Post-gynocentrism culture: a counterculture or subculture?

July 13, 2014July 30, 2014 / rtbavfm / 1 Comment

By Peter Wright and Paul Elam

Post-gynocentric attitudes are entertained by an increasing number of people, and by groups like those focused on Men’s Human Rights Advocacy (MHRAs), Women Against Feminism (WAF), and Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW). While they all demonstrate a reaction against gynocentric culture, it’s an error to conceptualize them as engaging in countercultural activity alone.

It should be noted that countercultural involvement is not always conscious and may be an unintended byproduct of committments that clash with the dominant culture. There are few examples of this better than Men Going Their Own Way. They demonstrate a new model for culture, and comprise a peaceful subcultural demographic that is at once countercultural, simply by going about their lives within the larger society.

Before we get to what ‘going about their lives’ means, let’s first make a few distinctions.

To clarify the distinction between subculture and counterculture, the following passages from Howard P. Chudacoff’s book ‘The Age of the Bachelor’ are instructive. Chudacoff asks if the values, behaviors and institutions typical of bachelors comprise a subculture — in other words, a subset of the general culture — or whether they are part of a counterculture that openly conflicts with the general culture. He begins by defining the difference between subculture and counterculture:

“A subculture exists as a reasonably benign component of a more general culture. The defining characteristics of a subculture may include such qualities as age, ethnicity, region or occupation. The elderly, the Irish, southerner’s, and carpenters are all subcultures. As well, a subculture may consist of people tied to each other by mutual special interests, such as bird watching, gun ownership or vegetarianism. According to one authority, the most important element in distinguishing a subculture is the degree to which values, artifacts and identities are shared among members. Such sharing is normally enhanced by the extent of conscious social separation between members of the smaller behavioral group and members of the larger society. Thus hair color can characterize a group but in itself is not a strong enough criterion for special separation — though certain cohorts of redheads or blonds might disagree. Youth or an interest in bird watching, by contrast, more likely would be sufficient qualities to create a subculture.

In an article published in 1960, J. Milton Yinger, a sociologist and leading authority on subcultures, separated the distinguishing characteristics of subcultures into four types: (1) aspects of life, such as religion, language, diet, or moral values; (2) duration over a period of time; (3) a common origin; and (4) a mode of relationship –indifferent, positive, or conflictual– with the surrounding larger culture. Yinger also distinguished between two types of subcultures: (1) those groups characterized by ascriptive qualities that differentiate the group from the larger society, qualities such as language and religion; and (2) those groups with norms that arise specifically from tension or conflict between that group and the larger society, separate norms common to groups such as youth gangs or homosexuals. He dubbed the second type “contra cultures” which he notes could develop a series of inverse or counter values that stand in opposition to those of the larger society. The term “contra culture” evolved into “counterculture” in the 1960s.

“According to Yinger, practically every person is born into a culture and is automatically a member of several subcultures, but an individual must actively and voluntarily join a counterculture. Moreover, conflict constitutes an essential element in the concept of counterculture, and such conflict differentiates a counterculture from a subculture. As sociologist William Zellner has written, “A subculture is part of the dominant culture, but some aspects of the subculture’s value system and life-style sets its members apart from the marger culture…” That is, a subculture normally does not pose a threat to the dominant culture. A counterculture, on the other hand, “is deliberately opposed to certain aspects of the larger culture.” Yinger has added that to understand a subculture, it is not necessary to understand its interaction with the larger society. But a counterculture’s identities a product of such interaction and can be understood only through that relationship. [Chudacoff, pp.12-14]

The title of this article asks whether post-gynocentric culture is better defined as a counterculture, or subculture? After reading the definitions above, the answer is unmistakably Both. Post-gynocentric culture defines itself in resistance to gynocentric culture and operates as a peaceful subculture based on human rights, equality, and greater freedom of choice than the larger culture currently prescribes – meta-ideological commitments that may, based on their increasing popularity, become principles of the culture at large.

The confluence should hardly be surprising. The Man Going His Own Way usually works, pays taxes, goes to school, socializes with friends, generally obeys laws and is indistinguishable on the surface from his cultural and subcultural counterparts.

However, his personal rejection of marriage, sex based chivalry or treating what relationships he has with women as a financial obligation – as well as his steadfast refusal of sex-based expectations on his values and actions — are all practiced in rejection and defiance of the culture at large. He is, through his personal choice, participating in counterculture, and as such is furthering advocacy by example of lifestyle and consciousness that is “deliberately opposed to certain aspects of the larger culture,” per Yinger.

The charge that post-gynocentric culture (including MGTOW, WAF and the MHRM) is merely a reaction to feminism can be dismissed. Post-gynocentric culture can’t be reduced to antifeminism any more than the black civil rights movement can be reduced to being anti-white, or the gay rights movement being reduced to anti-heterosexuality.

These are grossly oversimplified rationalizations — more symptomatic of cultural prejudice and backlash than credible explanations for the post-gynocentric culture’s existence. It may, however, be said that the drumbeat of reductionism characterized by these misperceptions adds momentum to the countercultural reaction.

Sources:

Howard P. Chudacoff, The Age of The Bachelor: Creating an American Subculture.
Peter Wright, Gynocentrism and its Cultural Origins
Peter Wright, A Voice for Choice
Paul Elam, What feminism is really about and why anyone who values freedom should fight against it
Paul Elam, Counterculture
Dean Esmay, Breaking the pendulum: Tradcons vs. Feminists
Dean Esmay and Paul Elam, On the MHRM, MGTOW, and Creating a Counter-Culture
August Løvenskiolds, Freedom from gynocentrism in 12 Steps

Post-gynocentrism culture

July 10, 2014May 27, 2015 / rtbavfm / Leave a comment

The following articles appear on A Voice for Men, the most comprehensive post-gynocentrism advocacy website on the internet. Each article presents a post-gynocentrism paradigm for individual or collective existence. – PW

How to end gynocentrism
Gynocentrism – why so hard to kill?
Freedom from gynocentrism in 12 Steps
Breaking the pendulum: Tradcons vs. Feminists
Why anyone who values freedom should be fighting against feminism
A Voice for Choice
Gynocentrism and the hierarchy of entitlement
The Counterculture
MHRM: counterculture or subculture?
On creating a counter-culture
A little blood in the mix never hurt a revolution

Gynocentric etiquette for men (1847)

July 6, 2014July 6, 2014 / rtbavfm / 1 Comment

The following excerpts on the subject of male etiquette are from ‘Etiquette for Gentlemen, Or Short Rules and Reflections for Conduct in Society’ published in 1847. – PW

“If you see a lady whom you do not know, unattended, and wanting the assistance of a man, offer your services to her immediately. Do it with great courtesy, taking off your hat and begging the honour of assisting her.

“You should never ask a lady at the table to help you to anything, but always apply to the servants. Your first duty at the table is to attend to the wants of the lady who sits next to you; the second, to attend to your own. In performing the first, you should take care that the lady has all that she wishes, yet without appearing to direct your attention too much to her plate, for nothing is more ill-bred than to watch a person eating. If the lady be something of a gourmande, and in over-zealous pursuit of the aroma of the wing of a pigeon, should raise an unmanageable portion to her mouth, you should cease all conversation with her, and look steadfastly into the opposite part of the room.

“If you are walking with a woman in the country, — ascending a mountain or strolling by the bank of a river, — and your companion, being fatigued, should choose to sit upon the ground, on no account allow yourself to do the same, but remain rigorously standing. To do otherwise would be flagrantly indecorous and she would probably resent it as the greatest insult.

“If you speak for a short time to a woman of condition in the open air, intending to leave her immediately, you should remain uncovered unless she desires you twice to put on your hat. If you are walking with women, or standing with them for any length of time, in the air, keep your hat on.

“It is deemed a requisition of good breeding for a gentleman, when paying a visit, or when present at a small party, to stand up when ever the lady of the house rose to pass from one part of the room to another. When the lady rises near you, especially if she has been previously conversing with you, you should by all means rise.

SOURCE: Etiquette for Gentlemen, Or Short Rules and Reflections for Conduct in Society

Gynocentric etiquette for men

July 6, 2014June 3, 2017 / rtbavfm / Leave a comment

The following series will look at the gynocentric etiquette expected of men throughout recent centuries. Each post in the series will feature quotes from popular books and articles on the question of male etiquette toward women – in the home, on the street, and in various social settings.

1. Gynocentric etiquette for men (1847)
2. Gynocentric etiquette for men (1873)
3. Gynocentric etiquette for men (1897)
4. Gynocentric etiquette for men (1929)

[more parts in this series will be added as they are sourced]

Gynocentric ettiquette today:

5. [Study] Surveying Women’s Expectations of Chivalry
6. [Study] Courtly Love Today; Socialization in Interpersonal Scripts
7. Women speak about men paying for dinner dates

Gynocentric etiquette for men (1873)

July 4, 2014July 25, 2014 / rtbavfm / 3 Comments

The following excerpts on the subject of male etiquette are from ‘The Gentlemen’s Book of Etiquette and Manual of Politeness Being a Complete Guide for a Gentleman’s Conduct in all his Relations Towards Society’ published in 1873. – PW

“In the familiar intercourse of society, a well-bred man will be known by the delicacy and deference with which he behaves towards females. That man would deservedly be looked upon as very deficient in proper respect and feeling, who should take any physical advantage of one of the weaker sex, or offer any personal slight towards her. Woman looks, and properly looks, for protection to man. It is the province of the husband to shield the wife from injury; of the father to protect the daughter; the brother has the same duty to perform towards the sister; and, in general, every man should, in this sense, be the champion and the lover of every woman. Not only should he be ready to protect, but desirous to please, and willing to sacrifice much of his own personal ease and comfort, if, by doing so, he can increase those of any female in whose company he may find himself. Putting these principles into practice, a well-bred man, in his own house, will be kind and respectful in his behaviour to every female of the family. He will not use towards them harsh language, even if called upon to express dissatisfaction with their conduct. In conversation, he will abstain from every allusion which would put modesty to the blush. He will, as much as in his power, lighten their labors by cheerful and voluntary assistance. He will yield to them every little advantage which may occur in the regular routine of domestic life:—the most comfortable seat, if there be a difference; the warmest position by the winter’s fireside; the nicest slice from the family joint, and so on.

“In a public assembly of any kind, a well-bred man will pay regard to the feelings and wishes of the females by whom he is surrounded. He will not secure the best seat for himself, and leave the women folk to take care of themselves. He will not be seated at all, if the meeting be crowded, and a single female appear unaccommodated.

“A true gentleman never stops to consider what may be the position of any woman whom it is in his power to aid in the street. He will assist an Irish washerwoman with her large basket or bundle over a crossing, or carry over the little charges of a distressed negro nurse, with the same gentle courtesy which he would extend toward the lady who was stepping from her private carriage. The true spirit of chivalry makes the courtesy due to the sex, not to the position of the individual. When you are escorting a lady in the street, politeness does not absolutely require you to carry her bundle or parasol, but if you are gallant you will do so. You must regulate your walk by hers, and not force her to keep up with your ordinary pace. Watch that you do not lead her into any bad places, and assist her carefully over each crossing, or wet place on the pavement. If you are walking in the country, and pass any streamlet, offer your hand to assist your companion in crossing.

“If walking with a female relative or friend, a well-bred man will take the outer side of the pavement, not only because the wall-side is the most honorable side of a public walk, but also because it is generally the farthest point from danger in the street. If walking alone, he will be ready to offer assistance to any female whom he may see exposed to real peril from any source. Courtesy and manly courage will both incite him to this line of conduct. In general, this is a point of honor which almost all men are proud to achieve. It has frequently happened that even where the savage passions of men have been excited, and when mobs have been in actual conflict, women have been gallantly escorted through the sanguinary crowd unharmed, and their presence has even been a protection to their protectors. This is as it should be; and such incidents have shown in a striking manner, not only the excellency of good breeding, but have also brought it out when and where it was least to be expected.

“Civility is particularly due to all women; and, remember, that no provocation whatsoever can justify any man in not being civil to every woman; and the greatest man would justly be reckoned a brute if he were not civil to the meanest woman. It is due to their sex, and is the only protection they have against the superior strength of ours; nay, even a little is allowable with women: and a man may, without weakness, tell a women she is either handsomer or wiser than she is.

SOURCE: The Gentlemen’s Book of Etiquette and Manual of Politeness Being a Complete Guide for a Gentleman’s Conduct in all his Relations Towards Society

How to Break a Dialectic

May 25, 2014July 29, 2019 / rtbavfm / 3 Comments

Lecture No. 12

“Feminism helps men too!” – late 20th century folk saying

If you have spent even a short amount of time browsing the multitudinous websites and blogs of the Men’s Rights sphere, you will have no doubt encountered a feminist detractor or two asserting that “Not All Feminists Are Like That.” This has become so common that MRAs have taken to referencing this as the “NAFALT” defence. But should the claim be so readily dismissed? Depending on the context, the feminist might well be right. A hypothetical feminist who stumbled upon my last two posts, which point to the eventual outcome of feminism as the physical extermination of men, might well object that she does not hope for this future, and therefore is Not Like That – and she is not necessarily wrong.

Of course, our hypothetical feminist would not have read closely enough, for I clearly stated that the physical extermination of men is more likely to be attempted as the result of an organic process, beginning with hostile indifference, followed by active persecution through state bureaucracies, without the requirement that extermination be consciously articulated or advocated by any more than a small number of feminists. The others only need to go along with the programme; they do not need to understand where it will all end. At the heart of this is the dichotomy between Earnest and Radical Feminists.

On the face of it, this distinction seems to imply that, as feminists are fond of saying, feminism is not monolithic. In other words, some feminists might read from the gospel of Mary Daly, while others just want a fair deal for women. This is a more elaborate version of NAFALT, but it does not explain why two ostensibly conflicting ideologies are referred to by the same name: feminism. In fact, stating that feminism is non-monolithic sidesteps the issue of how all these different sub-feminisms relate to each other and to feminism as a whole. Would feminism still be feminism if one of its sub-feminisms were removed? Possibly. The death of eco-feminism would not spell disaster for feminism in general, or for any other sub-feminism in particular. But what about the two main prongs of feminism – Radical Feminism, which is openly misandric, and Earnest Feminism, whose supporters “just want a fair deal”? Could feminism survive the death of either of these? Or does the ideology as a whole owe its existence to their reciprocity? Is their relationship inherently and intrinsically symbiotic?

I contend that the differences between Earnest and Radical Feminists are superficial, accounting only for the perceived differences between feminists themselves. The intellectual distance between two feminists in disagreement might seem, to them, to be vast indeed; a philosophical Grand Canyon! But to non-feminists, who stand far away from them both, and observe feminism from a distance, the two bickering ideologues stand very close to each other. Yes, we can just about see them on the horizon – two small figures, shouting over a pothole!

The feminist, having automatically ruled out the legitimacy of any space that is non-feminist, perceives feminism as the whole world, and on this tiny plane of existence, the interval of a few feet is colossal – large enough to justify drawing a chalk line on the ground, and saying, “that is your space, this is mine, and we are not like each other! Certainly, we are not a monolith!” But, to the non-feminist, who is not blinkered by ideology, and thus perceives much more of the world generally, the feminists in the distance are standing nearly on top of each other as they quarrel over their claims to a small piece of land.

In other words: the distance between objects becomes more significant the closer you get to them. And if you pay no attention to anything that is not those objects, then those objects will appear to be the entire world! And thus any distance between them will seem enormous, because you lack any sense of scale. Feminists are not in any kind of position to know how much they differ from each other, from the perspective of the non-feminist world; they cannot judge because they lack the prerequisite non-feminism.

So when a feminist tries to pass off the elaborated NAFALT defence, as apologia for herself or for the atrocious behavior of her sisters, you must remind her that she is in no position to judge how far she differs from other feminists! The differences she perceives might seem very significant from her own subjective point of view, but she must be made to understand that she is a participant in the social organism called feminism, that she speaks from within the big tent, and thus has absolutely no right to tell us how we should look at the tent from outside! The non-feminist world, you must explain, experiences the force of feminism from one direction in particular, and when we turn to look in that direction, we see infallibly that the Earnest Feminist stands proudly, side by side, with the Radical.

Now, I would presume that such an arrangement as exists between Earnest and Radical Feminists is one of necessity. Feminism requires both the acceptable public face of the salesman (trustworthy, just trying to make an honest living), and the momentum, that inner drive that keeps the whole show running (greasy, oiled palms on the factory floor). Neither could exist without the other. If only the public face of Earnest Feminism existed, it would get nowhere, because there would be no molten core of misandry, no dynamo at its centre to motivate action. On the other hand, if only the combustion engine of Radical Feminism existed, the movement would fold overnight, being exposed immediately as the politics of hate. Without the engine, all you would have is an object that looks nice but goes nowhere. Forget the paintwork, and nobody would want to buy it.

Whatever it is, feminism must be marketable if it is going to be successful – so its marketability alone cannot tell us anything about what it is.

Earnestness and Radicalism are two sides of the same feminist coin. The dichotomy allows for Radical attacks against men, followed up by the Earnest defence that feminism is a nice doctrine, or at least it is not monolithic, and anyway, anyone who is against it “just hates women.” The two sides fit together like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, the picture only making sense when they are combined.

Yes, feminism is one single, simple entity, monolithic in its aspirations, merely presenting different faces depending on context. The various manifestations of feminism, whether intended for public consumption or not, hold in common the constant that they seek to increase the power of women. This is the locus, the centre of gravity of feminism – whether it appears as a belief in innate female superiority, or as the aspiration to female domination in material terms, the actualization of female power will be present in some form or other. Without this epicentre, around which all else revolves, the movement could not survive; its sudden implosion would send its members spinning out of orbit in all different directions. The only thing which binds feminists together is the belief that the status of women must be elevated and the status of men must be relegated; that women must be made more superior, and men more inferior. Beyond this, there are only side issues, arguments which have no bearing on the primary thesis of female supremacy. These side issues are a distraction for the outside world, allowing for feminism to remain intact and coherent even when its activists appear to run into disputes.

Now, we are already clear on the aims of Radical Feminists. I have already described the plans they have for men and maleness. Radicals are content for all men to be exterminated or enslaved. They have openly declared war on men, and the future, if they get their way, can be summed up by the infamous pictures of Lynndie England, in her little soldier’s outfit, sexually humiliating naked men, using dogs to attack their genitals, and so on. The Radical Feminist dreams of this abuse, not confined to an Iraqi prison, but normalized across the world. The victims would not be Iraqis, as Iraqis, but men, as men. Much like the Army personnel who imagined that they were delivering Collective Punishment to members of a collectively guilty class of people at Abu Ghraib, Radical Feminists believe in the concept of Collective Male Guilt, and in the necessity of delivering punishment to all men.

In the Radical Feminist mind, all men are guilty, inherently, as men. “All men are rapists” is not just a relic of the past; it is the horizon that Radical Feminism is pushing us towards. By this, I do not mean that all men will become rapists, but that all men will be indicted as rapists. Any punishment, then, no matter how extreme, will become justified against this class of heinous abusers and violators. (Note that, in one of the Abu Ghraib torture pictures, the soldiers have written “I am a rapeist (sic)” onto the thigh of one of their victims – even though it was the soldiers themselves who were carrying out the rapes. The parallel to Radical Feminism is chilling.)

We know this about Radical Feminists, but what about those who “aren’t like that” – namely, the Earnest Feminists? It is true enough that many, perhaps most, Earnest Feminists do not look forward to a future in which men are enslaved or exterminated. Their role is not to dispossess men and shove them into prisons, but to convince us that there is no sex war. Even as men are imprisoned, tortured and murdered by state agents acting in the name of feminism, Earnest Feminists will pretend that there is not a war happening. Indeed, the effectiveness of the feminist project depends on the misperception that a war is not happening. They frame this desperate situation as something other than it is: progress towards equality, opening up dialogues, liberating people from restrictive gender roles, and so on.

No. This is a war, and it is one that feminists have openly declared. The true insidiousness of feminists becomes most apparent when we consider that, having declared war, they proceeded to demand that their enemy combatants show them respect, continue to protect them, and provide for their wellbeing. The duplicitousness in pretending that a war is not happening even as one wages it is a necessary element of the feminist way of war. Chivalry must be sustained if feminism is to advance. Women’s wellbeing must remain a priority for men. If it is not – if men en masse suddenly became cognizant of the war that has been declared on them, they would organize and found permanent initiatives to defend themselves. They would seek to remove female privilege. There would be no guarantee that they would stop once parity has been restored to men and women, but could even continue to push against women – it is difficult to know what would happen in such a situation!

A sex war, fought in traditional warlike style, in which men showed up to fight in the same numbers as women, would undoubtedly result in male victory, owing to men’s physical strength and aptitude for technical mastery. A war fought in traditional style, then, would be a losing strategy for feminists. They must wage war in a different way, which necessarily involves the active denial that war is happening. But what about the very language of “the gender war”? Was this not born of feminist rhetoric? It was, indeed, but it belongs to that period of recent history before men were willing to stand up for themselves. Men began standing up to misandry at a critical point of feminist development – that point when explicit hatred reached an apex then quickly died down. The ‘third wave’ was born. Ostensibly a new version of feminism, the only real difference between the third and previous ‘waves’ is the level of rhetorical discipline. No more do we hear of a war against men (at least, not from the Earnest Feminists), and yet the war continues unabated. And when men react to the war against them, as though it is a war, they are informed that feminism is just about equality, and the act of fighting back against their persecutors makes them horrible misogynists.

After tearing apart entire cities and cultures, after having ground countless men down beneath their tank treads, the feminist army is confronted by one man who has picked up a rock, ready to throw it. Teary-eyed, her lower lip trembling, the batallion leader cries out, “stop being so hateful!”

The transition from second to third wave has not made feminism any less hostile or hateful. This was a superficial change, a rhetorical rejigging – the plastering of makeup onto the public face for public consumption. While the feminists of the second wave openly admitted to hating all men, modern day Earnest Feminists recognize certain categories of men who are not deserving of hatred – conjuring up exceptions to more easily maintain the general rule. Earnest Feminists are less likely to say “I hate men,” and are more likely to say “I only hate those men who are abusive or not active against abusive men.” Still, this is practically all men. Men who are neither abusive nor active against abusive men are the hated vast majority – the general rule. Of course, there are innumerable reasons why a man might not devote his time to being active against abusive men – he might not even have that free time, unlike your typical college feminist. We need not explore the reasons why a man would not be actively against abusive men. It suffices to say that he has no moral obligation to be, particularly since war has been declared on him, and the very people he is being called on to protect are those who wish to destroy him. It is pure female entitlement – Gynocentric privilege – to expect that men should act as their personal bodyguards. And those men who are active against abusive women are not admired for their contributions to humanity, of course – they are hated all the more for it.

Earnest Feminists are not necessarily conscious of their role as denialists. They do not need to be. They fulfil the role just as effectively when they believe themselves to be something else. It might be thought, then, that Earnest Feminists have been misguided, manipulated even, by the Radicals. But keep in mind that they are only as Earnest as they are Feminist. Yes, they are still feminists, and have not been ‘tricked’ into this identity. It is an identity freely chosen. The Earnest Feminist, remember, stands side by side with the Radical; the former too will Kafka-trap you, she will falsely accuse you, she will tar your sex with one broad stroke. The difference between Earnest and Radical Feminists can be summed up as follows: while the Radical openly encourages and celebrates the spreading of misandry, the Earnest Feminist trivializes, excuses and justifies it. Beyond this, there is no difference, and both seek to increase the power of women over that of men.

Without the Earnest Feminist’s false demeanor of reasonableness, feminism would have made no progress. As counter-feminists, we must recognize that the appearance of reasonableness from anybody identifying as ‘feminist’ is a ruse. Behind the façade is ideological motive, not the capacity for compromise; the desire to dominate discussion, not to work towards collective solutions; anti-male emotionalism, not impartial rationality. One typical Earnest Feminist ploy is to cry “try to see things from my perspective” – implying fairness, neutrality, objectivity, and so on. And yet she has no intention of trying to see things from your perspective, because you are not a feminist, and non-feminist perspectives are by definition illegitimate. What she means is not “let’s both try to see things from each others’ perspectives,” but “I’ll see things from my perspective; you see things from my perspective too.”

Earnest Feminists exercise a form of control that Radicals cannot, because the latter have abandoned all pretence to impartiality. For Earnest Feminists, this is only a pretence, because the ideology trumps all. Only a ‘compromise’ which fully adheres to feminist doctrine could be acceptable.

Of course, certain Earnest Feminists go further than this, and imply that they have already incorporated mens’ perspectives into their programme: “feminism helps men too!” It’s a fair bet that you’ll never hear Radicals uttering such nonsense, because harming men is their conscious intention and one that they are open about. Still, the Earnest Feminists might genuinely believe that this is an accurate statement, as they are not necessarily conscious of the harmful effects that feminism necessarily has on men. But this does not make it sincere. A sincere approach to “helping men too” would involve actually asking men how they might best be helped, and then incorporating these answers into the agenda. Instead, Earnest Feminist practice involves telling men what will help them,

without deeming it necessary to canvass any more than a handful of marginal pro-feminist males.

The feminist idea of “help” is rooted in Patriarchy Theory – that is, it is rooted in the same animosity towards men which is the cause of the problems that a sizable number of men actually identify as problems. To put it another way, the cure is just more of the disease. Given that feminists fundamentally cannot accept the culpability of their own movement in causing or contributing towards anything negative, they will only ever locate the cause of men’s problems in social phenomena which are not feminism. Feminism will not accept even the smallest share of the blame for the oppressive conditions it has brought directly into existence. Men’s problems may only be traced back to men themselves, and hence to historical Patriarchy.

It is for this reason that, when Earnest Feminists claim that feminism “helps men too,” you do not then see them lobbying against false rape accusations or for equal paternity rights. On the contrary, that kind of lobbying would damage feminist interests; men are of secondary concern, and may only be helped up from those problems that they have caused for themselves. Hence, the terrible tragedy of men not being allowed to wear dresses, even while women can comfortably walk around in pants, is infallibly the number one priority of an Earnest Feminist who sets out to “help men too.” The fact that the overwhelming majority of men do not care about this issue and are not personally affected by it is irrelevant; it can be traced back to an impression of Patriarchy, and is also a good excuse to promote emasculation. Earnest Feminists, like Radicals, pathologize normal masculinity. They blame men for not wanting to wear dresses; i.e. they blame men for not having the problems that they tell us we should have. It is, so they say, male-enforced social conditioning that makes men “afraid” of appearing feminine. All evidence suggests that the vast majority of men have greater problems than this, and do not live in fear of appearing feminine. But that’s what fits the feminist narrative.

The notion that feminism is helping to “liberate both sexes from rigid gender roles” is particularly laughable, considering that feminism is entirely dependent upon men being forced to retain their traditional role of protector and provider. That has been covered elsewhere.

When men do attempt to raise their own concerns, feminists refuse to recognize them. They victim-blame – e.g. “men are responsible for their own problems” – and attempt to shift discussion back to what they think our problems should be. In effect, men are denied the right to decide what their own problems are. Our real problem, Earnest Feminists earnestly explain, is that we are just too male. Despite what we may claim our problems are – that maleness is increasingly curtailed, that maleness is pathologized, that maleness has become grounds for acceptable discrimination – the feminist response is that maleness actually is pathological and needs to be curtailed even further.

How is it that feminism “helps men,” by ascribing negative attributes to maleness? Tell me, was anybody ever helped by others ascribing negative attributes to him? Or would you say that this harms him? Feminism “helps men” by encouraging them to stop being men; to renounce their nature; to hate themselves; to believe that their sexuality is inherently flawed and a force for evil. What help this is!

Here’s a fun little juxtaposition:

“What it boils down to is this: Men, not women, need to be the ones creating the spaces to discuss men’s issues.”

Quote from finallyfeminism101 weblog

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qodygTkTUYM&w=420&h=315](Video: Feminists Disrupt a Forum About Battered Husbands)

Get the picture? It’s a game that law enforcement have been playing for decades. The ‘good cop’ is reasonable, even sympathetic, though of course, he insists that the responsibility for your crime rests entirely with you. The ‘bad cop’ will just scream at you until you give yourself up. And when you finally do just give up, because you’ve been ground down, you mutter your complaints, and the good cops over at finallyfeminism101 will remind you of what they said all along: that you need to be the one taking responsibility for discussing your own issues. See how that works? It’s not their fault. It’s yours.

Yes, Earnest Feminists have supported Radical proposals every step of the way – whether this involves denying men paternity rights, or creating rape shield laws to deny exculpatory evidence and more efficiently lock up innocent men, or diverting stimulus packages from men hit by recession to women who had not even lost their jobs. The only level at which Earnest Feminists disagree significantly with Radicals is the rhetorical. A Radical might say “kill all men,” and an Earnest Feminist might say “I don’t agree with that,” but she will go ahead and advocate that the healthcare gap be increased further, with the full knowledge that men continue to die earlier and suffer worse health overall.

Earnest Feminists distance themselves from the extremist rhetoric of the Radicals, but this is just how the dialectic works – you reach the goal slowly, bit by bit, by getting the other side to compromise with your moderate wing. Earnest Feminists are the good cops – the ones you want to strike a deal with before those nasty bad cops get back. What’s often missed is that they are all cops. Compromise with the moderate Earnest Feminists on one issue, and the centre ground shifts: now the deal you struck is taken for granted, and the radical fantasy is a step closer. What do Earnest Feminists do then? Rest on their laurels, content with the compromise they reached? No, they see the opportunity to get even more for women, and so they advocate for more. A compromise is reached again, and the centre ground shifts further towards radicalism.

Fortunately, I know of a way to break a dialectic, and that is to plant your feet firmly in the ground and refuse to budge an inch. Absolutely refuse to compromise on any issue. It’s as simple as that. Just keep in mind that behind the veneer of reasonableness is ideological motive, which will shift reality closer to the radical fantasy in which you are actively persecuted. If you can keep that in mind, it becomes very easy to refuse even the slightest compromise with a feminist.

Ultimately, feminists should be ignored. There is no use attempting to debate them, because their ideological motive trumps the possibility of admitting wrongness. Remember that feminist ideology is adopted in order to satiate violent, vindictive emotions, not as a result of logical thought. Those we should make an effort to appeal to are non-feminists, but they are not counter-feminists. That is, they are not yet activated in the struggle against feminism. One could split people up into three categories as follows:

Revolutionaries (counter-feminists)
Reactionaries (feminists)
Civilians (non-feminists)

The goal, then, is to recruit civilians to the counter-feminist side before the feminist camp gets to them. Given the rapid and exponential growth of the Men’s Rights Movement, we are clearly already enjoying success in this regard.

Adam

Further Reading:

Katherine K. Young & Paul Nathanson. Spreading Misandry (extract)

Magdelyn. Feminism Helps Men Too?

Fidelbogen. A Wooly Lamb for the MRA Wolves

GYNOCENTRISM THEORY LECTURE SERIES:
1. Staring Out From the Abyss
2. The Same Old Gynocentric Story
3. Refuting the Appeal to Dictionary
4. Pig Latin
5. Anatomy of a Victim Ideology
6. Old Wine, New Bottles
7. The Personal, as Contrasted to the Political
8. Chasing Rainbows
9. False Consciousness & Kafka-Trapping
10. The Eventual Outcome of Feminism, Part I
11. The Eventual Outcome of Feminism, Part II
12. How to Break a Dialectic

The Eventual Outcome of Feminism, Part II

May 25, 2014June 6, 2020 / rtbavfm / Leave a comment

Lecture No. 11

“Propaganda, as inverted patriotism, draws nourishment from the sins of the enemy. If there are no sins, invent them! The aim is to make the enemy appear so great a monster that he forfeits the rights of a human being.” – Sir Ian Hamilton

The physical destruction of maleness is the logical outcome of feminist governance. The more feminist governance exists, the more anti-male persecution there will be, and the closer to Holocaust we will find ourselves. More feminism will not result in greater sexual equality. More feminism is not the solution to the problems addressed by Men’s Rights Activists. Feminism is the problem. How could it be otherwise?

Feminists believe that a debt is owed to them by all men, and they are perfectly content to recover this debt in blood and suffering. No matter how much pain they inflict unto the world, it will never be enough to satiate their violent, vindictive emotions. Rather, the more harm they inflict upon men, the more normalized this becomes, and – like a drug addiction – they will need ever greater ‘highs’ to satisfy the hate, culminating in the Final Punishment, the total eradication of men.

Note that I am not mincing words. I will not tread lightly around this subject. I will not resort to euphemism or conceal my message ‘between the lines’. I will not leave you with the mere implication that Male Holocaust is the eventual outcome of feminism, before quickly moving on to talk about other things, as though airing the idea should be an embarrassment for the speaker. I am fully aware that mine is a marginal view of feminism, and may be considered by some to be ‘extreme’, but then the widespread misunderstanding and misrepresentation of what feminism is is just another symptom of the sickness I am describing. I will state, quite openly, that this is the conclusion I have reached, having considered all the available evidence, and it is a conclusion I would encourage nobody to take lightly.

The imminent attempted eradication of half the human race calls for writing unimbued by flippancy or fancy. It does not permit me to enter into civil discussion with those who will be attempting said eradication or cheering it on from the sidelines. There is no object in a respectful exchange of views with such people; the very idea appears, to me, to be an ugly parody of truly civilized discourse – sort of like Neville Chamberlain trying to appease Adolf Hitler. No, my aim is to convince as many people as possible that this is, indeed, the truth, and thus to propel them to do whatever they can to stop a humanitarian disaster before it begins. To that end, I shall tell it like it is, and call out the enemies of humanity as I see them – and they are feminists, who are even now, as you read these words, beavering away at stamping that official seal onto their key tenet of Collective Male Guilt.

No matter how far down the rabbit hole she has gone, the feminist is cognizant, at some level, of the fact that a person must have actually committed a crime in order to be guilty of it. Initially, this fact appears before her, phantomlike, as an inconvenient truth, a sticking point, an irritant – like a lump in the throat, or a speck in the eye, that simply will not go away. This irritating truth is a logical interceptor, a pile of debris left on the tracks. She wonders: must I stop and turn around? Can my feminism, this wonderful vehicle for my catharsis, be reconciled with my assumptions of human individuality and legal impartiality? Of course it cannot, and if she remains a feminist, she abandons the latter.

Treating individuals as individuals destroys any legitimate appeal to Collective Guilt and Collective Punishment, and vice versa: subscribing to notions of Collective Guilt and Collective Punishment negates the possibility of treating individuals as individuals. Having made her choice, she ignores this truth, that individuals must individually commit acts to be held individually accountable for them. It becomes irrelevant; revenge is higher on her list of priorities. Individual responsibility has ceased to matter for her, and it must cease to matter for others also. Those who remind her of it are attacked (cue the shaming tactics), and eventually, the fact itself is attacked. Individual responsibility is the product of false consciousness; all men carry guilt. Biological essentialism, once the stock in trade of the fascist far right, is resurrected as justifier of the authoritarian New Left.

Feminists are uninterested by truth. They do not formulate their principles based upon analysis of collected truths. The starting point for all feminism is misandric emotion, and subsequent principles are formulated upon this. Truth is largely incidental. It is greatly appreciated when it appears to coincide with feminist arguments, and outright attacked when it does not; otherwise, it is irrelevant. Facts are a tool of the patriarchy; feminism aims to elevate subjective passions and wills to the lofty quarters previously reserved for what can be objectively verified.

Detractors remain, of course, pointing out the awkward, inconvenient, irrefutable truths. For instance: even if we accept the fallacious claim that one in four women gets raped, that would imply that, at most, one in four men commit rape, assuming that each rapist commits only one rape. But this is not very realistic, since we know that there are serial rapists, whose recidivism would drive the number of guilty parties down significantly. Could anybody who touts the ‘one in four’ figure realistically disagree with this assessment? Such people are forced to conclude, with us, that at least three quarters of men have never and will never rape anybody; in other words, they are demonstrably not rapists. Is it not monstrous, then, to tar one hundred percent of a demographic with the crimes of less than a quarter? Perhaps we should hold rallies, in the style of Take Back The Night and so on, in which we chant “three-in-four! Three-in-four!” until people get the message that the overwhelming majority of men are not rapists and do not deserve to be labelled as such. What do you think?

Whatever the case, Collective Guilt appears to be ruled out – but we underestimate feminist creativity. While some of feminism’s more demented followers have asserted that “all sex is rape” – making nearly all men into rapists for having engaged in consensual sex at some point, including that initiated by women – most of the ‘third wave’ has gravitated to a phony rationalization that a ‘rape culture’ persists among men en masse. Rape culture doctrine holds that, although a minority of men in fact commit the act of rape, the other seventy-five percent (or, if we are being realistic, a significantly higher percentage) are cheering them on from the sidelines, deriving pleasure vicariously from the knowledge that women are being sexually attacked. Collective Guilt is secured.

The truth – that men are more histrionic than women when it comes to rape claims – is immaterial and can be safely denied or ignored. Further examples of feminist creativity – finding innovative ways to blame all men for the crimes of a small number – can be found for every subject that they write about. I will not list them here because our discussion must move on. It will suffice to say that all such creativity resolves to the myth of ‘the patriarchy’ – that individual men who do not control or abuse women nevertheless, somehow, simply because they are men, actively support the processes through which other men do control women. The only thing that a man must do to be guilty of this is to be male; ergo, by existing, he is guilty. All feminist male-blaming creativity is a variation on this bio-essentialist theme, and all of it serves to legitimize Collective Guilt and Collective Punishment.

The feminist process of destroying men and maleness will not necessarily follow a defined plan. It does not have to! To this very day, historians continue to debate whether there was ever a direct order given for the Final Solution, or if the Holocaust was the result of cumulative radicalization within the totalitarian, anti-Semetic state bureaucracy of Nazi Germany. It is at least conceivable, then, that the murder of millions can be achieved organically, after a significant period of demonization which leaves most of the population indifferent (if not hostile) towards the scapegoat. Very few people are actually needed to carry out a genocide – typically less than ten percent of a population, often less than five. Indifference is all that is required of the remainder.

Having said this, there is at least one explicit plan for Male Holocaust, which was emphatically not written as a satire, even if its author later brushed off troubling questions with this claim. While the SCUM Manifesto is remembered today as a bizarre relic which in no way represented mainstream feminism at any time, it’s worth pointing out that the text only achieved ‘classic’ status because of its overwhelming popularity. Even if we were to contort ourselves into believing that Valerie Solanas intended the text as a joke, we cannot believe the same about her followers. Of these, perhaps the most famous would be Robin Morgan, who included excerpts from SCUM in her anthology Sisterhood is Powerful, and stated her sincere aim that the “Feminist Revolution” would achieve not “some false state of equality,” but “a proud gynocratic world.”

Still, SCUM hardly contains the blueprints for male extermination. The feminist project has not followed SCUM to the letter, though this is perhaps because there is no letter to follow. The text is more statement than program; it is the violent, vindictive emotionalism laid bare, the ugly face of feminism unmasked, the dissected contents of a dirty bomb formerly disguised as a birthday present. In the long run, the publication of SCUM has probably benefited anti-feminists most of all. It is proof positive that feminism is, at least in part, supportive of female supremacy and the elimination of men; and that such views, when initially aired, were received with enough support from the feminist sector to make the book famous. Would feminists today be so dismissive of SCUM if anti-feminists had not seized on it as evidence?

To get back on track: while there certainly are individuals working within state bureaucracies whose chief aim in life is to make men suffer – and indeed, government departments have been set up for this very purpose – an official order to eliminate men has not (yet) been given, as far as we know. But one does not need to be given, for the situation may come about organically.

For decades, males have been subject to the worst possible demonization in mass media – including, earlier this year, the portrayal of newborn babies as inherently evil, rapists-in-waiting. The slurs made against all men, which cannot possibly be justified on the grounds of deterring that small number of men disposed to committing crimes, are typical of a dehumanization campaign.

The aims of this long hate crusade are threefold. First, that women, being exposed to the endlessly repeating feminist hate loop, will adopt the view that men are violent, inhumane oppressors, and are therefore deserving of whatever evil they suffer. Although most women will initially oppose this message, the endlessly repeating hate loop, because it is so persistent and pervasive, eventually breaks down psychological resistance. Once the hate loop had gathered enough momentum to carry itself, and was becoming bigger all the time, like a snowball rolling down a hill, then our cultural guardians needed only to intervene occasionally in order to fine-tune its content. E.g. it was not enough for a woman to only fear ‘strange men’; it had to be transmitted to her that her own husband, her father, her son, etc., are activated cells in ‘the patriarchy’ which is oppressing her, that they are each a ‘potential rapist,’ and so on.

The second aim of the dehumanization campaign is to get men to turn on each other. That this forms part of feminist methodology is not surprising, since exploitation of masculinity and male physical muscle, to be used against other men for the benefit of women, is the central plank of historical Gynocentrism. In addition to appealing to powerful men to pass punitive legislation enabling the brutalization of their less powerful brethren, feminists drive wedges between common men. By promoting to men the message that their own sex is full of rapists, abusers and pedophiles, men will be less inclined to identify with other men, or with men in general, and will feel much less in the way of mutual support or sympathy.

Even as the sexual grievance industry indefinitely expands the meanings of emotive words like ‘rape,’ ‘violence’ and ‘pedophilia,’ any man accused (not even charged, let alone convicted) of any of these acts becomes a persona non grata among his own sex. Even worse, the falsely accused man (or the man ‘guilty’ under the new definitions of these terms) finds himself on the receiving end of vigilante justice by outraged men who have swallowed the feminist line that male abusers are rampant everywhere (therefore this accused man must be guilty). When the falsely accused and the newly criminalized are being loaded onto train cars for deportation to death camps, men who have not yet been accused will turn their heads, consoling themselves with the thought that those men must be abusers, and so they are deserving of whatever happens to them. The men who have not yet been accused are lulled into a false sense of security, believing that they will be safe, so long as they continue to obey the feminist state.

The third aim of the dehumanization campaign is to normalize brutality against men. Feminists are boiling a frog, as the proverb goes. The cumulative brutalization of men occurs in increments, each of which appears to be objectionable, but not appallingly so (except, perhaps, to those who are paying close enough attention to perceive the creeping despotism). Already, we have surpassed situations which would have caused men to pour onto the streets in revolt had they been achieved in one fell swoop – the enslavement of men by family courts and child support laws, rape trials held in secret and without a jury in Sweden, the negation of the presumption of innocence for men in several states, mandatory arrest laws for men who call the police because their girlfriends have stuck knives in their chests, men being incarcerated and sold into sexual slavery in debtor’s prisons because their wives were bored, and so on.

As the brutalization of men becomes the norm, practised by more people, a greater number of misandrists will become emboldened to act out their hate. Feminism does not entail men ‘losing privileges,’ or suffering for a little while until the sexes are in balance and life becomes a perfect harmony. The more feminism, the worse things will be for men, right up to the point of extermination. The level of persecution corresponds precisely to the level of feminist governance. When a great mass of feminist bureaucrats set to work, finding innovative ways to persecute men, the individual feminist bureaucrat realizes that there is no limit to what she can get away with.

I would like to talk a little more about exactly why this is. From its earliest days, feminism was envisioned as a cultural war. Making misandric persecution a reality meant that the dehumanization and brutalization of men had to become normalized phenomena – background noise, those aspects of existence nobody bats an eyelid at, those facts of life that adults resign themselves to, the unpleasantness of which can be explained away by defeatist mantras like “it’s just the way things are,” “it sucks but what can we do about it,” and “men and women are different, so just man up and take it.” Creating this kind of hostile indifference towards Men’s Rights was necessary because it is the foundation upon which active persecution stands. Saying that hostile indifference has become normalized is another way of saying that it is normal for people to practise hostile indifference. In other words, enough people practise hostile indifference for it to be considered normal. That is, a great number of people practise hostile indifference, and are not taken to task for it, because it is sufficiently widespread to rule out the possibility of individuals being taken to task for it.

What we have, then, is hostile indifference towards men as a characteristic of the social organism as a whole, and it is within state bureaucracies that feminists congregate to build active persecution upon this normalized hostile indifference. The hostility and indifference towards men allows them to get away with this, because it affords each misandric individual anonymity and irresponsibility. She did not create this situation; she is not personally responsible for it. She is not the only one pushing for active persecution; everyone else is (at least) indifferent in this regard, and anyway, there are plenty of others working in the same field. Being pre-emptively ‘let off the hook’ through anonymity and irresponsibility, the individual feminist forms part of a collective mob whose members can indulge in a sentiment of invincible power, allowing them to yield to emotions which would otherwise have been restrained. Purely numerical considerations – strength in numbers – enable the individual operator to evade all questions of guilt and culpability. They become mere cogs whose existence and purpose is nonsensical when abstracted from the greater machine. They simply do as they are told, they simply ‘go along with’ what everyone else is doing – ostensibly harmless, unremarkable, dutiful.

Where a state seeks to achieve some ideological goal, its bureaucracy becomes the archetypal model of human consciousness overwhelmed by crowd psychology. Every collective acts collectively, that is, without pausing to allow the individuals to reflect, without consulting the individuals, without requiring that they give their enthusiastic assent. The collective acts with immediacy, according to its will, leaving absolutely no room for criticism from individuals within or without. Individuals within the collective act as all the others do. They are, by definition, anonymous and unaccountable. Excited by an idea, and indulging in the power of numbers, a collective does not allow or admit that anything could prevent the fulfilment of its will.

The feminist mob acts in the same way that all ideology-based collectives do – by magnifying the miniscule transgressions made against the collective, and trivializing atrocities perpetrated against others. An almost perfect example of this comes from the feminist website Sociological Images. First, the magnification of the miniscule. In September 2010, one of the site’s authors announced her outrage that a line of rulers (i.e. measuring sticks) commemorating great scientists in history included Marie Curie under the heading “Great Women Rulers of Science.” A horrific injustice, this is not. Still, at this point, we might simply assume that those habituating the blog are fragile people, finding themselves easily offended by much in life – we might think that they would feel the same way if they stumbled upon some equivalent version of these rulers with the sexes reversed.

We might think this is the case, until we scroll down to the comment section and find an accusation that Paul Elam’s A Voice for Men site is nothing but a load of “whining.” Now, in the two weeks prior to that comment being made, A Voice for Men had discussed the following:

A police state that arrests and incarcerates male victims of domestic violence and enables female perpetrators to continue criminal behavior; a ten to one death gap concerning capital punishment that works against men; a five to one death gap against men related to suicide; the staggering attrition of males in higher education and employment; the utter lack of reproductive rights for men, and the incidence of false rape allegations against men which even the police are calling epidemic.

At first glance, the cognitive dissonance is astounding. Could the feminist really have dismissed discussion of such human interest issues as these, while her own counter-movement has nothing more offensive to talk about but the headings on rulers (which actually highlight, not obscure, the fact that there have been great female scientists)?

As Paul succinctly puts it, “women’s whining = pursuit of justice. Men’s pursuit of justice = whining.” In following this simple maxim, feminists adhere perfectly to the dark elements of crowd psychology: magnifying the miniscule when it concerns them, and trivializing atrocities when these are committed against others.

Like all other collectives governed by the principles of crowd psychology, feminists have a tendency towards the power of suggestion: that an idea only needs to be spoken aloud for it to be taken as the gospel truth. Of course, this only works with certain types of ideas – most obviously, those which aid in magnifying the miniscule, but certainly not the ones that draw attention to the non-trivial atrocities suffered by others. It matters not that the cries of rape advocates – “one in four!” – are based on a study, the methodology of which is so flawed that any serious researcher would have transferred it directly from the printer and into the big round file. Young women will continue to pour onto the streets chanting it – “one in four! One in four!” – why? Because it serves the crowd to have been transgressed against in such a way, because it provides them with those feelings of righteous indignation which serve as a springboard from which they may launch the active persecution of the targeted class. No individual need bother checking the facts, and the crowd would not pay any attention to one who did anyway. As an example of this power of suggestion in action within a feminist state bureaucracy, we need look no further than the United Kingdom’s former Minister for Women and Equality, Harriet Harman, who was eventually ordered by a judge to stop spinning the lie that rape has only a six percent conviction rate. Even then, rape advocacy groups like Women Against Rape have continued to refer to this completely invented figure. Evidencing one’s claims is a trifling matter, and one subordinated to the necessity of exciting the mob.

The power of suggestion is particularly pronounced in the feminist crowd because it is mostly composed of women, and women are more impressionable than men. This is not an inherent difference between the sexes, but a socialized defect. A lifetime of privilege, of parasitic exploitation and entitlement, of juicing the fruits of another’s labor, has left many women devoid of character, with unrealistic views of the world which leave them open to certain kinds of manipulation that men are not so easily taken in by. Feminism is ideological snake oil, and impressionable women are its customers. If an idea excites them, if that one-in-four statistic sends a shiver down their spines, if it causes them to feel something so strongly, then there must be at least an element of truth to it – so the unconscious mental processes go. How could something that is not real affect her in a way that feels so real? Impossible, one would think. Once feminists understood and appreciated the malleability of women, they had merely to present astounding statistics which, when recited endlessly, to the point that they become background noise, exist on some plane beyond truth and falsehood, the plane of popular consensus, and so cannot be refuted by the evidence that most men would have asked for upon originally hearing the claims.

For the same reason, we find the tendencies among feminists to simplify, and to go immediately to extremes. An exceptional instance of violence against women becomes, for feminists, the rule which is practised against all women, everywhere. A college student making a rape joke to his fraternity brothers becomes a microcosm of society as a whole. On that note, making a rape joke is the same thing, for feminists, as condoning the actual rape of human beings. There is no room for nuance, no accounting for the thousand shades of grey that exist between black and white; only the two colors perceived by monochrome Manichean Essentialists. A rape joke could conceivably and consistently be made by people spanning the entire spectrum of opinion on rape, in the same way that people can make jokes about dead babies, tasteless though they may be, without necessarily supporting or contributing towards infanticide. This is common sense stuff, but common sense stuff does not excite the passions of ideological mobs. Collectives such as feminism rely, for their shared understanding, on a fundamental lack of nuance – to infallibly appeal to all its adherents, an ideological collective must propagate a small number of simplistic, exciting, image-like ideas. In the case of feminism, which is an ideological collective based upon the validation of violent and vindictive feelings held towards men, we should not be surprised to find that these image-like ideas are so often characterized by violence.

Feminism’s validation of immature, simplistic, exaggerated, generalized and extreme ideas results in violent emotion as a guiding principle of justice – in other words, the Collective Guilt and Collective Punishment I have already discussed. Feminist jurisprudence flows directly from the violent and anti-male emotions of individual feminist operators, emotions which are, in turn, validated by the ideological collective which has successfully constructed a climate of hostile indifference towards men. There is not even the pretense of impartiality in feminist jurisprudence – it is openly ‘anti-normative,’ seeking favorable conditions for female criminals while indefinitely expanding the scope of punishable male deviancy. Those who advocate and practise it are open about their vindictive sexism, and their reforms continue, under the radar. We are heading towards explicit male persecution because there is nowhere else this can go and very few people willing or informed enough to stand up and say ‘no’.

For those who would deny that feminism condones and advocates violence against men, I need only direct you to their own creations. Here is the banner for feminist website Feministe:

Now, despite the relatively tame content of this particular site, does it seem conceivable that the out-of-frame target of this little girl’s firearm is not a grown man? It’s a clever trick, because the target is not shown, allowing for plausible deniability on the part of the site’s members. After all, feminists don’t shoot people, do they? As Fidelbogen puts it:

Try looking at the little girl in context with the word FEMINISTE directly behind her. Note the synergy of the two elements, how they combine into a visual-conceptual unity of message – effectively amplifying and reinforcing each other.

Moving on, we might consider the hilarious irony of feminists voicing concerns over the likelihood of Pick-Up Artist Roosh Vorek being violent while simultaneously making violent threats against him:

I must find out his real name so if I ever meet him I can suckerpunch him in the dick.

I think Roosh is a great example of what truly needs to be purged.

I’m wondering if his blog is violent enough to notify the DA’s office.

I’m wondering too. But what I’m wondering about is why the phrase ‘cognitive dissonance’ gets thrown around by anti-feminists in situations like these, since the feminists’ behavior is perfectly consistent. It is simply that they have magnified all miniscule transgressions against women – such as, a vaguely insulting comment from a Pick-Up Artist – and have trivialized all atrocities against men. When it is appreciated that feminist operations are all characterized by double standards in their dealings with men and women, it will be understood that there is no ‘dissonance’ here at all, cognitive or otherwise – their behavior is fully consistent with their twin assumptions that every inconvenience a woman faces is a humanitarian tragedy, and that men do not matter at all.

Thus, after decades of feminist teeth-gnashing about the horrors of domestic violence, and how it is a subject so serious it should never be joked about or taken lightly, feminist website Jezebel produced a now-infamous article gloating over the greater incidence of domestic violence perpetrated by women, and issuing direct threats to men generally that the website’s authors will act abusively towards them should men “fuck with” them. Now that men are the victims, it’s acceptable to post amusing pictures of battered men; to refer to female-perpetrated abuse as “busting open a can of whupass”; to refer to male victims as “the dudes” and to employ veiled shaming tactics implying it is their own fault for not fighting back. If you follow the link, please check out the comments – make sure you click on ‘All’ and scroll down to get a proper impression of what feminists are really like when they think they are safely out of the world’s gaze.

The image-like ideas that feminism employs are not connected by logical bonds, although they are all consistent at base because they all contribute towards increasing the power of women. To the uninitiated, it appears that the various antics of feminist activists are not at all connected, and that the most contradictory, dissimilar ideas are supported side by side. E.g., feminists simultaneously advocate for the censorship of softcore pornography targeted at men and lament that there does not exist more explicit pornography featuring naked and aroused men for the consumption of females. This only leads to sputtering accusations of ‘cognitive dissonance’ if one takes for granted that feminists assume their own philosophy is universalizable. If they did assume this – if their goal truly was sexual equality and impartiality – then it would indeed be true that feminists would be irrational and could fairly be said to suffer from cognitive dissonance. But this is not the case. Their philosophy is not intended to be universalizable. The aim is not to apply a uniform standard towards men and women; it is to level women up and level men down. It is to grant women more rights, indefinitely, and to force new obligations onto men, indefinitely. Double standards are the feminist rule, not the exception.

And what is the logical outcome – say, if tomorrow, feminists got everything they are advocating for today? We would be plunged immediately into a two-tier system of rights and obligations, where men and women form distinct castes of citizen, the former weighed down by the obligations that enable the latter to luxuriate in their total autonomy. Life for women would be a literal lawlessness, while men’s every move would be dictated from above, geared to the purpose of providing for all female needs and wants. It would not be inappropriate to call such a system sexual feudalism, and every time I read a feminist article, this is the impression that I get: that they aim to construct a new aristocracy, comprised only of women, while men stand at the gate, till in the fields, fight in their armies, and grovel at their feet for starvation wages. All feminist innovation and legislation creates new rights for women and new duties for men; thus it tends towards the creation of a male underclass, the accomplishment of which will be the first step towards the extermination of men.

At present, feminism displays all the hallmarks of a dangerous movement about to become fascistic: its adherents demand blind submission to dogma, they are unable to discuss its principles, they desire to spread its ideology (by whatever means necessary), they are intolerant of those who do not embrace it, they immediately rush to generalization, they demand authenticity and conformity to a rigorous standard of morality, and they utilize bio-essentialist rhetoric and violent imagery to denigrate their targets. The (often literal) dehumanization of men, coupled with feminist governance, could not be leading anywhere but the enforcement of Collective Punishment, the idealized end point of a principle of justice based upon the validation of violent, primal emotion. Not one iota of sympathy, of fellow human-feeling, is to be felt for innocent men subject to the worst atrocities.

Holocaust is the ultimate utopian vision of some radical feminists, and they are perfectly open about this, discussing the male-free world of the future as insipidly as if they were discussing holiday plans. Other radical feminists imagine a future in which men’s numbers are greatly reduced and the remaining males are kept as slaves. Still others dream of a society similar to ours, but with women in the lead in all spheres of life, with all pretense to equality abandoned. Earnest feminists, meanwhile, do not necessarily intend any of these outcomes, but as they are members of the collective, they will act as members of the collective, and even if they do not participate in the active persecution of men, they will be forbidden – as an unspoken rule – from exhibiting any sympathy at all for men, no matter what they suffer. Those who do are promptly expelled, labelled anti-feminists, and subject to vicious attacks by the in-group. No feminist will stop the process of male elimination, nor will she feel any regret once it is complete, as long as she remains a feminist.

The destruction of males does not require a majority of feminists to even be on board; it is an organic process which unfolds naturally in time, and once a certain point is passed, there will be no stopping the attempt. Women like Hannah Rosin, who desire not equality but female supremacy with men as a permanent underclass, will find that the psychic forces which led them to agitate for this do not simply disappear once sexual feudalism is achieved. Feminism is a movement based upon the gratification of those psychic forces, the permanent, hateful needs of misandric women, and no limits will be reached for as long as men can be made to suffer even more.

Utopian visions supposedly present the perfectly just and moral society, but really, they envision the end of morality altogether. Utopia is that in which nobody makes an immoral decision; thus, nobody really makes moral choices. Rather, they have been socialized so well – through intimidation or brainwashing – that they always make the same choices. This silly little fantasy has inspired tyrants to send millions to their deaths. Early modernity is marked by the two most prominent examples of this: the French and Russian revolutions. Both were fought on the premise that the old regime would give way to a new age of human perfection. Both ended in failure, but not before soaking their countries in blood. The historian Hippolyte Taine wrote that it was by invoking “liberty, equality, fraternity” that the architects of the French Revolution were able “to install a despotism worthy of Dahomey, a tribunal similar to that of the Inquisition, and to accomplish human hecatombs akin to those of ancient Mexico.” Similarly, Communism was presumed to be the realization of freedom and all human potential – until it was actually realized. Communist countries repressed and starved their populations, worked them to the point of exhaustion, banned free speech, purged dissidents, and invaded other countries with a zeal for imperial conquest that must have seemed rather surprising to those who saw communism as an ideology of peace. And all this, not for any existing object – not for land, or resources, or for freedom – but for a social order that had never existed and was merely imagined.

We should not expect Feminist countries – capital F, standing for explicit Feminist Governance – to be any different. Feminist countries will starve and repress, they will force men and dissenting women into labor camps, they will ban open discussion, commit murder on a grand scale, and they will invade other countries, all in the name of liberating women. If there is anything we can learn from the last few hundred years, it is that humanity repeatedly fails to learn the important lessons. After men, which group shall be persecuted? Must we all take a turn, as though our biological characteristics make us representatives of those who appear similar to us, across all time and space? After the horrors of the Soviet regime and the Holocaust, is it not sensible that we all agree to cease judging heterogeneous groups of people by bio-essentialist standards, and damning them all to hell on earth because of the apparent crimes of a minority (be this in reference to the Elders of Zion or to ‘the patriarchy’)?

Now, I am well aware, that simply asking these questions is not going to change anything. It is certainly not going to change any feminist minds. But I am not here to plead with feminists. I am here to interrogate them, to embarass them about their future plans, and to spread the word about what those plans are. Because even the self-proclaimed enlightened, progressive feminist movement has not learned the lesson that humanity should now be well-versed in.

In contradistinction to them, I say – peace be with you.

Adam
Further Reading:

John Dias. A Glimpse of Collective Hysteria, 80 Years into the Past

Welmer. The Symbiotic Relationship Between Misandry and Power

Fidelbogen. A Nice Respectable Word

The Eventual Outcome of Feminism, Part I

May 25, 2014July 29, 2019 / rtbavfm / 1 Comment

Lecture No. 10

“The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.” – Nathaniel Hawthorne

It seems sensible, at this stage, to pose the question: why is all this happening? The answer I can offer up, for the purpose of this lecture, is not historical but psychological: it offers explanation through reference to the mental state of feminism’s operators. There certainly are historical processes at work, explored elsewhere, but no social movement survives purely for the sake of its history. Nobody is born a feminist. There must be some stimulus, or stimuli, working to remodel formerly non-feminist women and men into activated feminists. But we cannot explain feminist conversion by the agitation of those already existing feminist activists. We can certainly believe that feminist activism plays a role in recruitment, but this is not adequate as an explanation. Why would an individual then commit to feminism, rather than any other particular social movement whose advocates engage in agitation for the purposes of ideological recruitment?

It must be that feminism offers such individuals something that other movements do not. I propose that, by opening up space for perfectly satisfying, collective man-hating, feminism offers a form of catharsis eagerly seized upon by those already predisposed to misandry. There are probably as many rationalizations for misandry as there are individual feminists – we would have to explore the intimate details of an individual feminist’s life, particularly her mental culture, to come to a conclusion about when and why she decided to blame an entire sex for each of her inconveniences. What is common to them all is hostility to masculinity, i.e. maleness. When the initial excitement brought about by mutual indulgence in sexual hate has died down, the lines of communication between feminists remain open. Feminism provides more than the opportunity for catharsis. The feminist soon realizes that she need not restrict herself to echo chambers, but might try her hand at real change. A thrill rushes through her at the thought of not just disparaging, but actually hurting men. Backed up by an extensively organized, generously funded and institutionally-connected movement – one that enjoys a rosy reputation as defender of that greatest virtue of our time, equality – she sets to work. Feminism is a misandrist’s dream.

Implicit in what I have written above is the corollary that feminism does not create misandry. Feminism promotes, endorses, reinforces, organizes and aggrandizes misandry, but it does not generate it outright. A woman who is not antipathetic towards men will not become so upon exposure to feminist thought. More likely, she will recoil at its odious philosophy. Feminism simply provides a space for women and men who were already misandrically-inclined to congregate and make plans.

The forerunner to feminism was traditional Gynocentrism, a self-sustaining social system which taught women that men should sacrifice on their behalf, and taught men that they were defective women. The female privilege inherent to this sexual ecology was undoubtedly accompanied and reinforced by animosity towards men – the ‘flawed’ sex – most particularly those men who did not conform to the Gynocentric role expected of them. Feminism departs from this model, not only in the sense that it provides organization for this misandry, but also in the instability of its operations. Feminism relentlessly demands greater male sacrifice for the benefit of women. This is a process to be intensified without an end point. Such a process lacks forward planning or any semblance of equilibrium. Ever greater constraints are placed on the very class of people whose labor and genius sustains the social order in which feminism can thrive. The parasite is killing its host, and will either be purged or die along with it. Feminism is simply not sustainable.

But it is not as though feminists think in these terms. Despite their forays into such recondite subjects as jurisprudence and post-modernism, feminist thought ultimately resolves to the validation of primal emotions. The central tenets of Western-style justice systems, evolving as they did under patriarchy, aspired to impartiality and objectivity in all proceedings. We speak of habeas corpus, the right to trial by jury, the presumption of innocence, punishments which fit rather than exceed corresponding crimes, and so on. That these doctrines of civic freedom have lasted for so many centuries is testament to the integrity of the generations of men who inherited them. Feminists, in their efforts to replace these ‘outmoded, patriarchal’ institutions, do not engage in anything like the deep thought that begat their careful construction. Much less do they entertain the notion of impartiality. All feminist legal innovation – whether it is introducing the presumption of guilt (for men), advocating an inquisitorial rather than adversarial trial system (for men), or proposing that women should not be punished at all when they commit crimes – flows from the same source: the violent and vindictive emotions of individual feminist operators. Feminism is so dangerous because it exists to validate these emotions, and to assign them a permanent place in discussions over how society might be better organized.

The success of feminism in this regard can be appreciated when we consider the popularity of collective guilt, anathema as it is to the principles of neutrality and impartiality underpinning our liberal justice systems. Collective guilt is an emotional discharge, a visible effect of concentrated class hatred. It is an attack on the verifiable truth of individual moral agency. Under a system of collective guilt, one’s actions have no bearing on one’s fate. Human beings are sent to the gallows for the circumstances of their birth. There is no purpose for trials, or any institution which exists to ascertain the facts of the case and to assign guilt. Guilt is already assigned; the facts are irrelevant. What follows collective guilt is collective punishment.

Feminists are not yet in a powerful enough position to deliver collective punishment to the entirety of the male sex. Instead, they cast as wide and as deep a net as possible, hoping to snag as many men and boys as they can. Wherever an individually identifiable man appears on their radar, he becomes the latest pariah, even if the accusations against him are weak and unfounded. This is irrelevant; all that matters is that he has been identified. Then, he becomes the target for unbridled angst, a public piñata, an effigy of all men, of maleness itself. He becomes the personification of the entire male sex, and the collective punishment that feminists yearn to deliver unto all men is inflicted onto him. Even after he is proven to be innocent of all accusations, the attacks intensify, as though the reluctance of the world to acknowledge his guilt is an even greater injury than the charges brought against him. In a short while, he will be forgotten, and a new whipping boy will be discovered. Until that time, feminists will try to outdo each other in editorials, speeches, and in the comment sections of newspapers and weblogs, calling for the most grotesque mutilations and acts of violence against him.

An impartial legal system, which treats human beings as individuals, is a barrier against collective punishment. To do away with it altogether would allow for the punishment of many more men, on the basis that they are men, which is why feminists have fought so relentlessly to overturn impartiality. Bit by bit, feminist agents within government, academia and the legal system have replaced individual moral agency and the rule of law with the micro-management of people. As the mantra goes, the personal is political – it is, increasingly, the business of the state. Even when not explicitly framed like this, the underlying principle of all feminist innovation is to bring the state to bear down, ever more closely, on our personal, everyday existences. If the personal really is the same thing as the political, then political correctness must be personal correctness – a perverse and pervasive system of control which scrutinizes an individual’s every move, in order to lock him into place. You must be personally correct, in terms of your beliefs, your desires, your pursuits, your tastes – right down to the jokes you are permitted to laugh at – according to their standards. They being the self-declared ‘victims’ of society, who are nevertheless powerful enough to enjoy lunch with the President and set out the terms on which the government is to run your life.

The idea is not that men should overcome all the obstacles in their struggle to be politically/personally correct. After all, those who are demanding that men run this daily gauntlet are the very same people lining up to beat them with clubs as they try. The idea is that men should, so to speak, die trying. The intention is that men fail. For as long as average men manage to live peacefully, and even successfully, more and greater incursions into their personal space shall be required. It is at the point of failure -; when men have failed to live up to the increasingly constrictive rules set out for them – that they can be punished. The ordeal gets tougher by the day and with each passing of new legislation.

At the extreme end of societal micro-management, we find states like North Korea, a brutal, totalitarian dictatorship which controls all forms of media, place severe restrictions upon speech, association, movement and access to information, and detains dissidents and their families in concentration camps where many die from starvation or medical experimentation. Western societies are separated from the continuum of despotism, on which we find North Korea, by a small number of fundamentals, some of which have already been referenced: respect for the autonomy of the individual, the presumption of innocence, the separation of executive, legislative and judicial powers, etc. These doctrines correspond precisely to those which feminism aims to tear down. The violent, vindictive emotions from which feminism springs are, by nature, irrational; there exists no internal, rational boundary, to suggest that enough is enough once a certain benchmark is reached. The furious impulses at the heart of feminism would not stop short of constructing a totalitarian regime which restricts men’s speech, their association and movement, and detains them in concentration and labor camps where they are subject to starvation and mutilation.

Are we so far removed from savage regimes like North Korea that this is not a possibility? We should not allow ourselves to be misled by appeals that we live in a democracy, and that the leaders are ultimately accountable to the people. Our democracy is only ostensible, offering little real choice. The bipartisan consensus between leading parties ensures that the state continues to grow, and the feminist agenda is further promoted, whether the new government cloaks itself in red or blue. Facing no serious political opposition, the leaders do not have to bow to the people to secure their mandate. All public pandering is superficial, though highly effective, in the same way that all totalitarians have enjoyed the popularity of the masses.

By definition, totalitarians must be populist: the support they must mobilize, in order to remain in power, cannot be that of an armed minority alone. In exchange for the sponsorship of the masses, totalitarians caress their egos, giving enthusiastic praise to them for their courage, declaring them the inspiration of all progress. At least, the greater part of them are praised. Groups which are not in favor are, in contrast, treated with contempt prior to their destruction. It is the majority which becomes tyrannous – as Alexis De Tocqueville warned – when the leaders isolate a particular segment of the population for blame and castigation. Enjoying their glorification on behalf of the leader, the chosen majority will side against the undesirables, and treat them with abominable malice. It is a story that has played out, over and over, throughout history – not least in the populist tyrannies of the twentieth century.

Today, our leaders exalt the feminine and malign the masculine – a prejudice running so deep that it has become normalized, to the point where few consider it unusual for the President to bash men on Father’s Day. Men – who are, indeed in the minority, making up 49% of the population – are suffering the early stages of the tyranny of the majority. Leaders of all parties pander, first and foremost, to the female majority, and particularly to the pressure groups set up (supposedly) in their interests. More pernicious than this is the entry of women into politics – not because of the fact that they are women, but because almost every female politician, whatever her party allegiance, makes women’s issues her priority. In contrast, male politicians swear their allegiance to the principles of their party and to the demands of their constituents, but not to men’s issues. There are no politicians who make men’s issues a priority, but plenty – male and female – who run on the cross-party, women’s issues platform.

The world is not so simple that we can say men are over-represented because they are present in greater numbers. Although there is a greater number of men in politics, it is women who are over-represented, because more politicians represent them than they do men. The sex of the politician makes no difference to the legislation that he passes. In courting the female vote, and particularly in his efforts to please feminist groups (organized misandry), he will perpetuate and extend chivalry, he will publicly belittle his own sex, and he will pass ever more anti-male legislation, sanctioning the brutalization of ordinary men.

Systematic destruction follows systematic contempt. The eventual outcome of feminism is nothing less than a Holocaust, the almighty crescendo to mark the success of a century or more of sexual warfare and the demonization/degradation of the masculine. Those men, such as the male politician who has stoked the fires of gender tribalism to win votes and benefit his own career, will become the concentration camp facilitators and the enforcers of population reduction programs. They shall be the Uncle Toms, the Judenräte atop white horses, who will ultimately meet the same fate as the men they have helped exterminate. The anti-male, homicidal and genocidal violence in feminist rhetoric is well documented:

“The male is a domestic animal which, if treated with firmness … can be trained to do most things” – Jilly Cooper, SCUM (Society For Cutting Up Men)

“I want to see a man beaten to a bloody pulp with a high-heel shoved in his mouth, like an apple in the mouth of a pig” – Andrea Dworkin

“Kill your fathers” – Robin Morgan

“Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation, and destroy the male sex” – Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto

“It is no accident that in the ancient matriarchies men were castrated, sacrificially slaughtered, and excluded from public forms of power; nor is it an accident that some female supremacists now believe men to be a distinct and inferior species or race. Wherever power is accessible or bodily integrity honored on the basis of biological attribute, systematized cruelty permeates the society and murder and mutilation contaminate it. We will not be different” – Andrea Dworkin

“Why have any men at all? … The proportion of men must be reduced to and maintained at approximately ten percent of the human race” – Sally Miller Gearhart

“If life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth. I think this will be accompanied by an evolutionary process that will result in a drastic reduction of the population of males” – Mary Daly

The stock feminist response is to point out that these quotes are from radical feminists, who have not been active for a long time, and do not represent mainstream feminism. While it is not exactly true that they do not represent mainstream feminism, we can find more recent examples of feminist attitudes:

“It is time that government had a strategy on changing men away from power and oppression as part of its strategy for women and gender justice … Changing future agendas for women involves changing men; changing men involves deconstructing men and reducing men’s power; and, in the longer term still, this may even involve the abolition of men” – EuroPRO-Fem, a European men’s pro-feminist network

The following is extracted from a recent discussion on a feminist weblog:

Allecto: I think there is a very simple solution to the ‘problem’ of the team sport of gang-raping that is so popular as a form of gay male bonding between football players.

Mandatory castration of all men who play football and all men who watch football. This would be a quick and easy solution.

bonobobabe: I like your castration idea. I’d take a step further and castrate all male babies at birth.

Mary Sunshine: There is no remedy for this situation other than to halt the emergence of any more human males.

Two caveats must be advanced before we go any further. The first is not a compromise; it is not self-censorship or moderation. It is a statement of fact. The overwhelming majority of women do not, and would not, support the extermination of men. The question of whether all or most or only some feminists support the extermination of men is one that I shall address in a couple of weeks’ time. Clearly, there are feminists who do not openly support the extermination of men. Nevertheless, they have a role to play in the process, as do all misandrists. For the time being, it will suffice to say that all feminist self-reflection and self-criticism reaches the verdict that they are not being ‘feminist enough,’ i.e. it results in further radicalization. I quote from the back cover of Zillah Eisenstein’s The Radical Future of Liberal Feminism, a feminist text which arrives at this very conclusion:

Eisenstein shows that liberal feminism is ‘self-contradictory’ because it ‘accepts liberalism and at the same time rejects its patriarchal base.’ Yet in truth, feminism is ‘potentially subversive’, to both liberalism and the capitalist patriarchal state, and it must and can become radicalized as it pushes against the limitations of what can be accomplished within the context of the state … Eisenstein advances the view that liberal feminism contains within itself the seeds of radical change.

The significant point about the above quote is that Eisenstein, the feminist author, rejects the ‘patriarchal base’ of all liberal institutions; that is, she would happily do away with legal impartiality, equality before the law, presumptive innocence, and so on. Retaining these doctrines, which exist to protect innocent people, is not on the feminist agenda, and Eisenstein comes to the very same conclusion that I have presented in this lecture: that liberal feminism will become radical when it achieves all it can through the liberal state. The violent and vindictive emotions will not be satiated, ever. Once feminism has gone as far as it can go through the liberal state, ‘liberal feminists’ will turn against it and plot its overthrow.

The second caveat is that the physical destruction of men is not inevitable. It is the logical outcome of feminism, but our future is not set in stone. Given that feminists have explicitly called for forced male labor and the presumption of innocence to be removed when men are accused of rape, and that lawmakers are seriously floating the suggestion that those found guilty of sex offences should be physically castrated, we might conclude that we are already some way down the feminist road to hell. Feminism has no internal brakes; a victory does not temper the feminist’s violent emotions, but provides the momentum for her to push for greater results, in the knowledge that she can get away with hurting men. Any barrier to the progress of feminism will therefore have to come from outside feminism. It is up to external agents to build a brick wall in feminism’s path.

We are more than sixty years into an organic process that will leave humanity with an irrevocably changed society. The catalyst for the abolition of Gynocentrism is its own radical and unsustainable expression in feminism. Those same social and conceptual changes which made feminism possible prompt the question of why men should put up with any form of Gynocentrism.

The critical mass of opposition to Gynocentrism, resulting in its overthrow, will be reached as soon as feminism is exposed to the world. What remains to be seen is whether feminism shall expose itself, or whether it will be exposed by counter-feminists. The former will occur if the movement becomes powerful enough to explicitly launch the physical destruction of men. My own view is that feminists will make this final roll of the dice, and that they will be ultimately unsuccessful, although many men will suffer tortuous deaths. The other possibility is that feminism is exposed in advance of this, preventing much of the violence, and allowing for the repeal of all Gynocentric rule with minimal bloodshed. Whatever the case – whether feminism exposes itself, or is exposed – it is done for. Cast in the disinfecting sunlight of the world’s gaze, held to account for its grievous transgressions, never again will feminism be tolerated.

Adam
Further Reading:

Roger F. Gay. Unraveling Feminism in Sweden

Shannon O’Neil. Man Hatred OK at University of New Hampshire

Martin Lehmann. Feminist Zealots Create an Anti-Male World

False Consciousness & Kafka-Trapping

May 25, 2014July 29, 2019 / rtbavfm / Leave a comment

Lecture No. 9

“Never mind whether it’s Critias or Socrates who is the one refuted. Just concentrate on the argument itself, and consider what on earth will become of it if it is examined.” – Socrates of Athens

It is necessary, at this point, to set aside the the thread I have been weaving, and take a detour into the deep wilderness of feminist logic. The phrase feminist logic will strike most of my readers as a misnomer – if not an oxymoron! – so let me reassure you that what I really mean is feminist attempted logic. And there is nothing logical about that, I assure you!

First, why is the use of logic so threatening to feminists? We know, assuredly, that it is – with some feminists going so far as to claim that logic is nothing but a tool of the patriarchy. Of course, this is absurd. Logical argument is, by definition, a collection of valid inferences – so it is not possible to argue against logic. To put it another way, you cannot reason against reasoning, because the very attempt to do so involves the (attempted) use of reason. The only way to attack logic without using (or attempting to use) logic would be to attack it most randomly – that is, without entailment. The argumentative points you make, in attacking logic, would have to have no relation to each other whatsoever. You could not say, for instance:

Men use logic to defeat women in argument, therefore logic is a tool of the patriarchy

because the use of “therefore” indicates a logical consequence, i.e. it indicates entailment, which is a matter of logic! This leaves the feminist with two unfavorable choices: she can state that logic is a tool of the patriarchy, without reference to premise, evidence, example, definition, and so on – without any reference, indeed, to reality; or she can accept that her own argument, because it attempts to link two propositions together on a logical basis, is itself a tool of the patriarchy – and as the proponent of the argument, so is she!

Hence, the appropriate response to the feminist argument that “logic cannot be trusted, because it is a tool of the patriarchy,” is to say: “and so are you! Hey – as a patriarch, I appreciate you doing my job for me!”

But again, why is logic so threatening to feminists? Could it be that feminists are simply misguided about the nature of logic? That is doubtful. Having seen feminists defeated by logic many times, I am quite sure that they fear it because that their beliefs cannot withstand it. Like any cult, feminism does not allow its members to investigate the truth, nor does it tolerate free and open discussion of its core beliefs. Still, none of this makes a bit of difference to us – as non-feminists, there is no human authority obliging us to hold our thoughts or tongues on the matter of feminism.

Yes, feminists fear logic because it contradicts other ways of ‘knowing’ the world – e.g. being told what to think. They also fear that logic will discredit ideological ‘truths.’ Feminists want you to see the world as they say you should see it – they certainly don’t want you coming to your own conclusions! Particularly not conclusions critical of feminist orthodoxy, derived, for instance, from the process of asking questions and receiving unsatisfactory answers. And yet this is precisely the outcome that feminists guarantee, when their anxieties over criticism and the consequences of open discussion cause them to react, kneejerk-fashion, with shaming tactics.

What would a discerning neutral observer think, when he hears a reasonable question answered with an attack against the interlocutor’s character? Will this inspire him to adopt all tenets of the questioned set of beliefs? Is he more likely to feel threatened into submission by the shaming tactic used against the gadfly, or to feel offended by proxy at the ideologue’s evasiveness and insulting manner?

Ideologues don’t tend to ask themselves searching questions like these. Small wonder, then, that the word ‘ideology’ began life as a term of abuse. It was not until Marx and Engels wrote The German Ideology that the phrase took on the characterization we associate today with identity politics. One’s ideology, they claimed, is the product of one’s social position – that is, whether one is a proletariat or a bourgeois. The socialist proletariat are the possessors of the ideology which reflects truth, while the capitalist bourgeoisie possess only ‘false consciousness.’ It is never explained how it is known that things are this way around and not the other – i.e., why can’t the bourgeoisie possess true ideology, and the proletariat be subjected to false consciousness? That question does not need to be answered, because Marxism is a closed system of thought. It is like a man who stands not on the ground, but somehow, on his own feet; any one part of Marxism stands upon the other parts of the theory, and does not depend upon the vagaries of the experiential world for support. In other words, what happens in the real world does not matter – Marxism is self-verifying. The truth which backs up its claims is located within the theory, utterly independent of any contrary evidence that can be gathered from the actual experiences of actual people.

It is much like feminism, then – being abstract and anti-contextual, deciding upon the story before the facts are known. Feminism, to feminists, requires no justification outside of itself. It is impenetrable by external argument, and thus irrefutable – because it is inherently unreasonable. That is to say, it cannot be reasoned with. It is a waste of time trying to get feminists to see sense, and every MRA soon learns that he will more easily squeeze blood from a stone. The only discourse which will make feminists sit up and change their ways is the discourse of power: and this is a discourse that must be backed by action. Anti-feminists must be comfortable with the idea of wielding power over feminists, at least enough to marginalize them into irrelevance. This is the end game. Building critical mass is how we get from here to there, but we take a step backwards every time we indulge feminists in their sophistry.

Take, for example, the feminist sophism that we are ‘locked in’ to a perspective determined by the sex we belong to. Any counter-feminist argument launched by a man, no matter how accurate his observations, no matter how evidenced his claims, can be dismissed on the grounds that it was made by a man. The argument goes like this: “you’re only saying that because you’re a man. If you weren’t a man, you wouldn’t have a male perspective, and so you wouldn’t be saying that.” The implication is that a male perspective is inherently wrong – that a man, owing to his being a man, is incapable of grasping truth. So you see, this is really the same ‘false consciousness’ trick as practiced by Marx and Engels and their followers – the feminist has not explained how or why it is that a woman’s perspective, owing to her being a woman, is necessarily the one which yields to truth.

The ‘false consciousness’ trick is, ultimately, an evasion. In one dishonorable move, the feminist has sidestepped the argument itself and attacked the interlocutor – “you can’t possibly be right, because you are male.” For the feminist, this is enough. She considers the matter closed, and moves on. By the same undisclosed reasoning by which Marx knew that the proletariat possessed the truth, the feminist ‘knows’ (i.e. strongly feels) that her own ideology possesses the truth. But that undisclosed reasoning, whatever it is, does not work in reverse. The feminist is confident enough that a counter-argument, using the same tactic – “you wouldn’t be saying that if you weren’t a woman” – is inapplicable and impossible. The implication is that feminist women view the world objectively, whereas mere men are ‘locked in’ to a privileged perspective and cannot see the way things truly are. An attack on the perspective of a man, for it being a male perspective – even the identification of a perspective as peculiarly ‘male’ – is nothing less than a statement of female supremacy.

As for non-feminist women, they too are oppressed by ‘false consciousness.’ You see, when women use their own minds to decide things for themselves, they are being manipulated by the patriarchy! But when they stop thinking for themselves, and defer to feminist consciousness without question, then their minds are ‘liberated!’ Do you see how this works?

Now, I hate to ruin their fun by being a man who says things he wouldn’t say if he wasn’t a man, but there’s something that doesn’t quite make sense about all this. What the feminists are trying to impart is a kind of sexual determinism. That is, the notion that they are attempting to propagate is one which states that our actions and behaviors are determined according to our sex, and we have no freedom of choice in the matter. We are moral robots, hard-wired from birth to view the world in one particular way, from which we cannot deviate.

This theory would only be meaningful if it could tell us how men and women will act or think. Yet, both men and women are far less predictable than the pigeon-holers of the world would like them to be. There are, for instance, feminists who are men, MRAs who are women, and people of both sexes who buck all the trends we can imagine. Feminist sexual determinism, then, has become a useless theory; if there is any truth to it, it is limited to those aspects of human behavior that cannot be identified. It has been reduced to tautology: we will always do those things which we will always do!

It hardly needs stating that men and women are not two opposed and internally homogeneous classes of people. Feminists would very much like them to be. Indeed, feminism rests upon this faulty perception. The idea that men and women should be opposed to each other is a feminist construction, and any deviation from this is a threat to the whole feminist enterprise – hence the imperative of familial destruction. This is also why the most venomous attacks are reserved for male ‘feminist allies.’ That small number of men who exert the strictest self-discipline in accordance with feminist orthodoxy come under the most fire for being not feminist enough. This happens because every man who is pro-female in the slightest is a thorn in the side of feminism, just as much as the most outspoken anti-feminist woman (perhaps even moreso: in the case of feminist men, there is no equivalent to the ‘false consciousness’ argument used to dismiss anti-feminist women). It must be denied that feminist men could ever be feminist enough! The illusion must be maintained that men are ‘the enemy’ – and this means repudiating the friendly intentions of male allies. In declaring themselves feminist, those men fail to conform to feminist sexual determinism, thus contradicting feminist theory and threatening the progress of the movement as a whole. It is not so easy to paint them as atavistic brutes, and this is largely down to their own efforts to make themselves amenable – which is precisely why they receive such vitriolic scorn.

To get back on track: there is more that Marxism and feminism hold in common than the Appeal to False Consciousness. Both fit a certain template, upon which we could map any modern radical ideology. Again, it is developments in language and thought which allow for the theoretical configurations making possible social movements like feminism. Socialism was only possible once the state and the economy were conceptually distinguished – in feudal times, no distinction between the two was discernible, rendering moot the possibility of a socialist system being idealized. It was in response to the rise of capitalism, with all that this entailed – Enlightenment thought, economic individualism, free markets, free labor, an end to tax farming, the formation of the business and working classes – that Utopian socialism and (later) Marxism became possible in the realm of the imagination.

Similarly, nationalism – in its modern form, as an ideology – only became possible once society and culture were distinguished in language and thought. Our question here is, what had to be distinguished before feminism could become a possibility?

This is a question which would take a great deal of space to answer – more space than I have available here. It will suffice to say that the escalating liberties being granted to men resulted in a divergence of expectations between men and women. Reasonably enough, we might think, a small number of women began to question why the Enlightenment notion of individual freedom extended only to men. However, what is often missed is that these women began from a position of strength – they were already the beneficiaries of Gynocentric cultural codes that placed them high above men, atop pedestals. Over the coming decades, men tripped over themselves delivering whatever women demanded. It is likely that most of them sincerely believed that individual freedom should be extended to women as to men. But the very fact that Gynocentrism was already in full force meant that female supremacy was the only possible outcome of feminism. The ‘equality’ feminists sought was an ‘equality’ to do all the things men are permitted to do, and to retain their traditional advantages over men, accrued through centuries of Gynocentrism. The recipients of additional advantages are, of course, not equal at all, but privileged at the expense of all others. This was always the intention.

Despite the occasional claims of feminists that they are dispensing with all forms of male thought and creating anew, feminism slots in neatly with other radical ideologies which preceded it (and which were, of course, dreamed up by men). To take the most obvious fact about modern radical ideologies, their basis is in forms of association – Marxists oppose the proletariat to the bourgeoisie, nationalists oppose their own culture or race to a culturally or racially diverse society, and feminists oppose women to men. The key relationships, used by ideologues as total explanations for all human phenomena, correspond to the forms of association which are emphasized. For Marx, the key relationship is economic – the control of the workers by the capitalists is an economic relationship, and all else (politics, religion, culture) is mere ‘superstructure’ atop this ‘base.’ The superstructure may change, but nothing fundamental will alter unless the economic relationship of the classes is reconfigured. Similarly, for nationalists, the key relationship is cultural (or racial, if the two are differentiated). This is the ‘base,’ upon which everything else is built. Changes to the superficial structures on top of the ‘base’ (e.g. modifications to political and social institutions) are irrelevant; the only fundamental change will come about via transformations in culture and/or racial demographics.

We find the same pattern in feminism. Opposing women to men, the key relationship for feminists is, of course, sexual. It is the relationship of men to women which determines all else (politics, economics, culture, religion, and so on). The elements of the superstructure may well change, but until the domination of women by men is smashed at the base level, nothing fundamental will be achieved.

It is this belief which ultimately explains feminist attempted logic. Their attempts at rational argument are clouded by a belief in collective guilt – that all problems or inconveniences faced by women result from this base relationship (the domination of women by men), so that, as long as problems or inconveniences remain, it must be the case that men (collectively) are dominating women (collectively). It does not matter if a particular man is innocent – he is still ‘the enemy,’ as feminists are more than willing to admit (see: The Redstockings Manifesto). Nor does it matter if a particular woman is guilty – she is absolved in the name of collective innocence.

And on these grounds, we encounter the peculiar feminist debating tactic called Kafka-Trapping. I did not invent the term; the credit must go to Eric S. Raymond, whose original article on the subject is linked below. Nor did Eric intend the term to be used only for feminists – any member of a victim ideology can effectively Kafka-Trap their opponents. The name, Kafka-Trapping, is a reference to Franz Kafka’s work The Trial, in which the protagonist is told that he is very, very guilty, although his crime is never specified; and, as he soon discovers, the only ‘way out’ is to admit his guilt (though he knows not what of), thus acquiescing in his own destruction.

In Eric’s own words, a Kafka-Trap is:

an unfalsifiable claim, about thoughtcrime, intended to induce guilt so the subject becomes manipulable.

The most chilling thing about this tactic is that the Kafka-Trapper declares your mind to be out of bounds to you – her judgment is a dismissal of your own opinion about your own thoughts. Think you know what you think? Think again, buddy!

Now, I shall reproduce, from Eric’s blog, six models of the Kafka-Trap which feminists will use against you. Learn them. Know them. Recognize them for what they are: nothing more than ad hominem evasions. Calling out the tactic, as a Kafka-Trap, is sufficient for its refutation.

(Note: in the following examples, I have used the terms ‘sexist’ and ‘sexism’ but these may be replaced by ‘misogyny,’ ‘woman-hating,’ ‘patriarchy,’ etc.)

Model A Kafka-Trap

Your refusal to acknowledge that you are guilty of sexism confirms that you are guilty of sexism.

Model C Kafka-Trap

Even if you do not feel yourself to be guilty of sexism, you are guilty because you have benefited from the sexist behavior of others in the system.

Model P Kafka-Trap

Even if you do not feel yourself to be guilty of sexism, you are guilty because you have a privileged position in the sexist system.

Model S Kafka-Trap

Skepticism about any particular anecdotal account of sexism, or any attempt to deny that the particular anecdote implies a systemic problem in which you are one of the guilty parties, is itself

sufficient to establish your guilt.

Model L Kafka-Trap

Your insistence on applying rational skepticism in evaluating assertions of pervasive sexism itself demonstrates that you are sexist.

Model D Kafka-Trap

The act of demanding a definition of sexism that can be consequentially checked and falsified proves you are sexist.

It is the last model, Model D, which I find the most intriguing. It implies – and my experience with feminists verifies – that simply asking how to not be sexist will be taken as evidence of one’s sexism. The reason why I focused so heavily on definitions in my earlier lectures is because of the utility of attaching concrete meanings to terms. If we have a concrete definition of sexism, for instance, I could check my own behavior against this definition, and potentially discover that I do not fulfil any of the criteria – i.e., I am not sexist. But this does not satisfy the feminist notion of collective guilt. It feels like a panicked response on their part, then, to insist that any man who tries to discover whether or not he is sexist is automatically sexist simply for trying to find this out. In other words, he is a sexist for not wanting to be a sexist. Could there be any clearer indication that feminists want men and women to be two conflicting classes of people?

The purpose of the Kafka-Trap is to leave absolutely no room for the trapped individual to believe in his own innocence. A denial that he is oppressive is further evidence that he is oppressive; the only other option is to admit that he is oppressive, which is also evidence that he is oppressive. (Note the following from the Violence Wheel, designed by the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project: “saying the abuse didn’t happen” is abusive. So, you see, whether you plead “guilty” or “not guilty” in a court of law, both pleas are evidence of your guilt.) Oppression is alleged because the individual is a member of a group – but not necessarily one that he identifies with. The in-group identification is ascribed to the individual by the operator of the Kafka-Trap. To quote from Eric once more,

Real crimes – actual transgressions against flesh-and-blood individuals – are generally not specified. The aim of the kafkatrap is to produce a kind of free-floating guilt in the subject, a conviction of sinfulness that can be manipulated by the operator to make the subject say and do things that are convenient to the operator’s personal, political, or religious goals. Ideally, the subject will then internalize these demands, and then become complicit in the kafkatrapping of others.

That actual transgressions are not specified is true for all models apart from Model S, in which a specific transgression is specified, but any doubt regarding the alleged victim’s account of things is taken as evidence that the doubter is guilty along with the alleged perpetrator. How familiar this all sounds! Is it not the precise experience of anyone who encounters feminists while discussing the prevalence of false rape accusations? On that note, I shall refer you to a comment from the feminist Amanda Marcotte, which she quickly deleted, but not before Fidelbogen saved a copy:

Let’s talk about Amanda Marcotte some more, shall we? In fact, in her honor, I would like to define a seventh model of the Kafka-Trap, Model J:

Model J Kafka-Trap

Even if your innocence is proven in a court of law, this not only confirms your guilt; it also confirms the guilt of the (legal) system that found you innocent.

Exhibit A for Model J is a series of comments that Amanda Marcotte made in the wake of the Duke Lacrosse false rape accusations. Unable to accept that the accused men could possibly be innocent (hey, why do we even have trials?), she said the following:

In the meantime, I’ve been sort of casually listening to CNN blaring throughout the waiting area and good fucking god is that channel pure evil. For awhile, I had to listen to how the poor dear lacrosse players at Duke are being persecuted just because they held someone down and fucked her against her will—not rape, of course, because the charges have been thrown out. Can’t a few white boys sexually assault a black woman anymore without people getting all wound up about it? So unfair.

Leaving aside the content of her raging diatribe, doesn’t the style of her writing strike you as that of a twelve-year old, perhaps one who has only just discovered swear words, and believes that using them as much as possible is ‘cool’? In the spirit of this post, then, and given the evidence before us, I hereby believe that Amanda Marcotte is, in fact, twelve years old. Any argument to the contrary, from Amanda or anyone else, will be taken as further evidence that she is twelve years old.

All right then. Since she has clearly not been brought up properly, I shall recommend a regimen of discipline that will soon have her speaking as a proper young lady should! I suggest, first, that Amanda Marcotte shall have her mouth vigorously washed out with soap; next, that she shall receive a stern, bare-bottom spanking (over some patriarch’s knee, of course); and then, that she shall be sent to bed without dinner for a week. This will soon set her straight! And since I refuse to believe any evidence to the contrary of my opinion that she is twelve years old, any disagreement with my opinions on this matter shall only reinforce my contention that she is utterly deserving of this punishment. Now, what do you think about that?

Adam

Further Reading:

Eric S. Raymond. Kafkatrapping

Fidelbogen. Do You Know What ‘Kafka-trapping’ Is?

Michael Miller. Femspeak

Chasing Rainbows

May 24, 2014August 8, 2024 / gynocentrism / Leave a comment

Lecture No. 8

“Equality, rightly understood as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences; wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism.” – Barry Goldwater

What is it that enables us to live meaningful lives? This is a question with a long history, and after more than two thousand years of scratching our heads, our species is not much the wiser. Answers fall just as easily as they are formed. Perhaps the only real wisdom to be imparted by centuries of soul-searching is that the solution cannot be reduced to the realization of only one value. Efforts to bring about a social system based upon the realization of one value in particular – be it religious doctrine, the will of the nation, or social equality – have invariably resulted in widespread repression, and not the golden age of peace and virtue as postulated by their ideologues. In contrast, those societies which have managed to create and maintain the space for people to actually live what they might call ‘meaningful lives’ are those which have kept a number of values in balance. This is not a very exciting solution, but it is better to be dissatisfied with the great mysteries of life than to be enserfed or ‘disappeared’ by a regime in pursuit of a more enticing dictum.

Whatever the case, the argument for autonomy seems convincing – balanced, as it must be, against other values. It is difficult to see how one’s life could be considered meaningful where one does not possess even the most basic rights of self-determination. On this point, I am superficially in agreement with the feminists, who have made autonomy (and not equality) their guiding principle. Of course, in their case, it is only women’s autonomy that matters, and this is to be extended as far as possible. Nevertheless, we do agree that autonomy, in and of itself, is a good thing, although I would qualify my support with the corollary that it must be balanced against other values so that it does not become license.

It is the most spectacular irony, then, that so long as they remain feminists, women will never knowingly taste freedom. Feminism is a victim ideology which freezes women perpetually in Struggle; it cannot afford to indulge in Liberation, else the game is up. To continue playing, feminists must imagine that they are under the control of external forces which are responsible for every fate that befalls them. They have a name for this mass delusion: The Patriarchy. Every bad decision, every unwanted consequence, every minor inconvenience can be traced back to this mystical, mythical and invisible system of control which exerts influence over women, in much the same way that animistic tribes explained severe weather phenomena by reference to angered and vengeful deities. If feminists are to pretend that Struggle is still relevant, then it cannot be admitted that women are in control of their own actions, for this would imply that they are free moral agents. Women must be made to believe that they are delicate vessels being tossed about in an ocean storm, with navigation and steering rendered futile, and no land in sight. Perhaps we could contrast this to the MGTOW movement, which resembles a series of wooden canoes, light but durable, whose occupants paddle alone on calm seas – for the time being, at least.

Even when women are privileged beyond their wildest dreams – which is inconceivable in feminist theory – they still may not be considered free. Women are not permitted to enjoy freedom; it must be denied for the ideology to survive. It must be reiterated, until it comes to mind reflexively, that “we still live in a patriarchy,” and “women are still not yet equal,” and so forth. Feminism’s adherents can never rest, because they will not allow themselves to. They are forever chasing rainbows.

They are mentally barricaded in, shut off from the very world that they impose their designs upon. They are forced to conceive of themselves forever Struggling, lest they become Liberated, and therefore irrelevant. As I said last week, a tripartite perception of history (past as Oppression, present as Struggle, and future as Liberation) is a constant of feminism, and this is decided upon in advance of the facts. Regardless of context, the present is Struggle, with Liberation perpetually set some way off into the future. As the proverb states, tomorrow never comes.

As I have mentioned previously, feminism is fundamentally anti-contextual, deciding upon the story in advance, and then fitting the facts around this. The process is simple. Take the key points about the given situation, and through the use of dislogic, eristic, moral relativism, symbolism, self-contradiction and dreamlike fantasy, frame the discourse as one in which women are moving from Oppression to Liberation, but will not get there without feminist Struggle.

This is not to say that feminism operates statically. The first step in the process just described is to draw in the facts from real life. If feminists did not do this, their preaching would have zero appeal to the non-feminist sector, because it would seem to have no bearing on the experiential world. Feminism is anti-contextual in the sense that the story is decided prior to the facts, but it is nevertheless dependent on the context of any particular situation. The real life context must first be experienced and understood, and only then can it be co-opted into feminist discourse. To take a clear example, feminists in the United States today do not agitate for women’s right to vote. They would get nowhere if they did, because, having the vote, they have nowhere else to go (in this regard). The franchise is not now a relevant issue in the context of the real world. On the other hand, the fact that most business leaders are men will be verified by most people’s experiences of the world; this, then, can be drawn into feminist discourse, as an example of Oppression.

Forgive me for being overly simplistic. It must be made clear how the process of manufacturing Struggle is playing a pivotal role in the changing nature of rights.

What is a right? As it has typically been understood, a right is a claim which, in usual circumstances, is inviolable. In other words, if I have a right, then I have some kind of claim – the permission to do something I wish to do, or to be protected from something I do not wish for – and other individuals may not deprive me of this claim. To take a clear example, I have the right not to be assaulted – other individuals are not permitted to assault me. They may do so nonetheless, in which case they have transgressed against my right; they have done what they are not permitted to do, and prevented me from doing (or avoiding) those things which I am permitted to do (or avoid). Accordingly, I am permitted to seek recompense for the violation of my right.

A theory of rights requires an enforcer, in order to prevent rights transgressions and provide recompense to those whose rights have been violated. The enforcer that we are familiar with is the state, particularly those institutions involved in the creation and practise of law: the legislature, the judiciary, the police force, and so on. It is necessary that the state possesses the monopoly on the use of force, else its rule would go unenforced, and there would be no deterrent against rights violations. In an extreme case, the citizens may rise up and overthrow a weak state, subsequently instituting their own form of justice which may be far from impartial. Max Weber famously described the state as “the monopoly of the legitimate use of force.” I have left out the word ‘legitimate’ from my definition here, because it strikes me as an entirely subjective judgment, not to mention an inevitable one from the point of view of those in control of the state. Those who seize power and use it to persecute one section of the population will surely believe their own monopoly on the use of force to be legitimate – indeed, they will most likely believe their own use of force to be of greater legitimacy than that of the regime which they deposed, no matter how that regime conducted itself.

Note that there is no inherent limitation to the concept of rights; there is no in-built brake system. There can never be a point where we say, “now we have all the rights.” There will always be potentially more rights that we could possess. That is not to say we categorically should possess more rights. The full possession of all conceivable rights would be an inconceivable license – total autonomy, in which all claims would be permitted. This would mean that the individual with license would be free to violate the rights of others. In this case, the rights of others would be meaningless whenever they encounter the licensed individual. Logically, all people cannot have total possession of all rights, because each would be permitted to infringe upon the rights of all the others – which means that nobody’s rights would be secure, and the strongest individual or group would be entitled to establish arbitrary rule by physical force alone.

Clearly we need limitations, and the Constitution of the United States of America is the exemplar in this regard. As the finest statement of personal liberty and representative democracy the world has ever known, it exists to protect a number of fundamental rights from being overturned by the strongest collection of individuals – namely, the government. Laws may come and go, but so long as the constitution is upheld, the foundational rights of the individual citizen are set in stone – or, at least, are extremely difficult to remove or alter. Where a government repeatedly violates its own constitution, it (ideally, at least) runs the risk of being overthrown by an uprising of citizens, who would, together, form a stronger collective.

The United States Constitution, adopted in 1787, built upon the liberal philosophy of the time, most especially that of John Locke. Sections of the Declaration of Independence, signed eleven years previous, are more or less lifted from his Second Treatise of Government. The ideas expressed in this work are not those of the liberalism we know today; they sit somewhere closer to what we would now term libertarianism. It was only in the second half of the nineteenth century that liberalism underwent the profound transformation into the collectivist ideology we more readily associate with the term today.

In his 1859 text, On Liberty, J. S. Mill introduced a new articulation of the traditional liberal moral defence of individual rights. It runs something like this: individuals have the right to do whatever they choose, so long as this does not harm others. Mill exercised caution when considering the application of this principle: one would not be harmed, for instance, by losing in open competition (e.g. the free market). Following Tocqueville, he voiced concern that democracy, if unmoderated, could devolve into majoritarian tyranny.

We may thank the successors of Mill for the perversion of individualist liberalism into a collectivist and authoritarian philosophy. It was one small step from Mill’s axiom – individuals have the right to do whatever they choose, so long as this does not harm others – to the doctrine of New Liberalism: if I cannot do what I would otherwise choose, then somebody must be harming me. It was the self-proclaimed ‘liberal socialist,’ Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse, who built upon Mill’s premises and added a new twist: that freedom is not good in and of itself, but must be subordinated to some higher end. It follows that any freedom which is not subordinated to this higher end is not morally justified. It was the social radical Richard Henry Tawney, building on this development, who advocated an egalitarian society based on the premise that “freedom for the pike is death for the minnows” – in other words, that certain identifiable groups are not deserving of equal autonomy, but must have their share restricted. It was Lester Frank Ward who disavowed the individual altogether and argued that the state should direct all social and economic development, including the happiness of its citizens. Perhaps most tellingly of all, he was an enthusiastic supporter of the notion that women are innately superior to men. To quote an especially relevant passage:

And now from the point of view of intellectual development itself we find her side by side, and shoulder to shoulder with him furnishing, from the very outset, far back in prehistoric, presocial, and even prehuman times, the necessary complement to his otherwise one-sided, headlong, and wayward career, without which he would soon have warped and distorted the race and rendered it incapable of the very progress which he claims exclusively to inspire. And herefore again, even in the realm of intellect, where he would fain reign supreme, she has proved herself fully his equal and is entitled to her share of whatever credit attaches to human progress hereby achieved.

The purpose of this detour into the changing nature of rights was to hone in on the historical developments that precipitated certain aspects of modern feminism. Some contributors to the Men’s Rights Movement have somewhat abstractly attacked ‘modernity’ and ‘Enlightenment values.’ This is fine if they are intending to attack individual autonomy in general, but we must look more carefully if we actually want to get to the root of the problems facing men, as men, today – which, I would argue, coalesce into the deprivation of male autonomy. It is modernity, and particularly Enlightenment thought, which made individual autonomy a possibility – and it is social liberalism, and most especially feminism, which are turning it into an impossibility for men.

The innovation of social liberalism is conspicuous in the section of the Ward quote above which I have emphasized. It is entitlement; the creation of new obligations for others to fulfil; the construction of rights claims, not rights of individuals, to be held equally, but against an identified segment of the population (the ‘enemy’ group). Of course, every right, if it is taken seriously, demands obligations of others – if I have a right to not be assaulted, then you must not assault me, and vice versa. The difference between such a claim and the claims of New Liberalism is that the former is an obligation to inaction, while the latter is an obligation to action. My obligations to inaction mean that I cannot transgress certain boundaries – the rights of other people. I may not hurt them, steal from them, or do damage to their possessions. I am forbidden to do certain things which would interfere with the autonomy of others, but apart from that, I am free to do as I please. Obligations to action are of a different sort altogether: the one who holds me to such an obligation has the power to command me. I am told how to act, and I am forbidden to act any other way. This curtails my autonomy.

For instance, if you require some object in order to accomplish a certain project, then your autonomy is curtailed if you do not possess the object. Therefore, you have a claim to my object, presuming that I possess one. It matters not if I have earned or otherwise rightfully own my object; the theory goes that you should have it anyway. Claims of ownership and desert are subordinated to the autonomy of individuals, which translates to the wants (not needs) of specially identified ‘victim’ groups. If, say, I am interviewing a man and a woman for a position in my employ, and the woman demands that she be given the job as a crucial step in her career plan, I am denying her autonomy by not employing her, even if she is the least qualified candidate. She needs the position in order to achieve what she ultimately wants, and so she is wronged if she does not get it. The doctrine of New Liberalism – if I am unable to do what I would otherwise choose, then somebody must be harming me – clearly serves the victim agenda of feminism. Any limit whatsoever on the actions of women, including those introduced in the name of fairness and impartiality, can be taken as a new Oppression according to this doctrine.

‘New’ or ‘social’ liberalism is in fact the perversion and corruption of liberalism – and it finds its highest expression in the caste system of rights feminists are busy creating. Women’s rights, a catch phrase once trumpeted as a progressive march towards a fairer future, has become the trump card that never loses its value, ready to be played any time a woman wants to ‘get one over the guys’. In the early days, the idea of Struggle was more creditable, and even seems admirable in retrospect. Women struggled for rights which men possessed: the right to vote, the right to own property, the right to divorce, the right to the same wage as a man doing the same job. Once upon a time, it was perfectly plausible, to an unbiased observer, that feminism meant to bring about equality between the sexes. That is not to say this view is inherently correct, only that it was believable, from a point of view external to feminism, that the feminist project carried this altruistic goal.

But what are the women’s rights advocated today? The right to confiscate men’s money, the right to commit parental alienation, the right to commit paternity fraud, the right to equal pay for less work, the right to pay a lower tax rate, the right to mutilate men, the right to confiscate sperm, the right to murder children, the right to not be disagreed with, the right to reproductive choice and the right to make that choice for men as well. In an interesting legal paradox, some have advocated – with success – that women should have the right to not be punished for crimes at all. The eventual outcome of this is a kind of sexual feudalism, where women rule arbitrarily, and men are held in bondage, with fewer rights and far more obligations. To date, the transformation of rights into obligations to action have given us a welfare state in which, according to The Futurist,

virtually all government spending […] from Medicare to Obamacare to welfare to public sector jobs for women to the expansion of the prison population, is either a net transfer of wealth from men to women, or a byproduct of the destruction of Marriage 1.0. In either case, ‘feminism’ is the culprit […] Remember again that the earnings of men pays 70%-80% of all taxes.

Feminism views the independence of individual citizens as a barrier, not a safeguard. Personal autonomy hinders feminism’s progress in moralizing the world and bleeding men dry for the benefit of women.

Women’s rights? It’s nothing but a power grab.

Adam
Further Reading:

Michael Weiss and Cathy Young. Feminist Jurisprudence: Equal Rights or Neo-Paternalism?

Founding Fathers of the United States. The Declaration of Independence

Pelle Billing. Men’s Rights Manifesto