands. I have one still odder fact, common to several species, namely, that though they are hermaphrodite, they have small additional, or as I shall call them, complemental males, one specimen, itself hermaphrodite, had no less than seven of these complemental males attached to it. Truly the schemes and wonders of Nature are illimitable.

Darwin’s observations have been abundantly confirmed by later investigators. Huxley asserts the parasitic nature of the male in certain cases, the male being attached to the female and living at her expense. Van Beneden, to practically the same effect, remarks
that “the whole family of the Abdominalia [cirripedes] have the sexes separate; and the males, comparatively very small, are attached to the body of each female.”

The phenomenon of minute parasitic males is not rare among the lower forms, and that their sole office is fertilization may be clearly seen from the following statement of Milne Edwards : ” It is to be noted that in some of these parasites [Ex. Diplozoon paradoxum, a nematode] the entire visceral cavity was occupied by the testicles, and that Mr. Darwin could not discover in it any trace of digestive organs.” Van Beneden also says that the males are reduced to the role of spermatophores : “The male of the Syngami (nematodes) is so far effaced that it is no longer anything but a testicle living on the female.” These of course are extreme cases, and the difference is less in most of the animal world, the reason for which will be shown later on. But the examples cited serve to show how sexuality began. Female superiority, however, of a more or less marked degree still prevails throughout the greater part of the invertebrates. It is perhaps greatest among the Arachnidae or spider family. The courtships of spiders are so often described in popular works that allusion to them almost calls for an apology. They are always regarded as astonishing anomalies in the animal world. While the behavior of the relatively gigantic female in seizing and devouring the tiny male fertilizer when he is only seeking to do the only duty that he exists for, may seem remarkable and even contrary to the interests of nature, the fact of the enormous difference between the female and the male, is, according to the gynaecocentric hypothesis, not anomalous at all, but perfectly natural and normal.

In the mantis or praying insect there is much less difference in size than in most spiders, but female superiority shows itself in the ferocity of the female, while the paramount importance of the act of fertilization is clear from the terrible risks that the male takes in securing it, usually resulting in his destruction. I give an example on the authority of one of the best known entomologists :—

A few days since I brought a male of Mantis Carolina to a friend who had been keeping a solitary female as a pet. Placing them in the same jar, the male, in alarm, endeavored to escape. In a few minutes the female succeeded in grasping him. She first bit off his left front tarsus, and consumed the tibia and femur. Next she gnawed out his left eye. At this the male seemed to realize his proximity to one of the opposite sex, and began vain endeavors to mate. The female next ate up his right front leg, and then entirely decapitated him, devouring his head and gnawing into his thorax. Not until she had eaten all of his thorax except about three millimeters did she atop to rest. All this while the male had continued his vain attempts to obtain entrance at the valvules, and he now succeeded, as she voluntarily spread the parts open, and union took place. She remained quiet for four hours, and the remnant of the male gave occasional signs of life by a movement of one of his remaining tarsi for three hours. The next morning she had entirely rid herself of her spouse, and nothing but his wings remained.

The extraordinary vitality of the species which permits a fragment of the male to perform the act of impregnation is necessary on account of the rapacity of the female, and it seems to be only by accident that a male ever escapes alive from the embraces of his partner.

Riley in his first monthly report, p. 151, says: “The female being the strongest and most voracious, the male, in making his advances, has to risk his life many times, and only succeeds in grasping her by slyly and suddenly surprising her ; and even then he frequently gets remorselessly devoured.”

In insects generally the males ai-e smaller than the females, especially in the imago state. It applies to the larvae to a less extent, but it is often marked even in the cocoons, as, for example, of the silk worm. There are many species, and even genera, belonging to different orders, in which the male, usually smaller and more slender, is either not provided with any functional organs for eating, or has these so imperfectly developed that it seems improbable that it succeeds in sustaining life beyond the period that the nourishment stored up in the larval state will continue it. This clearly shows that the sole function of such males is fertilization. Some of these cases come very close home to us, for example, the mosquito. Dr. Howard says:—

It is a well-known fact that the adult male mosquito does not necessarily take nourishment and that the adult female does not necessarily rely on the blood of warm-blooded animals. The mouth parts of the male are so different from those of the female that it is probable that if it feeds at all it obtains its food in a quite different manner from the female. They are often observed sipping at drops of water, and in one instance a fondness for molasses has been recorded.

Bees constitute another familiar example, the males being what are popularly known as the drones. Fertilization, as is well known, is almost their only role, and if they become at all numerous they are killed off by the workers (neutral females), and the hive is rid of them. But great differences between the sexes, always involving some form of female superiority, occur also in the Neuroptera, Lepidoptera, Orthoptera, and Coleoptera. In the other great types of invertebrates this is also true, but only the specialists are acquainted with the facts. Even in the lower vertebrates there are cases of female superiority. The smallest known vertebrate, Heterandria formosa Agassiz, has the females about twenty-five per cent larger than the males. Male fishes are commonly smaller than female. In trout this is well known, and trout fishermen sometimes throw the little males or ” studs,” as they call them, back into the stream, as not worth taking. Even in birds, which are the mainstay of the androcentric theory, there are some large families, as, for example, the hawks, in which male superiority is rare, and the female is usually the larger and finer bird. There are even some mammals in which the sexes do not differ appreciably in size or strength, and very little, or not at all, in coloration and adornment. Such is the case with nearly all of the great family of rodents. It is also the case with the Erinaceidae, at least with its typical subfamily of hedgehogs.

All that was said of the Protozoa applies equally to the Protophyta, and indeed in those unicellular forms the distinction between plant and animal is very obscure, Haeckel making a third kingdom of nature, the Protista, which is neither plant nor animal. But the evolution of the male sex in multicellular plants is somewhat different from that of the Metazoa. In dealing with such plants much depends on what we regard as constituting an individual. If we take the growing branch or phyton as the unit of individuality, it may perhaps be truly said that sexual differentiation is universal in the vegetable kingdom. But if we make the individual include all that proceeds from the same root and coheres in one organic system—the whole plant—then we have the following grades of sexuality : 1, hermaphroditism, in which both male and female organs occur in the same flower ; 2, monoecism, in which the flowers are either male or female, but both sexes occur on the same plant ; and 3, dioecism, in which every plant is either wholly male or wholly female. In the flowerless plants—thallophytes, bryophytes, pteridophytes, formerly known as cryptogams—the sexual cells are borne in a variety of ways, usually separated some distance from each other, often on different plants, but here there occurs in most cases a compound generation, consisting of a short-lived prothallium stage— the true sexual stage—succeeded by a sporebearing stage constituting the principal life of the plant. This peculiarity has no important bearing on the theory under consideration, and being too complicated to be explained without extensive illustration, it need not be dwelt upon here. An acquaintance with it belongs to a proper understanding of botany such as the student of sociology should have.

Confining our attention, then, to the flowering plants, we have to note first that the Cycadaceae and Ginkgoaceae form two apparently different transitions from the flowerless to the flowering plants, in that they are both fertilized by means of spermatozoids—active ciliated sperm cells— as in the case of flowerless plants generally, while, all the other families of flowering plants, so far as now known, have the entire prothallium stage effaced, abridged, or theoretically condensed into the development of the ovule and pollen grain. The discovery of this important distinction, which has revolutionized the classification of the vegetable kingdom, dates back only to 1896, and was made primarily by two Japanese botanists.

We have next to remark that hermaphroditism in plants is not the anomalous and almost pathologic condition known by that name in the animal world. It seems to have been the common initial state in flowering plants, and deviations from it seem to be the result of the universal struggle of nature to prevent self or close fertilization and to secure the widest possible separation of the sexes. This is, however, nothing but the continuation of the operation of the same principle by which sex itself was introduced. But if the other more scientific and correct view is taken as to what constitutes an individual, this is not hermaphroditism at all. It is simply the bringing of the sexes together in compact and somewhat symmetrically ordered groups, which, before the advent of nectarloving winged insects, was almost the only way in which fertilization could be brought about. Still, long strides were taken in this direction among the Gymnosperms, in which no showy flowers have ever been developed, and cycads and conifers are either monoecious or dioecious. The maidenhair-tree which has the longest known geological history, is dioecious, and most of the trees whose fossil remains show them to have had a long history are diclinous. Thus the willows and poplars are dioecious and the oaks and plane trees are monoecious. All this points to the law that the longer a type has lived the wider is the separation of the sexes, and as the flowers of plants are rarely preserved in the fossil state we have no warrant for assuming that the ancestral forms that we know were the same in past ages as now in respect of their sexual relations.

We have already had occasion to refer to the fact that showy flowers with nectar glands and nectar-loving insects developed pari pasu in the history of the world (see supra, p. 234). It is now to be noted that the influence of cross fertilization through insect agency is chiefly upon plants with hermaphrodite flowers. On the scientific theory of leaf metamorphosis each stamen and pistil of a flower is a transformed leaf, and therefore a flower is only a cluster of leaves, some of which have been specialized into stamens, others into pistils, others into petals, and others into segments of the calyx. The flower may therefore be looked upon as a little colony. If the ovary is compound it is not the whole pistil but each lobe or cell of the ovary with its separate style and stigma that constitutes the individual. In such a colony the conditions become too uniform for vigorous development, and there has been an obvious struggle to escape these narrow bonds and secure a wider separation of the sexes. The mutual interaction of the law of natural selection and the fact of insect agency has wrought the most extensive changes in this direction, some of which have been pointed out.

If we regard stamens and pistils as individuals, it becomes obvious that in the higher plants generally, and to a much greater extent than in animals, the male is simply a fertilizer, while the female goes on and develops and matures the fruit. Stamens always
wither as soon as the anthers have shed their pollen. They have no other function. If we take the other and more popular view of individuality, and look upon the whole plant as the vital unit, the only comparisons between the sexes that can be instituted are those of dioecious plants. Here of course we usually find the sexes practically equal. This we should expect, since sexual differentiation has alone brought about this state from a former state of hermaphroditism. If any cases could be found of either male or female
superiority they could only be accounted for either by special overdevelopment of the superior or by degeneracy of the inferior sex. In point of fact there are such cases, but only those of female superiority. An examination of them clearly shows that they are due to a loss on the part of the male of the powers once possessed. Again, there are found to be cases in which this decline does not take place until after the function of fertilization has been performed.

The best known example is that of the hemp plant. Cannabis sativa. It has long been known that when hemp is sown in a field the sexes cannot at first be distinguished, and this condition of equality persists until the plants of both sexes reach the period of fertility. The male plants then shed their pollen and the female plants are fertilized thereby. Soon thereafter, however, the male plants cease to grow, begin to turn yellow and sere, and in a short time they droop, wither, die, and disappear. The fertilized female plants are then found not to have as yet reached their maximum development. They continue to grow taller and more robust, while at the same time the fruit is forming, swelling, and ripening, which requires the remainder of the season. It is only from these tall, healthy, robust female stalks that the hemp fiber is obtained. It is commonly supposed that this collapse of the male plant only occurs in thickly sown fields, where, after it has performed its function it is only a cumberer of the ground. Certain it is that it amounts to an effective weeding of the field. I have, however, carefully watched the sexes when growing as weeds in waste grounds, and where there were not enough plants to crowd one another in the least, and found that the male plants ceased to grow taller and thicker after shedding their pollen, as did the female plants after being pollenized, but here the males did not perish at once, but continued to live to near the end of the season.

Before I had made any observations on the hemp plant or had heard of the peculiarity above described I had been for a number of years taking notes on a somewhat similar habit in certain native plants of the United States. In my Guide to the Flora of Washington and Vicinity published in 1881, as Bulletin No. 22, U. S. National Museum, which consists chiefly of a catalogue of the plants growing in the region named, and in which I occasionally made a brief note of some special peculiarity in a plant not mentioned in any other work, I find the following note appended to Ambrosia artemisicefolia (p. 90) : “Tends to become dioecious, and the fruiting plants crowd out the staminate ones.” Subsequently I found this to be even more true of the large species, A. trifida especially farther south where it often covers large areas of abandoned land. At Antennaria plantar ginifolia (p. 89), this remark occurs : ” Female plants much larger than the male, often half a meter in height, and both varying widely.” What I regarded as one species has since been found to represent several, and all of. them possess this peculiarity. They tend to grow in little patches at a distance from one another, and all the plants in the same patch are of the same sex, either all male or all female, and in these patches the plants are densely crowded together. The male patches form a mat or carpet on the ground, the flowering stems only rising a few inches above the radical leaves. The female patches are less dense, and the flower-bearing stems after fertilization grow a foot or two high. Male inferiority was also noted in Thalictrum dioicum and many other dioecious herbs. If carefully looked for it would probably be found to be general.

All these facts from both kingdoms, and the number that might be added is unlimited, combine to show that the female constitutes the main trunk, descending unchanged from the asexual, or presexual, condition ; that the male element was added at a certain stage for the sole purpose of securing a crossing of ancestral strains, and the consequent variation and higher development ; that it began as a simple fertilizer, assuming a variety of forms; that for reasons hereafter to be considered, the male in most organisms gradually assumed more importance, and ultimately came to approach the size and general nature of the female; but that throughout nearly or quite the whole of the invertebrates, and to a considerable extent among the vertebrates, the male has remained an inferior creature, and has continued to devote its existence chiefly to the one function for which it was created. The change, or progress, as it may be called, has been wholly in the male, the female remaining unchanged. This is why it is so often said that the female represents heredity and the male variation. “The ovum is the material medium through which the law of heredity manifests itself, while the male element is the vehicle by which new variations are added. . . . The greater variability of the male is also shown by a comparison of the adult male and female with the immature birds of both sexes.”

The last fact is the one usually adduced in support of the theory that in birds and mammals where the male is superior the female is an example of ” arrested development.” Such is, however, probably not the case, and the female simply represents the normal condition, while the condition of the male is abnormal due to his great powers of variability. That the female should resemble the young is quite natural, but the statement is an inverted one, due to the androcentric bias. The least unbiased consideration would make it clear that the colors of such male birds as Professor Brooks had in mind are not the normal colors of the species, but are due to some abnormal or supra-normal causes. The normal color is that of the young and the female, and the color of the male is the result of his excessive variability. Females cannot thus vary. They represent the center of gravity of the biological system. They are that “stubborn power of permanency” of which Goethe speaks. The female not only typifies the race but, metaphor aside, she is the race.

***

All modern anatomists know how the facts that are now regarded as demonstrating the horizontal position of the ancestors of man, and in general those that establish the doctrine of evolution, were treated by the older students of the human body – rejected, ignored, and disliked, as intruders that interfered with their investigations. It is exactly so now with gynæcocentric facts, and we are probably in about the same position and stage with reference to the questions of sex as were the men of the eighteenth century with reference to the question of evolution. Indeed, the androcentric theory may be profitably compared with the geocentric theory, and the gynæcocentric with the heliocentric. The advancement of truth has always been in the direction of supplanting the superficial and apparent by the fundamental and real, and the gynæcocentric truth may be classed among the “paradoxes of nature.“¹³

References:

[1] Lester Frank Ward on Wikipedia
[2] Pure sociology; a treatise on the origin and spontaneous development of society (1903)
[3] The Forum, New York, Vol. VI, November, 1888, pp. 266-275.
[4] “Woman’s Place in Nature,” by Grant Allen, the Forum, Vol. VII, May, 1889, pp. 258-263.
[5] “Genius and Woman’s Intuition,” the Forum, Vol. IX, June, 1890, pp. 401-408.
[6] “The Course of Biologic Evolution,” Proc. Biol. Soc., Washington, Vol. V, pp. 23-55. See pp. 49-52.
[7] “Tableau Historique des Progrès de I’Esprit Humain,” Paris, 1900, pp. 444-445.
[8] “Philosophie Positive,” Vol. IV, Paris, 1839, pp. 405, 406.
[9] “Système de Politique Positive,” Vol. I, 1851, p. 210.
[10] Op. cit., Vol. IV, 1854, p. 63.
[11] “Die Sociologische Erkenntnis,” von Gustav Ratzenhofer, Leipzig, 1898, p. 127.
[12] “The Native Flowers and Ferns of the United States,” by Thomas Meehan, Vol. I, Boston, 1878, p. 47.
[13] “Dynamic Sociology,” Vol. I, pp. 47-53.

Gynocentrism – why so hard to kill?

May 4, 2015June 9, 2024 / Peter Wright / 1 Comment

Many theories exist as to why we are saddled with a gynocentric culture in which men, to put it simplistically, play the role of servant to women. The explanation people choose will determine whether they believe gynocentrism is a permanent or temporary fact of human existence, and will dictate how they are likely to respond to it.

The first explanation is one of biological determinism – that men have always kowtowed to women regardless of fluctuations in cultural habits, customs, taboos and beliefs. Our genes, according to this theory, make men little more than nerve reflexes primed to obtain sex with females and reproduce – that we must position ourselves as slaves in order to meet that end.

Another version of the biology hypothesis was proposed by Lester F. Ward in his “Gynæcocentric theory”¹ which frames women as the dominant sex by dint of biology. Evolutionary Psychologists and Difference Feminists, who often collaborate,² support this view via anthropological, zoological and other scientific evidence. The basic theory holds that in the underpopulated world of the past, wombs were a precious and key resource to human survival, hence a genetic predisposition toward gynocentrism was a survival advantage. With the current overpopulation, however, wombs are now plentiful and cheap but our biological predispositions still make us overvalue them – ie. a redundant gynocentrism is built into our nervous system at a time when overpopulation could wipe out our species.

Biological determinists conclude that extreme gynocentrism is a permanent feature of human existence, and thus abandoning interactions with women is the only viable option if men want to be free of it: we must drop out of male-female interactions in order to avoid inbuilt gynocentric reflexes.

A completely different explanation is that gynocentrism is an extreme cultural exaggeration of human potential, one that hasn’t played constantly throughout human history. This explanation leaves open the option to confront and potentially change gynocentric culture in the knowledge that it is not an inevitable fate for men to suffer.

The two perspectives above, one theory placing the accent on biology and the other on culture, have serious ramifications for how men conceptualize and responded to the problem – the one abandoning it, the other rejecting it and posing an alternative approach to male-female relations.

I personally wager that extreme gynocentrism, that which is based on chivalry and romantic love, is a novelty in the long walk of human evolution. And yet it doesn’t appear to be going away, at least not quickly, despite concerted efforts to dismantle it. What could be going on?

Why is gynocentrism still alive?

With the different approaches to understanding gynocentrism touched on, I’d like to use the rest of this article to deal with one question – how to destroy the beast.

I’d like to think it will come to an end through natural processes. Human beings possess inbuilt regulating mechanisms that work to achieve homeostasis in biological, psychological and social systems, and which tend to cull extreme behaviors when they interfere with the overall psycho-biological economy.

Gynocentrism is an example of an extreme, discord-creating behavior, and yet those innate balancing mechanisms do not seem to be culling it from our repertoire. Why is that?

One explanation is that media is censoring those voices calling, nay yelling, for homeostasis.

Everyone draws information from the environment, and especially from the media, to construct internal schemas of the external world. We create internal pictures of how things work. However, if the environment is not providing adequate data, or worse, something in the environment is actively censoring the available data, it severely weakens our ability to understand the world and to create a balanced way of moving through it.

Censorship of the media by gynocentrists is not new, but historically speaking appears to be the No.1 force blocking a change in gender culture.

Go back 200 years and newspapers were the dominant media which began with some remarkable examples of free speech. But as soon as criticism of gynocentrism increased, the censor army infiltrated – free speech in newspapers was crushed. Ernest B. Bax for example wrote;

When, however, the bluff is exposed… then the apostles of feminism, male and female, being unable to make even a plausible case out in reply, resort to the boycott, and by ignoring what they cannot answer, seek to stop the spread of the unpleasant truth so dangerous to their cause. The pressure put upon publishers and editors by the influential Feminist sisterhood is well known.³

And;

All parties, all sorts and conditions of politicians, from the fashionable and Conservative west-end philanthropist to the Radical working-men’s clubbite, seem (or seemed until lately) to have come to an unanimous conclusion on one point – to wit, that the female sex is grievously groaning under the weight of male oppression. Editors of newspapers, keen to scent out every drift of public fancy with the object of regaling their “constant readers” with what is tickling to their palates, will greedily print, in prominent positions and in large type letters expressive of the view in question, whilst they will boycott or, at best, publish in obscure corners any communication that ventures to criticise the popular theory or that adduces facts that tell against it. Were I to pen an impassioned diatribe, tending to prove the villainy of man towards woman, and painting in glowing terms the poor, weak victim of his despotism, my description would be received with sympathetic approval. Not so, I fear, my simple statement of the unvarnished truth.⁴

Later came TV, which dethroned the old tabloid censorship. The Federal Communications Commission (USA) began handing out broadcasting licenses in the early 1950s (with the highest concentration of license grants and station sign-ons occurring between 1953 and 1956), spurring an explosion of growth in the medium. Half of all U.S. households had television sets by 1955.⁵ With that advent, consider the success of Martin Luther King’s civil rights campaigning which spanned from 1955 (Montgomery Bus Boycott) through to the mid 1960s. Without TV it would not have happened. Unfortunately, forces of political correctness infiltrated public broadcasting too, applying censorship and eventually dominating TV culture completely.

In the 1990’s the new medium of the internet appeared and dethroned the old TV media with its censorship. This opened the door to thousands of revolutions gaining a voice, including the MRM & MGTOW, which have gained traction as cultural forces. But as usual, the cycle of 1. New media technology 2. subsequent cultural revolutions, and 3. eventual feminist censorship, is playing out on the internet….. and we are entering the censorship phase of the cycle.

Those who say feminists will never succeed in censoring the internet are dreaming, and dare I say blind. It’s happening – Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Wikipedia, etc. all being taken over by feminist sensibilities and regulations. Free speech is experiencing a decline on most social media platforms.

The only avenue left is to grab our own domains and websites from which we can enjoy free speech, and to do it NOW before government regulators ask domain providers, hosting companies, and ISPs to institute onerous application criteria for the privilege. In short, give up on Youtube (etc) and grab a domain and website while you still can – social media is dying from censorship, and MGTOW, MRA and outspoken gamers etc will be its first casualties.

Despite the doom and gloom about impending censorship it’s not all bad news, far from it. The window opened by the internet has been seized upon and used to maximum effect. We have inserted a narrative on what gynocentrism is, what men’s issues are, and they’ve enjoyed considerable reach into the culture. Witness any comments section under an MSM article to gauge the new awareness of -and support for- these same issues. And the narrative is growing…

MHRAs, MGTOW, gamers, PUAs, antifeminists, and a growing coalition of everyday Joes, are poised to drive the nail deeper. We can continue to use social media -in spite of restrictive feminist guidelines- to drive the narrative home : gynocentrism is toxic and we want to to end. And those smart enough to grab their own domains and websites can come down harder with the message knowing there is no Hall Monitor to control our private soapboxes, at least not yet.

In fact let’s grow our private websites exponentially so they overshadow PC social media outlets and continue competing with them in the battle for cultural real estate.

This article began with a description of different ways of conceptualizing the origins of gynocentric culture, and the question was posed of why does gynocentrism continue to exist. We then looked at the transformations of mainstream media through recent centuries, noting how media is a double-edged sword, at times championing free speech, and at times censoring it, with the latter being a potential cause for gynocentrism’s longevity. Lastly was underlined how the internet currently gives voice to long suppressed thoughts, and of the need to make hay while the sun still shines – i.e. hopefully to make it shine longer and brighter. As long as we are able to keep adding our story to mainstream media, and being the media, gynocentrism will atrophy and homeostasis will come.

References:

[1] Lester Frank Ward, Pure Sociology, (The gynæcocentric theory, pp. 296-376), published 1903.
[2] For examples of the growing marriage between Evopsychology and difference-feminism, see:
— David Buss, Sex, Power, Conflict : Evolutionary and Feminist Perspectives
— M. Fisher, J. Garcia, Evolution’s Empress: Darwinian Perspectives on the Nature of Women
[3] Ernest Belfort Bax, The Fraud of Feminism, pp.1-2, published 1913
[4] Ernest Belfort Bax, Essays in Socialism New & Old, pp.108-119, published 1907
[5] History of American Television, Television in the United States

Romantic Love – by Lester F. Ward (1903)

April 25, 2015June 29, 2023 / Peter Wright / Leave a comment

Lester F. Ward, an American botanist, paleontologist, sociologist and an early ‘feminist’ thinker, proposed a gynocentric theory that women are superior to men. Aside from this theory, Ward wrote about the origins of romantic love, which is presented below in full. -PW

_____________

All social forces are psychic, and in that sense spiritual. The application to any of them of the term physical, is therefore not strictly correct, but if it is done not to stigmatize them, but for the sake of distinguishing some from others, it may be justified and even useful. All feeling is psychic, but feelings differ in many ways, and among others in a certain greater or less remoteness from their physical seat, or vagueness and indefiniteness with regard to the location of the nerve plexuses, by the molecular activities within which the feelings are occasioned. Another difference consists in the degree in which the feeling is external or internal, and still another is that of the relative intensity and durability of feelings.

All these differences are more or less correlated, and in general those feelings which are most vague and least definitely located in the body, those that are most internal, and those that are least intense and most durable, are classed as more spiritual, more elevated, and more refined. And in fact, there can be no doubt of the general correctness of this popular view, and, as has already been said, the true reason why this latter class of feelings is regarded as superior is that they yield a larger aggregate amount of satisfaction. Though lower from the standpoint of necessity, since they are not essential to life, they are higher from the standpoint of utility, i.e., they are worth more – more worthy.

But these feelings are derivative, and are the consequences of a qualitative development of the physical organization of man. For it is not the brain of man alone that has developed. The brain is only one of the many nerve plexuses of the body, and there is no reason to suppose that it is the only one that has undergone structural refinement. The brain has now been studied and the chief causes of mental superiority have been discovered. Primarily brain mass is the cause of intelligence, and until the process of cephalization had far advanced and the relatively large hemispheres had been superposed upon the original ganglionic nucleus, there could be no advance sufficient to constitute rational beings. And this attained, other things equal, increase of brain mass represents increased intelligence.

But this is far from being the whole. There took place qualitative changes, and brains came to differ in kind as well as in size. Since the period of social assimilation this has undoubtedly been the principal advance that has been made. The cross fertilization of cultures worked directly upon these qualitative characters, rendering the most thoroughly mixed races, like the Greeks and the English, highly intelligent. The physiological or histological cause of this improved brain structure is now known in its general aspects. Brain superiority is measured chiefly, first, by the number of neurons in a cubic millimeter of the brain substance, and second, by the degree of extension and ramification of the plumose panicles that proceed from the summit of these pyramidal cells, and by the character of the axis cylinder at their bases.

Now, while there can be no doubt that this higher brain development vitally influences all the other nerve plexuses of the body, since every conscious feeling must be referred to the brain, it is altogether probable that a process of qualitative improvement has also and at the same time been taking place in the entire nervous system, and especially in the great centers of emotion, and if the serious study of these plexuses could be prosecuted, as has been that of the brain, differences would in all probability be detected capable of being described, as this has been done for the brain. In other words, the development of the human race has not consisted exclusively in brain development, but has been a general advance in all the great centers of spiritual activity.

It is this psycho-physiological progress going on in all races that have undergone repeated and compound social assimilation that has laid the foundation for the appearance in the most advanced races of a derivative form of natural love which is known as romantic love. It is a comparatively modern product, and is not universal among highly assimilated races. In fact, I am convinced that it is practically confined to what is generally understood as the Aryan race, or, at most, to the so-called Europeans, whether actually in Europe or whether in Australia, America, India, or any other part of the globe. Further, it did not appear in a perceptible form even in that ethnic stock until some time during the Middle Ages. Although I have held this opinion much longer, I first expressed it in 1896.¹ It is curious that since that time two books have appeared devoted in whole or in part to sustaining this view..² There is certainly no sign of the derivative sentiment among savages. Monteiro, speaking of the polygamous peoples of Western Africa, says: –

The negro knows not love, affection, or jealousy. … In all the long years I have been in Africa I have never seen a negro manifest the least tenderness for or to a negress. … I have never seen a negro put his arm round a woman’s waist, or give or receive any caress whatever that would indicate the slightest loving regard or affection on either side. They have no words or expressions in their language indicative of affection or love.³

Lichtenstein⁴ says of the Koossas: “To the feeling of a chaste tender passion, founded on reciprocal esteem, and an union of heart and sentiment, they seem entire strangers.” Eyre reports the same general condition of things among the natives of Australia,⁵ and it would not be difficult to find statements to the same effect relative to savage and barbaric races in all countries where they have been made the subject of critical study. Certainly all the romances of such races that have been written do but reflect the sentiments of their writers, and are worthless from any scientific point of view. This is probably also the case for stories whose plot is laid in Asia, even in India, and the Chinese and Japanese seem to have none of the romantic ideas of the West; otherwise female virtue would not be a relative term, as it is in those countries. This much will probably be admitted by all who understand what I mean by romantic love.

The point of dispute is therefore apparently narrowed down to the question whether the Ancient Greeks and Romans had developed this sentiment. I would maintain the negative of this question. If I have read my Homer, Æschylus, Virgil, and Horace to any purpose they do not reveal the existence in Ancient Greece and Rome of the sentiment of romantic love. If it be said that they contain the rudiments of it and foreshadow it to some extent I shall not dispute this, but natural love everywhere does this, and that is therefore not the question.

The only place where one finds clear indications of the sentiment is in such books as “Quo Vadis,” which cannot free themselves from such anachronisms. I would therefore adhere to the statement made in 1896, when I said, “Brilliant as were the intellectual achievements of the Greeks and Romans, and refined as were many of their moral and esthetic perceptions, nothing in their literature conclusively proves that love with them meant more than the natural demands of the sexual instinct under the control of strong character and high intelligence. The romantic element of man’s nature had not yet been developed.”

The Greeks, of course, distinguished several kinds of love, and by different words (eros, agape, philia), but only one of these is sexual at all. For eros they often used ‘Aphrodite’. They also expressed certain degrees and qualities in these by adjectives, e.g., pandemic. Some modern writers place the adjective heavenly over against pandemic, as indicating that they recognized a sublimated, heavenly, or spiritual form of sexual love, but I have not found this in classic Greek. Neither do I find any other to the Latin Venus vulgivaga. But whether such softened expressions are really to be found in classic Greek and Latin authors or not, the fact that they are so rare sufficiently indicates that the conceptions they convey could not have been current in the Greek and Roman mind, and must have been confined to a few rare natures.

Romantic love is therefore not only confined to the historic races, those mentioned in Chapter III as representing the accumulated energies of all the past and the highest human achievement, but it is limited to the last nine or ten centuries of the history of those races. It bean to manifest itself some time in the eleventh century of the Christian era, and was closely connected with the origin of chivalry under the feudal system. Guizot has given us perhaps the best presentation of that institution,⁶ and from this it is easy to see how the conditions favored its development.

In the first place the constant and prolonged absenteeism of the lords and knights, often with most of their retainers, from the castle left the women practically in charge of affairs and conferred upon them a power and dignity never before possessed. In the second place the separation of most of the men for such long periods, coupled with the sense of honor that their knighthood and military career gave rise to, caused them to assume the rôle of applicants for the favor of the women, which they could not always immediately attain as when women were forcibly seized by any one that chanced to find them.

These conditions produced a mutual sense on the part of both sexes of the need of each other, coupled with prolonged deprivation on the part of both of that satisfaction. The men, thus seeking the women, naturally became chivalrous toward them. The solitary life of women of high rank made them somewhat a prey to the lusts of men of low degree, and the knights assumed the rôle of protecting them from all dangers. Moral and Christian sentiments also played a part, and we find among the provisions of the oath that every chevalier must make the following solemn vows: –

To maintain the just rights of the weak, as of widows, orphans, and young women. If called upon to conduct a lady or a girl to any place, to wait upon her, to protect her, and to save her from all danger and every offense, or perish in the attempt. Never to do violence to ladies or young women, even though won by their arms, without their will and consent.

Such an oath, made a universal point of honor, any breach of which would be an everlasting disgrace, and be punished severely by the order of knighthood to which they belonged, could not fail to produce a powerful civilizing effect upon the semi-barbaric men of that age. The whole proceeding must have also given to women a far greater independence and higher standing than they had ever before enjoyed since the days of gynæcocracy in the protosocial stage.

Out of this condition of things there arose a special class of poets who wrote lyrics wholly different from the erotic songs of antiquity that go by that name. These poets were called troubadours, and some of them wandered from place to place singing the praises of the great court ladies, and still further inflaming the new passion, which was relatively pure, and contented itself with an association of men with women while conserving the honor and virtue of the latter. This, of course, was a passing phase and somewhat local, being mainly confined to southern France and parts of Spain.

It degenerated, as did the whole institution of chivalry, and by the end of the thirteenth century nothing was left of either but the ridiculous nonsense that Cervantes found surviving into his time, and which he so happily portrayed in Don Quixote. But chivalry had left its impress upon the world, and while Condorcet and Comte exaggerated certain aspects of it, no one has pointed out its greatest service in grafting romantic love upon natural love, which until then had been supreme.

But it would be easy to ascribe too great a rôle, even here, to chivalry. The truth is not all told until chivalry is understood as an effect as well as a cause. Whatever may be said of the Middle Ages as tending to suppress the natural flow of intellectual activities, there can be no doubt that they were highly favorable to the development of emotional life. The intense religious fervor that burned in its cloisters for so many centuries served to create centers of feeling, and to increase the sensibility of all those nerve plexuses that constitute the true organs of emotion.

Whatever may be the physiological changes necessary to intensify the inner feelings, corresponding to the multiplication and diversification of the neurons of the brain by which the intellect is perfected, such changes went on, until the men and women of the eleventh century found themselves endowed with far higher moral organizations than those of the ancient Greeks and Romans. They had been all this time using their emotional faculties as they never had been used before, and the Lamarckian principle of increase through use is as true of those faculties as it is of external muscles and organs. It is true of the brain, too, and when educationalists wake up to this truth the only solid basis for scientific education will have been discovered. But without a preparation in this latent growth of the emotional faculties neither chivalry nor romantic love could have made its appearance.

The crusades, contemporary to a great extent with chivalry, and due also to the surplus emotion, taking here a religious course, became also a joint cause in the development not only of romantic love but also of many other lofty attributes, both ethical and intellectual. They failed to save the holy city, but they gained a far greater victory than that would have been in rationalizing, moralizing, and socializing Europe. Any one who thinks they were a failure has only to read Guizot’s masterly summing up of their influence.⁷

Romantic love was due primarily to the greater equality and independence of woman. She reacquired to some extent her long-lost power of selection, and began to apply to men certain tests of fitness. Romantic love therefore marks the first step toward the resumption by woman of her natural scepter which she yielded to the superior physical force of man at the beginning of the androcratic period. It involves a certain degree of female selection or gyneclexis, and no longer permitted man to seize but compelled him to sue.

But it went much farther than this. It did not complete a cycle and restore female selection as it exists in the animal world. It also did away with the pure male selection that prevailed throughout the androcratic régime. The great physiological superiority of the new régime cannot be too strongly emphasized. Its value to the race is incalculable. Female selection, or gyneclexis, as we saw, created a fantastic and extravagant male efflorescence. Male selection, or andreclexis, produced a female etiolation, diminutive stature, beauty without utility. Both these unnatural effects were due to lack of mutuality. Romantic love is mutual. The selection is done simultaneously by man and woman. It may be called ampheclexis. Its most striking characteristic consists in the phenomenon called “falling in love.”

It is not commonly supposed that this so-called “tender passion” is capable of cold scientific analysis. It is treated as something trivial, and any allusion to it creates a smile. Yet libraries are filled with books devoted exclusively to it, and these are as eagerly devoured by philosophers and sages as by schoolgirls. Such books, of course, are not scientific. They are fictions, romances, lyrics. Yet many of them are classic. Such always contain much truth, and this is almost the only way in which truth of this class is attainable. Serious writers fight shy of the subject. This emphasizes the idea that the subject is not serious. But as it is the most serious of all subjects this naturally creates an almost universal hypocrisy. My favorite way of illustrating this hypocrisy is by contrasting the attitude of society toward a couple, say on the day before and the day after their marriage.

To heighten the contrast let us suppose first that one of the two dies on the first of these days. The other is not even a mourner at the funeral. Next that one dies on the latter of these days. The other is then the chief mourner! Yet what real or natural difference is there between the relations of the two on the two days? Evidently none whatever. The only differences in their relations at the two dates are purely artificial and conventional.

Over and over again in the course of our studies into the origin and nature of life, mind, man, and society we have encountered the mysterious but silent power that unconsciously compasses ends not dreamed of by, the agents involved, the unheard voice of nature, the unseen hand, the natura naturans, the future in the act of being born. But nowhere has there been found a more typical or more instructive example of this than that which is furnished by romantic love. The end is nothing less than perfectionment of the human race. Whatever individuals may desire, the demand of nature is unmistakable. Primarily the object is to put an end to all tendencies toward extremes and one-sided development. It has been said that this mutual selection tends toward mediocrity.

This is not strictly true, but there can be no doubt that it tends toward the establishment of a mean. That mean may be regarded as an ideal. It is not an ideal in the sense of exceptional beauty, unusual size, excessive strength, or any other extraordinary quality. It is an ideal in the sense of a normal development of all qualities, a symmetrical rounding out of the whole physical organism. In this of course certain qualities that are considered most valuable fall considerably below the level attained in certain individuals, and this is why it has been supposed to aim at mediocrity. But it is certainly more important to have a symmetrical race than to have a one-sided, top heavy race, even though some of the overdeveloped qualities are qualities of a high order.

When a man and a woman fall in love it means that the man has qualities that are wanting in the woman which she covets and wishes to transmit to her offspring, and also that the woman has qualities not possessed by the man, but which he regards as better than his own and desires to hand on to posterity. By this is not meant that either the man or the woman is conscious of any of these things. They are both utterly unconscious of them. All they know is that they love each other. Of the reasons why they love each other they are profoundly ignorant.

It is almost proverbial that tall men choose short wives, and the union of tall women with short men is only a little less common. Thin men and plump girls fall in love, as do fat men and slender women. Blonds and brunettes rush irresistibly together. But besides these more visible qualities there are numberless invisible ones that the subtle agencies of love alone know how to detect. All such unconscious preferences, often appearing absurd or ridiculous to disinterested spectators, work in the direction of righting up the race and bringing about an ideal mean.⁸

The principle works in the same way on mental and moral qualities, which are at bottom only the expression of internal instead of external differences in the anatomy of the body. For a bright mind is the result of the number and development of the brain cells, and all the manifold differences in character are ultimately based on the different ways in which the brain, the nervous system, and the entire machinery of the body is organized and adjusted.

Generally speaking persons of opposite “temperaments,” whatever these may be, attract each other, and the effect is a gradual crossing and mutual neutralizing of temperaments. The less pronounced these so-called temperaments the better for the race. They are in the nature of extremes, idiosyncracies, peculiarities, often amounting to intolerable and anti-social caprices, and producing in their exaggerated forms paranoiacs, mattoids, and monomaniacs. Love alone can “find the way” to eliminate these and all other mental, moral, and physical defects.

Romantic love is therefore a great agent in perfecting and balancing up the human race. It follows as matter of simple logic that it should be given full sway as completely as comports with the safety and stability of society. All attempts to interfere with its natural operation tend to check the progress of perfecting the race. Under the androcratic régime, during which woman had no voice in the selecting process, and under the patriarchal system generally where the marrying is done by the patriarch and neither party is consulted, nature’s beneficent aims were thwarted, races grew this way and that, and mankind acquired all manner of physical and mental peculiarities. There were of course counteracting influences, and natural love, especially in the middle classes, helped to maintain an equilibrium, but male selection dwarfed woman and slavery dwarfed both sexes.

The races of men with all their marked differences have doubtless been in large part due to the want of mutuality in selection for purposes of propagation. This mutual selection under romantic love can be trusted not to work the extermination of the race from over-fastidiousness. It operates always under the higher law of reproduction at all events. This is proved by the universal influence of propinquity. “Great is Love, and Propinquity is her high priest.”

If there be but one man and one woman on any given circumscribed area they may be depended upon to love and to procreate. Very bashful persons who shun the opposite sex usually in the end marry the ones with whom circumstances forcibly bring them into more or less prolonged contact. The constant enforced separation of the sexes in the supposed interest of morality causes the sexual natures of those thus cut off from the other sex to become so hypertrophied that there is little chance for selection, and unions, too often illicit, take place with little concern for preferred or complementary qualities. Contrary to the views of moral theorists who advocate such enforced separation, marriages are fewer and occur later in life in societies where the sexes freely commingle and where there is the least restraint.

It is also in such societies that the closest discrimination takes place and that the finest types of men are produced. Where a reasonable degree of freedom of the sexes exists and there is no scarcity of men or of women, this passion of love becomes from a biological, from an anthropological, and from a sociological point of view, the highest of all sanctions. It is the voice of nature commanding in unmistakable tones, not only the continuance, but also the improvement and perfectionment of the race. In cases where arbitrary acts or social convention in violation of this command produce conjugal infelicity and despair, one might even indorse the following statement of Chamfort: –

When a man and a woman have a violent passion for each other, it always seems to me that, whatever may be the obstacles that separate them, husband, parents, etc., the two lovers belong to each other by Nature and by divine right in spite of human laws and conventions.

It is a curious fact that there is always a touch of the illicit in all the romances of great geniuses – Abelard and Héloïse, Dante and Beatrice, Petrarch and Laura, Tasso and Eleonora, Goethe and Charlotte von Stein, Wilhelm von Humboldt and Charlotte Diede, Comte and Clotilde de Vaux – and the romantic literature of the world has for one of its chief objects to emphasize the fact that love is a higher law that will and should prevail over the laws of men and the conventions of society. In this it is in harmony with the teachings of biology and with those of a sound sociology.

With regard to the essential difference between romantic love and natural love, it consists chiefly in the fact that the passion is satisfied by the presence instead of the possession of the one toward whom it goes out. It seems to consist of a continuous series of ever repeated nervous thrills which are connected if the object is near, but interrupted and arrested if the object is absent. These thrills, though exceedingly intense, do not have an organic function, but exist, as it were, for their own sake. That they are physical is obvious, and they are intensified by various physical acts, such as kissing, embracing, caressing, etc. In fact it is known that sexuality is not by any means confined to the organs of sex, but is diffused throughout the body. Not only are there nerves of sex in many regions, but there is actually erectile tissue at various points and notably in the lips.

Romantic love gives free rein to all these innocent excitements and finds its full satisfaction as romantic love in these. Anything beyond this is a return to natural love, but it is known that such a return is not absolutely necessary to complete and permanent happiness. This is the great superiority of romantic love, that it endures while at the same time remaining intense. It is probably this quality to which Comte alludes in the passage first introduced into his dedication of the “Positive Polity” to Clotilde de Vaux, and then put as an epigraph at the head of the first chapter: “One tires of thinking and even of acting, but one never tires of loving.”⁹

But “true love never runs smooth,” and herein lies the chief interest of romantic love for sociology and its main influence on human progress. Besides its effect thus far pointed out in perfecting the physical organization of man, it has an even greater effect in perfecting his social organization. The particular dynamic principle upon which it seizes is that which was described in Chapter XI under the name of conation. It was there shown that the efficiency of this principle is measured by the distance in both space and time that separates a desire from its satisfaction. It is the special quality of romantic love to increase this distance. Under sexual selection proper, or gyneclexis, male desire was indeed long separated from its satisfaction, and the interval was filled by intense activities which produced their normal effects according to the Lamarckian law.

But these effects, due to male rivalry, were purely biological and only showed themselves in modifications in organic structure. They produced secondary sexual characters and male efflorescence. This, as we have seen, must have lasted far into the human period. During the long period of androcracy that followed this stage, there was no selection, but only seizure, capture, rape, the subjection, enslavement, and barter of woman. There was no interval between the experience and the satisfaction of desire on the part of men, and very little effort was put forth to obtain women for this purpose.

Hence during the whole of this period neither the Lamarckian principle nor the principle of conation could produce any effect. For the great majority of mankind this condition prevailed over the whole world, with greater or less completeness, down to the date of the appearance of romantic love. It still prevails within certain restrictions and under various forms and degrees, in all but the historic races. Under male sexual selection, or andreclexis, so far as its influence extended, there was no interval between desire and satisfaction, no effort, no conation. Its effects were confined to physical modifications, primarily in woman, due to inheritance of the qualities selected by men. With the advent of romantic love, or ampheclexis, all this was changed.

So far as physical modification is concerned the effect was doubled by its application to both sexes alike, and instead of producing anomalies and monstrosities it worked, as already shown, for equilibration, symmetry, and normal average qualities or ideals. But here we also enter the field of social dynamics, and the principle of conation finds full expression.

Schopenhauer¹⁰ has acutely pointed out that the true romance never deals with happiness attained, but only with the prolonged struggle for happiness, with the troubles, disappointments, labors, and efforts of all kinds in search of happiness. It leads its heroes through a thousand difficulties and dangers, and the moment the end is reached the curtain falls! Tarde, well says¹¹ that love is essentially a “rupture of equilibrium.” The entire course of a romantic love is a heroic struggle for the restoration of disturbed equilibrium. What does all this mean? It means intense activity on the part of great numbers of the human race at the age of greatest efficiency.

All this activity is expended upon the immediate environment and every throe of the struggle transforms the environment in some degree. The greater part of this transformation is useful and contributes to its full extent to social progress. In the early days and in the upper classes the demands of woman may have been somewhat trivial. Man must do something heroic, must prove his worthiness by acts of prowess, and such acts may even be opposed to true progress. But they at least develop manhood, courage, honor, and under the code of chivalry they must have a moral element, must defend the right, protect the weak, avenge dishonor, and uphold virtue.

But in the lower ranks even then, and everywhere since the fall of the feudal system, woman demanded support and the comforts of life, luxuries where possible, and more and more leisure and accomplishment. To-day she demands a home, social position, ease, and economic freedom. More and more, too, she requires of men that they possess industry, thrift, virtue, honesty, and intelligence.

Man must work for all this, and this struggle for excellence, as woman understands that quality, is an extraordinary stimulus, and leads to all forms of achievement. But man also selects. Romantic love is mutual. Woman has as much to lose as man if it results in failure. And man sets ideals before woman. She must be worthy of him and she gently and naturally bows to his will and follows the course that he gives her to understand is most grateful to him. Thus she develops herself in the direction of his ideals and both are elevated. She may also to some extent transform the environment, if it be no more than the inner circle of the family.

The combined effect, even in an individual case, is considerable, and when we remember that in any given community, town, city, state, or country, the majority of men and women pass at least once, sometimes twice or several times, through the phase of life known as being in love, waiting and working for the longed-for day when they are to possess each other, struggling to prepare themselves for each other and for that happy event, we can readily believe that such a stimulus must work great social results. The history of the world is full of great examples, but the volume of achievement thus wrought is made up of thousands, nay, millions of small increments in all lands and all shades and grades of life, building ever higher and broader the coral reef of civilization.

_______________________________

REFERENCES:

1) International Journal of Ethics, Vol. VI, July, 1896, p. 453.
2) “Antimachus of Colophon and the Position of Women in Greek Poetry,” by E. F. M. Benecke, London, 1896. “Primitive Love and Love Stories,” by Henry T. Finck, New York, 1899.
3) “Angola and the River Congo,” by Joachim John Monteiro. In two volumes. London, 1875, Vol. I, pp. 242-243.
4) “Travels in Southern Africa,” in the years 1803, 1804, 1805, and 1806, by Henry Lichtenstein, English translation, Dublin, 1812, p. 261.
5) Journals, etc., Vol. II, p. 321.
6) “Histoire de la Civilisation en France depuis la chute de I’Empire Romain,” par M. Guizot, 3e éd., Vol. III, Paris, 1840, Sixième Leçon, pp. 351-382.
7) “Histoire générale de Ia Civilisation en Europe depuis la chute de I’Empire Romain,” par M. Guizot, 4e éd., Paris, 1840, Huitième Leçon, pp. 231-257.
8) The reverse is of course also true, and a decided aversion between a man and a woman means that their union would result in some prominent detect or imperfection in the offspring. The extent to which the great number of misfits in society, of people who are out of harmony with the social environment, of which criminals only represent the comparatively rare extreme cases, are due to conventional and compulsory marriages, which ought never to have been contracted, and which ought to be annulled as soon as they are found to be wrong, is little reflected upon, and society and the church continue to denounce divorces, when the very desire for divorce proves that such marriages are violations of nature and foes of social order and race perfection.
9) “On se lasse de penser, et même d’agir; jamais on ne se lasse d’aimer,” “Politique Positive,” Vol. I, Dédicace, p. viii; Discours préliminaire, p. 1.
10) “Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung,” Vol. I, pp. 377-378.
11) “La Logique sociale,” par G. Tarde, Paris, 1895, p. 426.

John Stuart Mill on chivalry

March 30, 2015October 16, 2023 / Peter Wright / Leave a comment

In 1869 John Stuart Mill published his gynocentric work The Subjection of Women (SOW), stating that while people everywhere were being freed from social roles, women remained tethered to theirs, stating: “Men hold women in subjection by representing to them meekness, submissiveness, and resignation of all individual will into the hands of a man, as an essential part of sexual attractiveness.” (SOW, p. 272). Ironically, Mill lauds the male chivalry that women both inspired and were recipients of. Mill contends that male chivalry, however, was not always reliable and thus must give way to a more reliable, State-enforced protection and benevolence toward women. In light of Mill’s gynocentrism, Ernest Belfort Bax published an incisive rejoinder to the book pointing out the greater injustices faced by men. – PW

The following is a quote from Mill’s venerated SOW:

___________________

The Moral Influence of Women: Chivalry
By John Stuart Mill

The other mode in which the effect of women’s opinion has been conspicuous is by giving a powerful stimulus to those qualities in men which, not being themselves trained in, it was necessary for them that they should find in their protectors. Courage, and the military virtues generally, have at all times been greatly indebted to the desire which men felt of being admired by women: and the stimulus reaches far beyond this one class of eminent qualities, since, by a very natural effect of their position, the best passport to the admiration and favour of women has always been to be thought highly of by men.

From the combination of the two kinds of moral influence thus exercised by women, arose the spirit of chivalry: the peculiarity of which is to aim at combining the highest standard of the warlike qualities with the cultivation of a totally different class of virtues – those of gentleness, generosity, and self-abnegation towards the non-military and defenseless classes generally, and a special submission and worship directed towards women; who were distinguished from the other defenceless classes by the high rewards which they had it in their power voluntarily to bestow on those who endeavoured to earn their favour, instead of extorting their subjection.

Though the practice of chivalry fell even more sadly short of its theoretic standard than practice generally falls below theory, it remains one of the most precious monuments of the moral history of our race; as a remarkable instance of a concerted and organised attempt by a most disorganised and distracted society, to raise up and carry into practice a moral ideal greatly in advance of its social condition and institutions; so much so as to have been completely frustrated in the main object, yet never entirely inefficacious, and which has left a most sensible, and for the most part a highly valuable impress on the ideas and feelings of all subsequent times.

The chivalrous ideal is the acme of the influence of women’s sentiments on the moral cultivation of mankind: and if women are to remain in their subordinate situation, it were greatly to be lamented that the chivalrous standard should have passed away, for it is the only one at all capable of mitigating the demoralising influences of that position. But the changes in the general state of the species rendered inevitable the substitution of a totally different ideal of morality for the chivalrous one.

Chivalry was the attempt to infuse moral elements into a state of society in which everything depended for good or evil on individual prowess, under the softening influences of individual delicacy and generosity. In modern societies, all things, even in the military department of affairs, are decided, not by individual effort, but by the combined operations of numbers; while the main occupation of society has changed from fighting to business, from military to industrial life. The exigencies of the new life are no more exclusive of the virtues of generosity than those of the old, but it no longer entirely depends on them.

The main foundations of the moral life of modern times must be justice and prudence; the respect of each for the rights of every other, and the ability of each to take care of himself. Chivalry left without legal check all those forms of wrong which reigned unpunished throughout society; it only encouraged a few to do right in preference to wrong, by the direction it gave to the instruments of praise and admiration. But the real dependence of morality must always be upon its penal sanctions – its power to deter from evil. The security of society cannot rest on merely rendering honour to right, a motive so comparatively weak in all but a few, and which on very many does not operate at all.

Modern society is able to repress wrong through all departments of life, by a fit exertion of the superior strength which civilisation has given it, and thus to render the existence of the weaker members of society (no longer defenseless but protected by law) tolerable to them, without reliance on the chivalrous feelings of those who are in a position to tyrannise. The beauties and graces of the chivalrous character are still what they were, but the rights of the weak, and the general comfort of human life, now rest on a far surer and steadier support; or rather, they do so in every relation of life except the conjugal.

Auguste Comte’s cult of woman at the heart of the western-republic

March 17, 2015February 19, 2024 / gynocentrism / 1 Comment

Auguste Comte (1798 – 1857) was the founder of the doctrine of positivism, founder of sociology (coining the term), and a champion of the idea that women should be placed at the reverential centre of human affairs. The following excerpts are from Engendering the end of European history: Auguste Comte’s Cult of Woman at the Heart of The Western Republic by Professor Mike Gane. — PW

Introduction

Auguste Comte is not generally acknowledged to have played any major role in the development of modern historiography, and even in sociology (a word he coined in 1839) and philosophy he is today a neglected figure. Ending the neglect is timely, not least because we approach the bicentenary year of his birth (1998). There are, however, a number of obstacles to such a réévaluation. Sociology prefers to identify Marx, Durkheim and Weber as its principal modern founders, whereas as late as the 1960s Comte was still taken as the starting point in introductory courses.

In accounts of rationalism and positivism it is Hume who now dominates the picture. Comte’s own eccentricities, particularly the project of the religion of humanity with its idealisation of woman, and its Utopian restructuring of the ‘western republic’ under a new spiritual authority based in Paris, make it difficult for social scientists to read his contribution other than as an aberration. But is it adequate to treat Comte as ‘mad’ in order to move on? In this essay I want to explore what it is we miss if we do pass over his contribution. One way of examining his work is to ask questions about the nature of Comte’s strategic thought precisely as it encountered issues of space and gender.

Auguste Comte

After completing the founding study of the law of the three states in 1842, his life and thought were deeply shaken by two events. The first was personal. He separated from his wife, Caroline Massin, in 1842, the very day he completed his first major work. In 1844 he began an intense emotional affair with Clotilde de Vaux, at her insistence platonic, which lasted until her death in 1846 at the age of thirty-two.¹ The second event was the marked change in the social composition of French society and the experience of the revolution of 1848-1851, particularly the emergence of the proletariat as a political factor.

Clotilde de Vaux

In the 1840s Comte’s method and conceptions went through considerable transformations. He rationalised his emotional life as a salutory purification and spiritualisation, and after her death Clotilde was transfigured into a saintly figure whose image Comte began to worship.² Reassessing his own project he argued that all attempts to solve the western crisis through reason and science alone only exacerbated it. All reason, for him essentially masculine, could be effective in the human context only if guided by the moral and emotional superiority of love and affection, essentially feminine. Comte took his own experience of the sublimation of physical love as a necessary process for all those trying to resolve the social and cultural transition of the three states. He installed the maxims of Clotilde within the new religion of humanity in imitation of the medieval cult of the virgin mother.³

When he came to work out the logic of the revised strategy, he based the new construction on a subjective method: the law of the three states was to be completed by adding a theory of the emotions to the theory of science and industry. The final, third, state became, in Comte’s last version, a combination of science and fetishistic worship… This fundamental order was to be ruled by a purifying cult of woman, regarded as the centre of love and affection. In order to reach this final state there would be a transition period in which the dictatorship of the proletariat would purify economic life and the commercial spirit.⁴

***

Comte’s thoughts on the new society were far from communistic. Against the revolutionary and communist visions of the dictatorship of the proletariat, Comte argued that the positive doctrine would legitimate a new hierarchical social order: in the economy it would legitimate differences of wealth, and in the family it would legitimate the separation of the sexes and the spiritual ascendency of women based on the realisation of the principle of virgin motherhood. Comte aimed to appeal to all sections of political opinion, radical and conservative, since he wanted to reveal precisely how each element fitted into a broad scheme of social progression.⁵

***

Comte is just as radical in his proposal for a reorganisation of gender relations. Here his aim is to reverse the tendency to the debasement of love in Western culture, and to deal with the new phenomenon of feminism and the demand for equality between the sexes. Comte poses this issue again historically as a problem of the debasement of the ideals of chivalry and courtly love of the medieval period. His aim is to restore some substance to the idealization and purification which the medieval practice seem to inspire.⁶

He commends the principle of eternal widowhood (with certain limited exceptions which would have applied to Clotilde), and reasserts the value of the segregation of the sexes. The woman should obey the husband, but the latter should adopt the cult of women and guardian angels. Comte’s radical hypothesis, however, is that all sexual relations in society should be replaced by a utopia of the virgin mother. This utopia itself will reverse the decline in the status of women. The utopia would give women complete control over human reproduction. It is not absolutely clear just what Comte had in mind. There could be an organic development which itself would lead to a new hermaphroditic condition, or artificial insemination would become the norm.

The specific details of the cult of woman were developed and practised by Comte: the nature of the image, the prayers, the language, the gestures.⁷ The objective is purification and hygiene. What women will do is left an open question to be developed and solved by women themselves.⁸ His view is, however, that the physical act of sex so far as men are concerned is not principally to be understood in terms of reproduction but rather in terms of its sublimating function. Against the demands of feminism, for instance as exemplified by the demands of his wife Caroline Massin, he claimed that they could never form the basis of a set of stable human relationships, but produce only continuous metaphysical strife.

It is through the segregated and hierarchical structures, through idealisation and duty, that a new stability can be attained. In effect therefore, the Comtean programme for the family is intended to end the metaphysical phase within the domestic sphere. Once the final stage is achieved science itself comes to an end in a system of harmonised laws which are all conscious of their place in the totality. It seems at this point that life will be made up of rituals, ceremonials, re-enactments and reproductions of the various aspects of the three-state law. In this sense the law seems to reflect Comte’s own deep longing that the pain of the modern crisis be ended, as it predicts the certainty of a positive state in which everything will find its rightful place. Comte noted in 1852 that it is feeling which is;

the sole existing preservative of Western society from a complete and irreparable dissolution. Since the close of the Middle Ages, the influence of women has been the sole though unacknowledged check on the moral evils attaching to the mental alienation toward which the West more and more tended, especially its centre – France.

He insisted that it is only when men begin to think under ‘the inspiration of women’ can they ‘bring synthesis into constant harmony with sympathy.’⁹

***

The final system of Comte’s sociology, with the modifications introduced from his reconstructed masculinity, suggests that the medieval system already attempted to install a cult of woman in the worship of the virgin. In 1853, Comte returned to the great western transition and again treated it in terms of the contrapuntal movements of its main phases.¹⁰ But Comte’s reorganisation of his explanatory forms did not change: he simply added a note at the beginning of the story indicating the fundamental but passive influence of women. –women preserved society from complete dissolution.¹¹ At the other end of the account of the transition he added a note on the effect of the decisive influence of Clotilde to the reconstruction of the positive philosophy.¹²

Nevertheless the social topography of Comte’s later vision was strikingly different from the earlier one: the western revolution is an interregnum between two social systems in which the feminine principle, the heart, rules the masculine principle, the intellect. More and more the systems at both ends of the historical sequence became structurally identical. the scientific elite would become the priesthood of the new religion of humanity, but a religion without theology. Paris would replace Rome as the sacred heart of Europe, and Clotilde would replace Mary at the heart of a new cult.

Notes:

[1] I have discussed Comte’s personal relations and how they related to his intellectual development in M. Gane, Harmless Lovers? Gender, Theory and Personal Relationships (London, 1993), ch 6; and in ‘Unresolved Comte’ in Economy and Society, 24 (1995), 138-49.
[2] In the crisis of the insurrection in Paris in June 1848, Comte wrote a ‘Saint Clotilde,’ an address of commemoration on the anniversary of Clotilde’s death. In the address he referred to the ‘ill-omened detonations… of bloody conflict’ going on around him. He said, ‘I am indebted to thee for finding some pure satisfaction in a dreadful crisis… Though mingled with warlike sounds, I already hear indications that the human metropolis is returning to its normal condition. The carnage on both sides may have ceased, at least until the next conflict, which will be still more terrible, unless the working men now in arms shall have discovered their real camp.’ A. Comte, Confessions and Testament: And his Correspondence with Clotilde de Vaux, edited by A. Crompton (Liverpool, 1910). pp.349-57.
[3] For a typical statement of these relations see the Preface in A. Comte, System (New York, nd) vol 1, pp.ix-xxix.
[4] See Comte, System (New York, nd).
[5] These propositions were worked out in continuous outpourings in the years of positivism after 1847.
[6] All the main details of his ideas are expounded in A. Comte, System, (New York, nd), all four volumes.
[7] Comte might well have been influenced by the revival of Catholicism which emphasised Christian love. See a discussion of this in E. Berenson, ‘A new Religion of the Left: Christianity and Social Radicalism in France, 1815-48’ in The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, edited by E. Furet and M. Ozouf (Oxford, 1989), vol 3, ch 29. For details of Comte’s religious practice see for example the collection of texts in The Religion of Humanity, edited by A. Crompton (Liverpool, 1907).
[8] In effect Comte leaves women little room for choice since his sociology has already allocated women their role, function, and place in the final state.
[9] In Comte, Preface to The Catechism of Positivism, (London 1891).
[10] See A. Comte System, vol 3, pp.452-531.
[11] See Ibib. p.436.
[12] See Ibid. p.530.

A Privileged and Pampered Sex?

February 21, 2015September 25, 2024 / gynocentrism / Leave a comment

The following Letter To The editor of Reynolds Newspaper in 1896 (England) provides a snapshot of gender inequity before the law, in this case a gradual softening of female prison experience compliments of a misguided male chivalry – PW

A Privileged and Pampered Sex

TO THE EDITOR OF REYNOLDS NEWSPAPER

SIR,–A paragraph in your issue of the week before last stated that oakum-picking as a prison task had been abolished for women and the amusement of dressing dolls substituted. This is an interesting illustration of the way we are going at present, and gives cause to some reflection as to the rate at which a sex aristocracy is being established in our midst. While the inhumanity of our English prison system, in so far as it affects men, stands out as a disgrace to the age in the eyes of all Europe, houses of correction for female convicts are being converted into agreeable boudoirs and pleasant lounges.

A case in the police court before Sir John Bridge two or three weeks ago further brings into relief the sort of privilege and pampering accorded to one sex at the expense of the other. A woman of the town forced herself upon a young man going home at night and seized hold of his arm. On his shaking her off, the report says “she fell to the ground” (a well-known dodge). Sir John Bridge, on hearing the evidence, was bound to acquit the defendant, but added a rider to his judgement, advising the unfortunate man who had been first assaulted and then had a false charge brought against him, to compensate the woman with half-a-sovereign! Had some luckless male beggar (the brother, let us suppose, of the prosecutrix in this case), after having seized hold of a gentleman’s arm and been shaken off, “fallen to the ground,” and then prosecuted the said gentleman for assault, what would Sir John Bridge or any other Magistrate have said? Would he have suggested 10s. compensation or would he have given him ten weeks? I leave the reader to judge. But the several remarks with which Sir John accompanied his decision are especially noteworthy. He said in effect that “however badly these women behaved” the man ought not to resist them. In fact, the law of self-defence is to be suspended wherever females are the aggressors. This monstrous opinion is on par with the constant iteration in the present day of the “manly” duty of non-resistance and passive obedience to female domination.

We want, sir, a little of the sturdy, healthy, good sense of our ancestors to revisit the glimpses of the moon and speak out against these maudlin, whining, sentimentalisms, and tell us that there are occasions when women, despite the blithering weakness on which they sometimes presume, deserve as severe punishment in their own and the common interest as any male human being who grossly misbehaves himself. That anything in petticoats may ride roughshod over every requirement of decency, justice, or fair-play with impunity is a new doctrine, being assiduously preached, sauced with whimpering appeals to men’s chivalry, gallantry, and the rest of it. Woman’s “weakness” is now fast becoming as oppressive an engine of tyranny and inequality as exists in this or any other country. For though the rich man can sometimes buy off his tormentor, the poor man is handed over by the law, gagged and bound, to the caprices of any vile shrew whom in an evil moment for him he may have made his wife.

I am personally in favour of the abolition of corporal punishment, as I am of existing prison inhumanities, for both sexes, but the snivelling sentiment which exempts females on the ground of sex from every disagreeable consequence of their actions, only strengthens on the one side every abuse which it touches on the other. Yet we are continuously having the din of the “women’s rights” agitation in our ears. I think it is time we gave a little attention to men’s rights, and equality between the sexes from the male point of view.–Yours, &c.,

A MANLY PROTESTOR

The Dream of Heroism and Love – by Johan Huizinga

December 10, 2014May 26, 2023 / gynocentrism / Leave a comment

The following are excerpts from J. Huizinga’s 1924 book The Waning of The Middle Ages, chapter V: The Dream of Heroism and Love. – PW

The knight and his lady, that is to say, the hero who serves for love, this is the primary and invariable motif from which erotic fantasy will always start. It is sensuality transformed into the craving for self-sacrifice, into the desire of the male to show his courage, to incur danger, to be strong, to suffer and to bleed before his lady-love.

From the moment when the dream of heroism through love has intoxicated the yearning heart, fantasy grows and overflows. The first simple theme is soon left behind, the soul thirsts for new fancies, and passion colours the dream of suffering and of renunciation. The man will not be content merely to suffer, he will want to save from danger, or from suffering, the object of his desire. A more vehement stimulus is added to the primary motif: its chief feature will be that of defending imperilled virginity—in other words, that of ousting the rival. This, then, is the essential theme of chivalrous love poetry : the young hero, delivering the virgin. The sexual motif is always behind it, even when the aggressor is only an artless dragon; a glance at Burne-Jones’s famous picture suffices to prove it.

One is surprised that comparative mythology should have looked so indefatigably to meteorological phenomena for the explanation of such an immediate and perpetual motif as the deliverance of the virgin, which is the oldest of literary motifs, and one which can never grow antiquated. It may from time to time become stale from over-much repetition, and yet it will reappear, adapting itself to all times and surroundings. New romantic types will arise, just as the cowboy has succeeded the corsair.

______

Nowhere does the erotic element of the tournament appear more clearly than in the custom of the knight’s wearing the veil or the dress of his lady. In Perceforest we read how the lady spectators of the combat take off their finery, one article after another, to throw them to the knights in the lists. At the end of the fight they are bareheaded and without sleeves. A poem of the thirteenth century, the work of a Picard or a Hainault minstrel, entitled Des trois Chevaliers et del Chainse,¹ has worked out this motif in all its force. The wife of a nobleman of great liberality, but not very fond of fighting, sends her shirt to three knights who serve her for love, that one of them at the tournament which her husband is going to give may wear it as a coat-armour, without any mail underneath. The first and the second knights excuse themselves. The third, who is poor, takes the shirt in his arms at night, and kisses it passionately. He appears at the tournament, dressed in the shirt and without a coat of mail; he is grievously wounded, the shirt, stained with his blood, is torn. Then his extraordinary bravery is perceived and he is awarded the prize. The lady gives him her heart. The lover asks something in his turn. He sends back the garment, all blood-stained, to the lady, that she may wear it over her gown at the meal which is to conclude the feast. She embraces it tenderly and shows herself dressed in the shirt as the knight had demanded. The majority of those present blame her, the husband is confounded, and the minstrel winds up by asking the question : Which of the two lovers sacrificed most for the sake of the other?

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The warlike sports of the Middle Ages differ from Greek and modern athletics by being far less simple and natural. Pride, honour, love and art give additional stimulus to the competition itself. Overloaded with pomp and decoration, full of heroic fancy, they serve to express romantic needs too strong for mere literature to satisfy. The realities of court life or a military career offered too little opportunity for the fine make-belief of heroism and love, which rilled the soul. So they had to be acted. The staging of the tournament, therefore, had to be that of romance ; that is to say, the imaginary world of Arthur, where the fancy of a fairy-tale was enhanced by the sentimentality of courtly love.

Note:

[1] Of the three knights and the shirt.

A MGTOW Yardstick: Determination Of Self By Other (DOSBO)

November 30, 2014July 24, 2023 / Peter Wright / 3 Comments

In this piece I’ll be looking at the opposite of MGTOW, at what MGTOW isn’t, in order to throw MGTOW into relief against impostors. Naturally, this is my own take, one of numerous that abound on the Internet and one that comes with no special authority and no assumption that I speak for others.

By now many are familiar with the concept of male self-determination as a basic working definition for MGTOW. Self-determination is the practice whereby a man makes choices and decisions based on his own preferences and interests, monitors and regulates his own actions, and is generally self-directing.

Simple enough.

That leads to a consideration of the opposite of male self-determination, i.e., determination of self by other (DOSBO). Determination of self by other limits the definition of MGTOW and in one stroke negates the claim that MGTOW can mean anything a person wants it to mean. By applying the DOSBO rule, no person can qualify as a MGHOW if he hands over a significant amount of his sovereignty to another entity. Here are some examples illustrating DOSBO in action.

Example 1: Pro-feminist men
On the face of it, we might assume pro-feminist men are self-determined for having made a choice to be led by the spirit and letter of feminism. It hardly needs saying that this amounts to a false assumption.

The only self-determined decision such men make is an initial one to give up self-determination altogether in favor of determination of self by other—which is, of course, the antithesis of self-determination and thereby disqualifies MGTOW status for such men according to the DOSBO yardstick.

Example 2: Married men
This example is a bit trickier because it raises the question of whether the DOSBO factor is actual or merely potential for a particular married man.

The question to ask about such a man is this: Is he entering the marriage to willfully participate in a gynocentric charade? Sadly, the vast majority of men are doing precisely that, which indicates that the DOSBO factor is actual—such a man cannot qualify as MGTOW under this definition because he is ceding his self-determination to the will of women and the state.

Alternatively, if a man undertakes to symbolize his love through the ritual of marriage while at the same time assuming he’s rejecting the gynocentric aspect imposed by the state, can that man call himself a MGHOW while the DOSBO factor looms in potential due to his wife’s latent legal power? Is this man, rare as he may be, a MGHOW?

This is where I stop short of saying he absolutely cannot be—although I would certainly call him foolhardy if he entered a marriage while knowing the enormous risks involved. He is actually a MGHOW in behavior because he is temporarily “doing his own thing” with his wife’s momentary blessing, but he is potentially a man whose life can be determined by his wife and the government if she so chooses. While I look at what is actual instead of what is potential, I’m forced to conclude that he retains some semblance of a MGHOW.

Example 3: Traditionalists
Like marriage, traditionalism needs defining because not all traditionalism is the same—it is not all gynocentric. Traditionalism is a big basket of historical practices that may or may not be limiting of male self-determination. To simply say “All tradition is bad for men” is a blunt instrument that begs debunking. A better approach might be to ask, Which aspects of traditionalism are limiting to male freedoms?

“Traditional gender roles” is a more precise name for the problem, although it too suffers from lack of discrimination. Is it some traditional gender roles, most traditional gender roles, or all traditional gender roles that are bad? Was it bad for men to have the freedom to enjoy male-only fraternal organizations such as the Elks, Masons, Golden Fleece, and others,¹ or was it oppressive for men to have male-only drinking saloons, pool halls, or sporting clubs? These too were the result of traditional gender divisions.

To use a more controversial example, was it limiting of male self-determination for a woman to stay home during the first two years after giving birth (not beyond!) to breast-feed while the husband worked? Or to take this further, is it limiting for a couple of today to employ the same traditional role division, but reversed, whereby the father stays at home and bottle-feeds a baby while the woman works full-time?

Are not some aspects of role-division benign?

While I leave the answer to these questions open, I’m going to suggest that a much more precise term than either “traditionalism” or “traditional gender roles” would be traditional gynocentrism. Gynocentrism is the main perpetrator in limiting male freedom, and for that reason it is more precise to finger the gynocentric thread of traditionalism.

Moving beyond subjectivism
As a limiting principle, DOSBO delivers MGTOW from the meaninglessness of subjectivism, delivers it from the claim that MGTOW has no inherent meaning, or that it can mean whatever the hell a person wants it to mean. It gives a precise meaning with real meta ideological commitments. Whether or not DOSBO proves of wider value is not important, but it will hopefully stimulate discussion about what precisely are the things that all MGTOW hold in common.

Notes
[1] Edward Ward, The Secret History of Clubs, published 1709. [This is one of hundreds of titles detailing traditional male clubs, guilds, and fraternities. The examples given show that the clubs were riotous places of laughter, male bonding, drinking, inventing and collaborating on various projects, and above all were places to enjoy a little self-chosen freedom. Married and bachelor men alike participated, and in the majority of clubs no women were allowed to set foot].

Feature image by James Cridland

Gynocentric Culture Complex (GCC)

October 1, 2014April 22, 2023 / Peter Wright / Leave a comment