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

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 Personal, as Contrasted to the Political

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

Lecture No. 7

“They prided themselves on belonging to a movement, as distinguished from a party, and a movement could not be bound by a program.” – Hannah Arendt

Last week, we looked at how the concept of domination has become a justification for encroaching despotism. It should not come as a shock to attentive readers that virtually every keyword in the feminist lexicon is used in a similar way. Whether the term being discussed is misogyny or rape or patriarchy, the tendency is to broaden its meaning to cover as wide a semantic area as possible, smuggling the maximum possible ideological contraband within an overcoat of righteousness. The real-world effect of all this is to restrict male autonomy through the criminalization of men’s actions. The limitless possibilities for semantic bleaching correspond to extensive prison sentences and crippling fines. The intention is to criminalize the norm. Every move that a man makes should send a shiver down his spine, should force him to look over his shoulder, with a panic-stricken expression, wondering, “what new law have I just broken?” Men are to live in a perpetual state of surveillance and presumed guilt – a panoptical existence in which they are repeatedly chastized for doing wrong. That is, according to an invasive, alien moral standard that they are invited to obey, not understand, and certainly not to question or refute.

But when the criminalized behavior falls within the domain of actions in which both men and women engage, the argument requires a corollary that it is different, and worse, when men do it. For instance, certain nasty individuals of both sexes engage in sexual harassment, but we must understand that when men do it to women, it is chalk, and when women do it to men, it is cheese. The two, we are assured, are incomparable, regardless of how a victimized man might see things – after all, even in his victimhood, he is blinkered by his privilege.

The whole fairy tale is aptly summed up in the feminist mantra, the personal is political. As was discussed last week, the proper context in which this claim should be viewed is the recent history of the Western world. Particular focus should be given to a current within our shared political culture, which has given rise to despotic government and threatens to do so again. How else are we to interpret a statement that all things within the domain of the individual are in fact the business of government? If we do not own or control those things which are personal to us, there cannot be anything to speak of that we do own or control, up to and including our lives.

But it would be a mistake to view the mantra simply as a statement of belief, i.e. that its speaker merely believes the personal to be political. All manner of people have all manner of kooky theories, and a group of people communicating their belief that all aspects of our lives are managed by the state would be about as troubling as tin foil conspiracy theorists or the Flat Earth Society. When a feminist says that the personal is political, however, she is not simply stating a belief; she is making a call to action. There are implications hidden within the phrase.

Last week’s discussion involved a section on ideologies, and the progressivist assumptions at the roots of Western political culture. To recap, ideologies assume a difference between how society is and how it ought to be, predicated upon a specific moral view of the world. What this means, as far as feminist analysis is concerned, is that if the personal is not currently political, then it should be made that way. Practically all feminist innovation consists of making those things which are personal into political matters. The logical end-point is to be found where there are no strictly personal actions, no personal utterances, intentions, thoughts or beliefs; all of these, expressed publicly or privately, would be strictly political. Every decision, down to the minutiae details of everyday life, becomes a political matter for which individuals are held to account, not as individual transgressors, but as members of an oppressive class which must answer for its sins.

‘The political’ is another one of those essentially contested concepts – in other words, it is one of those concepts most open to abuse. It is an elusive idea, which can be grasped but never precisely pinned down – and attempts to do so are rather like trying to grab all the air in an inflatable mattress. One of the things we can say about ‘the political,’ is that it has not always been identified with ‘the ideological’ – which seems sensible enough, since ‘the ideological’ is a product of modernity, a relative newcomer as far as politics is concerned.

Once upon a time, ‘the political’ was a term which referred to Kings, Queens, courtiers and nobles, their struggles and their successions; but certainly not to doctrine. That change came about gradually, with the steady fall of religious fervor that marks modernity.

I am aware that I skate close to etymological fallacy, so let me clarify what I am arguing. I am not complaining that there is a proper meaning of terms such as ‘the political’ which has fallen out of fashion. I have previously acknowledged that language is forever in flux. As a corollary, I do recognize that objectively correct definitions are something of a rarity. My purpose, in highlighting linguistic change, is a correlative highlighting of social change! The one rarely undergoes a paradigm shift without bringing the other along. There is immense power in language, to not only reflect but to define the experiential world. If we want to understand how things came to be the way that they are, we should cast a searing torch beam over historic changes in vocabulary – it is here that we will find the notional germ cells that gave rise to the feminist disease.

Such as in the case of ‘the political’. Today, everything controversial is reflexively considered a political matter. Whether we are discussing a person’s unusual lifestyle, or a new work of art that pushes boundaries, or a website that advances an innovative worldview, we feel quite certain that what we are discussing is a political statement. The controversial, then is political; or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the unusual is political. Non-conformists of all stripes are prompted to attach some political purpose to their actions or beliefs. The effect of this very public challenge is to lock individuals into a system of pervasive control; stepping out of line makes one into a target.

And this is precisely what feminism requires – for men to stand in line, and to target those who do not. It’s a lot easier to pursue the project for increasing the power of women when you can effectively gag those who stand to lose the most from its success.

The flip side to all this is women’s exponentially increasing and ‘compensatory’ license. It is men alone whose private lives are to be locked into the system of public control; women, in contrast, are to enjoy the spoils of victory in a new era of female sexual anarchism. Perhaps the only consolation we can realistically take is that despotisms are great generators of spiritual enlightenment among the oppressed. It was the persecution of early Christians that drove pious men and women to live alone in the desert, in imitation of Jesus Christ – it was only in the fifth century that these monastics were co-opted into the Church, having sought a purely ascetic existence as an alternative to the material world that had driven them out. Similarly, the oppressive regimes of the Hellenistic period led many in the Greek city-states to embrace mystical philosophies which advocated turning away from the world. Given that we are well on our way towards feminist despotism, it is not surprising that a parallel development is fledgling, in the form of the Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW) movement. MGTOW have rejected the Gynocentric demand that men must define themselves according to their sexual prowess. Accordingly unburdened, many MGTOW have taken up introspective deliberation on the nature of man and masculinity – discussions which are androcentric and therefore not accountable to feminist orthodoxy. At its core, the MGTOW movement turns away from the world – from marriage, children, self-sacrificing employment, even relationships with women altogether – seeking solace from hostile agents as did the ascetics and mystics of the ancient world.

Although I endorse the MGTOW lifestyle, I am conscious that it is not enough – for fulfillment or for survival. Feminism is simply not in the business of leaving men alone. It is a progressivist ideology, which means it just keeps on growing, with no internal checks on its own activities; it has no brakes! All attempted self-criticism yields to further radicalization. Unable to perceive the world from outside of the feminist bubble, its disciples think and act in an anti-contextual, abstract fashion. The only checks on the activities of such ideologies must come from the outside – i.e., from the rest of society. If feminism will not slow down and stop of its own accord, then external agents must build a brick wall in its path. This is a moral requirement – the alternative is to allow it free reign, in which case we will inevitably end up with despotism. Thus far, feminism has proved remarkably socio-dynamic, and has faced very little political resistance – meaning that the velocity of persecution is set to increase.

I should like to clarify. The word ‘feminism’ can refer to more than one thing. Most obviously, feminism the movement is the not precisely the same thing as feminism the ideology; rather, the former is driven by the dictates of the latter. Feminism the ideology is a victim ideology, which means that it exists in defense of a certain class of people which has been designated as the victims. The dual objectives goals of a victim ideology are, as I have remarked previously:

(1) To equalize with the ‘enemy’ group;

(2) To forge its own ‘victim identity,’ separate from and unaccountable to the ‘enemy’ group.

If objective (1) is ever achieved, then the ideology simply ceases to be, which means that the movement also ceases to be. The movement, however, is not an inorganic entity which mechanistically fulfills the needs of the ideology. It is made up of people who have become dependent upon it, psychologically and financially. The end of inequality, however it was originally measured, would spell disaster for Women’s Studies graduates everywhere. For instance, the inability of feminist organizations to admit that rape rates are falling and that false allegations are reaching epidemic levels is down to the losses that would be sustained by ideologues sitting in (usually empty) rape crisis centers. The ideology cannot be permitted to die – there is far too much riding on it, namely, the movement, and whatever goodies its principal actors have managed to get their paws on. As with many people, the threat of redundancy is enough to bring out a hard-line conservatism, which insists, in this case, on the existence of brand new oppressions still to be overcome. There is an awful lot of money riding on the continued perception that women are disadvantaged. Feminism is not merely a movement any more, but an industry – aptly referred to by some as the sexual grievance industry.

Should this industry crash, it would leave a hole in the purses of career feminists nearly as large as the hole it would leave between their ears. The alternative to continued state support for the overcoming of new oppressions is almost unthinkable. It would not only mean an end to men subsidizing their own persecution – it would also threaten to leave a psychic vacuum in the minds of professional feminists. Whatever would they do, should they be deprived of their blood money?

The feminists do, of course, have a backup plan. I refer you to objective (2). The reason why victim ideologies tend to die hard when equality or even supremacy of the ‘victim’ group is achieved is this: they shift their aims towards the inherent separateness of the ‘victim’ and ‘enemy’ groups, and refuse accountability to the rest of the world. Indeed, any attempt by a person external to the designated ‘victim’ group, to hold the members of said group accountable for their transgressions, is tarnished as the effort to roll back objective (1) – and the person who dared to raise the complaint will be called any number of amazing names.

A victim ideology is necessarily tripartite in its understanding of time. The past is identified with Oppression, the present with Struggle, and the future with Liberation. This tripartite historiography is a constant. If any one of the three states – Oppression, Struggle or Liberation – is removed, then we no longer have a victim ideology. It falls apart, owing to its inconsistency. There must have been past Oppression, as this justifies the present Struggle, which also must be the case for the present, as a matter of tautology -; what else would we be talking about? Struggle must be towards something, and this is Liberation, promised in the future. Below is a diagram of sorts, presented from the feminist perspective:

It is a childish caricature, fitting for a childish worldview. Note what is required for the tripartite Oppression, Struggle, Liberation to make sense – the actor who did the oppressing, who must be struggled against, and from whom the designated victims shall be liberated. This is, of course, men.

The above picture is presented from the feminist perspective, in which time moves horizontally, from left to right. In the real world, time’s arrow is broken. We are frozen permanently in the present phase, and from there, time moves vertically and downwards:

There is simply too much riding on feminism (i.e. the sexual grievance industry) to allow the actual liberation of women to be acknowledged. If it were to be admitted that women are not only liberated, but the recipients of a number of advantages over men, then the movement and the ideology, and thus the industry that is feminism, would become moot. Women’s current role, which is perhaps more appropriately described as Privileged, is not even conceivable on feminist time. Liberation must always remain a future goal, and can never be permitted as a present achievement. Feminism is self-sustaining this way – by forever propelling itself into new Struggles. The tripartite understanding of timeis independent of context; it is fundamentally abstract and anti-contextual. The tripartite is assumed before the truth about the world at any given moment is ascertained, and the facts of the world must then be hammered out into a feminist-friendly shape.

It is of little consequence that all the great Struggles have been won. Feminists can just create new ones. And since men are (as the case must always be) the oppressors to be struggled against, it is quite justifiable to take away whatever power they still possess.

Until they possess none.

Adam

Further Reading:

Fidelbogen. The Bright Line

Adrian Smyth. Feminism: The Birthplace of

Sexist Hypocrisy

Archivist. The ‘under-reporting’ canard

Old Wine, New Bottles

May 24, 2014July 29, 2019 / rtbavfm / Leave a comment

Lecture No. 6

“Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called” – J. S. Mill

Domination. So much of feminist analysis revolves around this concept. A man who punches his wife is not just angry at her; he is attempting to dominate her. A man who disagrees with a woman and talks over her is not just being rude; he is trying to dominate her. A rapist is not really that bothered about sex; his crime is a display of power, he just wanted to dominate the woman.

You see, the fact that these things happen at all is not enough for the male-bashers of the world; they shall forever require more grist for the misandric mill. Punishing actual criminals is one thing, but it’s simply not gratifying enough to leave it there – they need to articulate what their womyn’s intuition has always told them, and go on the attack against all men. The problem, of course, is that the overwhelming majority of men don’t attack women in any perceptible way whatsoever. The solution, as feminists found, is to play Dr. Freud and posit some subconscious, underlying motivation – a dark, sexual, deviant, violent mentality, which acts as a universal explanation for male behavior.

You see, even when men are not actually engaging in criminal acts, the criminality is still there, it is just latent – so the feminists would have us believe. The idea that all men possess an inherent, latent evil, and that women do not, serves as a useful cover for all sexist hate speech against men. We find it at work in senseless diatribes against a non-falsifiable “rape culture,” in campaigns to prohibit the private consumption of pornography, and in apologia for malicious women who falsely accuse men of sex crimes. Consider this statement from Mary Koss: “rape represents an extreme behavior but one that is on a continuum with normal male behavior within the culture.”

Inherent male deviancy, so they say (or imply), manifests as a continuum of dysfunctional maleness, covering everything from a simple verbal disagreement, all the way up to the murder of a spouse. All male actions which do not contribute towards the feminist project – increasing the power of women – are to be taken as evidence of an innately flawed masculinity which seeks, above all, to dominate the fair sex.

Put it this way. Would you say that being murdered helps to increase a woman’s power?

No?

Well, what about losing a verbal sparring match – does this help to increase her power? Or doesn’t it? It certainly seems that one will have greater autonomy if she can more easily convince others that her view is correct.

So, if both of the above examples exist on a continuum of women losing power, the corollary of which is patriarchal domination, then of course men are to blame. That is, if our analysis is based in dubious, feministic assumptions.

The concept of domination, so taken for granted in its present manifestation, is a supreme example of the linguistic shifting I have discussed previously. As a term, it carries ideological contraband, concealed in an overcoat of righteousness. Originally, the term domination, which has its root in the Latin dominus, referred specifically to the power exercised by a master over slaves. Like so many other terms that feminists have seized upon in order to manipulate perceptions of reality, domination has become an object of semantic bleaching.

What is really interesting about all this, is that our new concept of domination – as unjust hierarchy, to be opposed and attacked – has been put to use in a specific direction: as a sponsor for true despotism. The single most obvious red flag marking the road to despotic rule is the encroachment of the public sphere into the private lives of individuals. Despotism is precisely the type of unjust hierarchy with which we identify domination; yet if the latter term is broadened sufficiently, to encompass all areas of private life, then a crushing and brutal dictatorship is the inevitable result.

This is the context in which we should understand the feminist slogan which has had the most staying power: the personal is political. Note that (according to the slogan), the personal is not only a matter of interest to the political; it does not form part of the political; it is not of equivalent importance to the political. It actually is the political.

The two terms are presented as though they are identical, interchangeable.

The personal is political.

If this is true, then there does not exist the smallest space of privacy which is a matter for the individual alone – that is, over which the individual is sovereign. It is true enough that a private life worth anything would not be possible without an overarching public structure – it is law which protects all the liberties that make private lives and interests possible. To use J. F. Stephen’s favorite analogy, law is the pipe through which the waters of liberty flow. It is when public life – the state – fails to recognize its own limits that society becomes threatened by despotic rule.

Intellectuals of all ages have come up with the most ingenious of reasons for why it is that their mode of thought is superior to all that passed before. The majority of people have simply assumed this without the need for justification whatsoever. What is peculiarly modern is the construction of artificial boundaries between our own time and epochs past. We do not, for instance, consider ourselves to be living on the same historical plane as those of Medieval Europe, let alone of Ancient Greece. These are times inexplicable and inaccessible to us. It is a seductive fantasy by which we explain away any fears conjured up by the horrors of history books. We like to believe that bloody autocracies will confine themselves safely to those pages, and that such things could not happen here, not now; not in real life. Surely, we have moved beyond all that. We are Enlightened, unlike the human beings that existed before us.

But are we not on the same historical plane that gave rise to Soviet Communism and the Nazi party? These particular reigns of terror occurred within the last century, no matter how much we might like to think of ourselves as having progressed beyond such barbarism. Supposedly, we in the Western world abhor totalitarian regimes; and yet the rise of the two mentioned previously is indicative of a trend existing within our political culture. Among the baggage we have inherited from the Enlightenment is the concept of utopia. The term was coined in the 16th century, and it designated, for the first time, the notion of a perfect socio-political order. With the birth of this idea, the seeds were sown for the cleansing of human impediments as an operationalized political program.

Prior to the Enlightenment, human life was mostly assumed to be cyclical. As surely as the sun would rise in the morning and set once more in the evening, so great powers would rise and fall, only for new ones to take their place. Such was the science of Polybius, whose historical works did not arrange events in chronological order, but presented human experience as a unity. Dynasties, empires, cultures, people and their communities lived and died in the swings of the cosmic pendulum.

One of the major conceptual innovations of modernity is progress as the guiding ideal in politics and society. Not only do we assume that we are constantly on the move away from our own history; the belief persists that it is only a matter of time before each problem yields to a solution. Faith in human knowledge has never been so great as in the Information Age; we actively seek to overcome what were long considered intractable facts of life.

The purpose of this digression is not to cast doubt over the possibilities for human knowledge, nor to suggest that an attempt to improve the human condition is an ignoble pursuit. It is to point out that we are all children of the Enlightenment, no matter where we fall on the political spectrum. It is to point out that there are certain peculiar assumptions which form the base and scaffolding of Western political thought, and it is upon these assumptions that ideologies as diverse as conservatism, liberalism, National Socialism and feminism are built.

The -ism itself is an altogether modern phenomenon. An -ism (or we might say, an ‘ideology’) assumes a difference between how society is and how it ought to be, predicated upon a specific moral view of the world. This is obviously true for those ideologies explicitly advocating change – liberalism, socialism, feminism, and so on. It is just as true for conservatism and traditionalism, ideologies which (as they see it) aim to resuscitate the baby that has been thrown out with the bathwater of the ages.

Typically, that which ideologues find so objectionable about the world is its existing configuration of power. The great texts and speakers of the ideology describe a configuration of power, argue for its recognition as injustice, and then present the means for achieving the desired change. The means may involve working through the existing institutions of state, or they may necessitate their overthrow, or they may shun mainstream practices altogether and advocate working their magic through civil society.

Whatever the ideology implies in practice, this is a marked difference from what went before. Progress, not recurrence, is at root of all political expectation. Whether this is progress towards the classless society, or ethnic purity, or the return of traditional virtues, progress is the constant. The view that something is wrong and something needs to be done about this, as a political statement, is a recent invention, one which defines our shared political culture. Conservatives are caught up in the same ‘progressive’ web, but then, so too are iconoclasts, who signal their compliance with conventional modes of thought even as they state their intentions to break away. The more they struggle against this inevitability, the more stuck they find themselves. To take a relevant example, feminists have sometimes declared that they are moving away from ‘patriarchal’ assumptions altogether, and building up their own worldview from scratch, quite untainted by male influence. In truth, nobody starts from scratch, and feminism remains deeply embedded in modes of thought which have evolved over centuries, exclusively through the minds of men. The feminist ideology, and all of its innovations, simply could not occurred without centuries of work by men beforehand.

Next week’s lecture shall take a closer look at the feminist assertion that the personal is political, and the hidden implications contained within this catch phrase. In the weeks that follow, we will consider the concept of utopia, which has been mentioned only in passing here. A brief comment here will suffice: utopia is the logical extension of progress, in that it is the end of all progress, the final stage of human existence. It is a profoundly dangerous idea, one responsible for the most oppressive regimes and bloody revolutions the world has ever known. While personal power and glory may have been the motivating force behind the actions of despotic individuals still in recent memory, it was a collective, utopian vision that aroused their followers to make manifest the most violent of fantasies. In all cases where utopians grip the reigns of power, the human beings which do not fit into their vision of a new world order are treated as the living garbage of a faded regime.

It is with disgust and horror that the West looks back at the utopian despots of the twentieth century, and yet these particular despotisms correspond to a tendency that forms the infrastructure of our own politics. The disgust and horror is real enough, though, and perhaps the most truly progressive shift in recent times is the rejection of extremism, in all its forms, by populations determined to leave behind the century of genocide.

Only, it’s not that simple. You can pull up the heads, and tear the stalks clean from the earth, but unless you dig out the roots, you will find those flowers in bloom again before long. Utopianism, with the cleansing of human impediments that it always implies, is coded into our political DNA. Widespread detestation of the recent, failed totalitarianisms will not make this go away; it can only make the despotic tendency fall quiet for a little while. A new despotism can only emerge if it does so silently, in disguise as something quite different – perhaps as organized opposition to certain forms of unjust domination, the solution for which is always to increase the power of the state relative to the autonomy of the individual.

The personal is political, say the feminists.

I can hear the goosesteps getting closer.

Adam

Further Reading:

Fidelbogen. The Redstockings Manifesto

W. F. Price. Who Really Wants Control?

Angry Harry. The Governmental Beast

Anatomy of a Victim Ideology

May 24, 2014July 29, 2019 / rtbavfm / Leave a comment

Lecture No. 5

“The weakness of men is the façade of strength: the strength of women is the façade of weakness” – Warren Farrell

Among the worst mistakes that freedom-loving people can make is to stereotype feminists as a small, motley crew of angry lesbians who have long since ceased to be relevant. Take note: this stereotype helps them.

I must repeat myself: this stereotype helps them.

Let that sink in for a moment. Every time you have belittled feminists as a bunch of cranky old hags that nobody takes seriously, you have helped to obscure their program and indeed, their very existence as a form of organized power. Belittle them, you must – but do so in a way which exposes, not obscures! For feminism is far from being a relic of the past. The feminist movement is taken very seriously indeed by those with the power to enforce its core aims:

(1) The expropriation of resources from men to women.

(2) The punishment of men.

(3) To increase (1) and (2) in terms of scope and intensity indefinitely.

Obscurity assists the realization of these goals by creating doubt amongst potential opponents. The misidentification of feminism as a cultural artifact which no longer holds sway over the operations of government and society is a product of feminism’s own metamorphosis. Note that the essence, or substance of feminism has not changed over the years, only its form, or packaging. The change of packaging has proved so effective that some now deny that the product still exists.

Au contraire. As much as the times changed with feminism, feminism has changed with the times. In the transformation of feminism from a movement opposed to government and society at large, into a movement which controls the state and public opinion – and uses this position to persecute the new enemies of the state – its strategies underwent a certain cultivation. Today, feminists no longer need to throw temper tantrums to get their way, because while they once raged against the machine, they now control it. This is the truly profound shift in Western societies since the height of consciousness about feminism in the middle of last century; it is not that feminists have become less relevant, but more.

As Fidelbogen recently put it:

Feminism is now lodged in the institutional structures, hence, “respectable”. I might compare it to organized crime, which was openly thuggish in the early racketeering days, but once they got their people into “city hall”, and into electoral politics, learned to wear a silk tie and play the game in a different way.

When feminists were outside the tent, causing offense was one of their prime weapons – poorly disguised as edgy boundary-pushing. Who remembers this lovely piece of propagandistic hate, published in the 1970s?

The above is precisely the kind of thing that feminists today like to pretend never happened. Now that feminists are inside the tent, they are forced to defend their gains; in the 1970s, when the above picture was produced, they attacked from the outside, and sought to tear down official morality rather than (as they do now) define and dictate it.

And how better to maintain control than by punishing those who attack, or who might attack, the new status quo? We are of course referring to men, who stand to lose the most from the three core aims of the feminist project as listed above. Today, feminists believe that women have the inalienable right to not feel offended, and they do not hesitate to employ state violence to enforce this. Prosecuting those (men) who cause offense is their new weapon, one which has replaced the old (causing offense). Of course, persecuting people merely for being offensive is rather less charitable than men were to feminists before feminists took over. But, as Gynocentrism Theory tells us, men were only charitable to offensive women in the early days of feminism because women already exercised substantial control.

Do feminists believe that they are doing right? The answer is an unequivocal yes for most of them – they truly do believe that they are a righteous people, and even when they become cognizant of doing wrong, they rationalize that they are also, simultaneously, doing right. How could this be? Well, let me show you how it works, by tracing the anatomy of a victim ideology.

Once a period of consciousness-raising has propagated the belief that the members of a group are – by their essential nature as members of the group – victims, the group shall pursue two objectives:

(1) To equalize with the designated ‘enemy’ group;

(2) To forge their own ‘victim identity,’ separate from and unaccountable to the ‘enemy’ group.

You will notice that, while the first objective brings the ‘victim’ group closer to the ‘enemy’ group, in terms of status, expectations, autonomy, etc., the second widens the gulf between them. The first objective, we are told, will unite us in our common humanity, and bring about liberty for all, and other nice things like that. But as soon as we get close to this, there tends to be a drift towards proclamations of the importance of the second objective. Nothing will ever be enough to satisfy the ‘victim’ group, because they view themselves as essentially and inherently the victims of the ‘enemy’ group, regardless of what may have changed in reality. A victim ideology is anti-contextual, and its followers – the self-designated ‘victims’ – shall never see themselves as anything but. Their victimhood is affirmed in advance, and the facts must be made to fit the story. In other words, they will spin any situation into one where they are most harshly treated.

This is why feminists like Hillary Clinton can get away with saying things like

women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat.

Well, sure – losing family members to horrible deaths is so much worse than actually having to die those horrible deaths. That is, if your whole worldview is tainted by sexism and you reduce the status of men to Protecting/Providing Objects. In Mrs Clinton’s quote, no humanity is ascribed to men whatsoever. The real problem is not that they are traumatized, mutilated and blown to pieces per se; it is that, because of their being subject to atrocities, men will not be able to fulfill their protecting/providing roles quite so effectively. It is, therefore, women who lose out, because men don’t actually matter except insofar as they can assist females. This is precisely the kind of attitude which emerges out of a victim ideology. The entirety of existence, in all its wonderful complexity, is reduced to black-and-white primitivism: my people matter, your people don’t. Or, as we shall see, my people good, your people bad. Anything good for my people is good, no mind whether it is good or bad for your people.

This kind of thinking is known as Manichean Essentialism, and it is the metaphysical cornerstone for feminism as a whole. Decades of consciousness-raising have ensured that women are reflexively considered to have been wronged, whatever the facts. Whenever genuine examples of women being wronged cannot be found, compensatory privilege becomes the sanctioned goal. That is, women are treated more leniently in one regard because they are believed to be disadvantaged in unrelated regards, or just disadvantaged in general. One recent example of this from the United Kingdom is the order issued by Dame Laura Cox to judges that they must treat female criminals with greater leniency, a ruling which simultaneously reduced British men to second class status while green-lighting abusive women who might otherwise have been deterred.

There are some who go further than this. Baroness Corston, who explicitly identifies as a feminist, believes that women don’t really deserve to be punished at all when they commit crimes. Her 2007 Government report advocates that all women’s prisons should close, and that even the most violent and abusive female offenders should not be locked up. Indeed, they

would no longer go to one of the country’s 15 women’s prisons, which would all close. Instead, killers such as Rose West, serving life for the murder of ten young women and girls, would be sent to “homely” local custody units. There they would be allowed to live as a “family unit” with between 20 and 30 other women prisoners, organising their own shopping, budgets and cooking. The units would also allow them to stay close to their families … All the women’s jails would shut within the next decade, and could instead be converted into prisons for men … The report claims: “Women and men are different. Equal treatment of men and women does not result in equal outcomes.”

The above is a classic example of Orwellian Newspeak. Anti-feminists of all stripes have been saying for decades that men and women are essentially different. Feminists have insisted that men and women are essentially the same, and we must therefore have equal treatment. But as soon as equality works retrograde to the goal of female empowerment, it is dropped like a hot potato, and feminists twist themselves around in incredible semantic gymnastics to justify the sudden turnabout.

Women also (sic) never be sent to jail to “teach them a lesson”.

Of course they shouldn’t. Women shouldn’t have to actually learn how to abide by the law, much less how to be functioning members of civilization. They should be allowed to run wild and free, abusing and destroying anything they please with absolute license. They shouldn’t even expect a slap on the wrist for their misbehavior – that would be domestic violence, don’t you know?

But if feminism truly was about equality, shouldn’t feminists be pushing for new laws to criminalize more women, rather than their anti-egalitarian approach of imprisoning less women and more men? Or does equality only matter when it is women who are deemed unequal? (In and of itself, this would imply strongly that women are a privileged class like no other.)

The female incarceration rate is just one-eighth that of men in the United States (Wikipedia, accessed 10th October 2010), while women account for only 5.7% of inmates in Great Britain (accessed 10th October 2010). Surely, if equality was the goal, we would be relaxing the punitive, feminist-inspired laws against men, and seeking to punish more women instead. I can think of nowhere in modern society that is more male-dominated or unrepresentative than the penal system – something which, in the interests of sexual equality, needs to change.

But no – flatly contrary to the principles of neutral, impartial justice, feminists deem it a good thing for its own sake to lock up fewer women! It is as though women who are guilty of crimes aren’t really guilty – and are therefore victims of whatever is done to them as punishment. It is a popular notion that women are disadvantaged – generally, inherently, essentially, within the very fiber of their being – and so must be disadvantaged in every particular area of life; thus, anything done to assist them must be a reduction of unfair disadvantage. Any rationally-minded person can see how absurd this all is, and I include leading feminists in this, as they are shrewd but not stupid. Just deserts, deterrence, fair treatment, civilization itself be damned; this is Gynocentrism in action.

To recap, victim ideologies such as feminism seek to:

(1) Equalize with the ‘enemy’ group;

(2) Forge their own ‘victim identity,’ separate from and unaccountable to the ‘enemy’ group.

That these two objectives are in contradiction is not just a logical flaw; it’s part of a strategy which allows the ‘victim’ group to shift its stance as circumstances require. Objective (1) might be consistently pursued for a little while. But if the movement comes under scrutiny for disadvantaging the ‘enemy’ group, the ‘victims’ can just switch to objective (2) and emphasize the importance of their own uniqueness in ways for which equality does not suffice. Or, as feminist Germaine Greer puts it:

In 1970 the movement was called ‘Women’s Liberation’ or, contemptously (sic), ‘Women’s Lib’. When the name ‘Libbers’ was dropped for ‘Feminists’ we were all relieved. What none of us noticed was that the ideal of liberation was fading out with the word. We were settling for equality. Liberation struggles are not about assimilation but about asserting difference, endowing that difference with dignity and prestige, and insisting on it as a condition of self-definition and self-determination. … the visionary feminists of the late sixties and early seventies knew that women could never find freedom by agreeing to live the lives of unfree men.

Once equal status has been reached, the rhetoric of equality can be discarded, because who wants to be only equal to a man anyway? Here, in black and white, is a statement of female supremacy.

Same as it ever was.

If equality had ever been the end goal, then men’s disadvantages would have been addressed seriously, and not exacerbated while men themselves were goaded. To this day, the only time a feminist bothers herself with an issue of male disadvantage is when it benefits women to point it out – as in the case of parental leave. Enforced equal paternity and maternity leave rules out any disincentive that employers have to hire women. A feminist will set aside her ‘all fathers are rapists and abusers’ shtick, just long enough to insist that men should have equal rights to parenting – but this is typically presented as a demand that men shoulder the burdens of raising children so that women may be empowered in the workplace. Even when injustices against them are being redressed, men are tools for female betterment.

Same as it ever was.

Another example is male rape in prisons. This is occasionally highlighted by feminists, but only because men can be shown to be the oppressors, allowing them to attack maleness itself. Feminists pick up the torch once the rapist has done his part; they complete the rape victim’s sexual humiliation by destroying his self-identity, poisoning his mind with aspersions that maleness itself is to blame for his victimization; and so a fundamental, immutable part of himself was the cause of his rape. They force upon him the identity of rapist along with rape victim, their vilification of ‘toxic masculinity’ serving to assure him that he shares the abusive characteristics of his abuser. On the other hand, the high level of female culpability in child abuse, both sexual and non-sexual, is ignored or denied.

This is why our universally applicable definition of feminism could not have included any reference to ‘equality’ – it’s not a reasonable statement to make if we’re using analytical tools more incisive than Manichean Essentialism. The universal definition remains, and no ground can possibly be ceded: feminism is the project for increasing the power of women.

Power in what regard? Power to do what? Such questions inevitably arise. The answer, if you’ve been following closely, is obvious – whatever they please, no matter who else is harmed. Silence is not consent, but it is complicity, when you have the power to draw attention towards abuse and the resources towards stopping it, yet you fail to do so on the grounds that the abusers have genitals that resemble your own.

And that’s what it comes down to, folks – we are dealing with primitives in pantsuits.

Adam

Further Reading:

Welmer. Feminism and the Prison Industrial Complex

Babette Francis. Feminist Legal Theory

Oz Conservative. Men’s role is to empower women for what exactly?

Pig Latin

May 24, 2014July 29, 2019 / rtbavfm / 1 Comment

Lecture No. 4

“It is as if the ordinary language we use every day has a hidden set of signals, a kind of secret code” – William Stafford

To recap on last week’s lecture: Men’s Rights Advocates should not be afraid to play around with words; to reframe debate; to recast conventional linguistic usages however we see fit. Don’t be afraid to make a game out of it. Use words – and the meanings you choose to ascribe to them – to mock, humiliate, and confuse your enemies. Here’s a good example – it makes use of typical feminist phraseology, but with one major difference:

Not all patriarchs are like that. I am a patriarch – and proud of it – but that doesn’t mean that I, personally, am responsible for what other patriarchs do, particularly not those radical patriarchs. But patriarchy isn’t a monolithic entity. There isn’t only one kind of patriarchy. There are lots of different types of patriarchs who have different views.

Note that defining yourself as a patriarch need not imply that you define yourself as feminists think that patriarchs should be. Feminists are not linguistic arbiters; you are absolutely free to call yourself a patriarch using your own definition of the term, which may or may not coincide to some extent with their definition. Whatever the case, though, you certainly don’t need to explain which qualities you possess that, in your mind, make you patriarchal. However, upon announcing that you are a patriarch, you may find feminists attempting to trick you into giving some definite shape to your patriarchy; the shape having already taken form in her mind, her task now is to get you to acknowledge it. She will say something emotive like, “oh, so you think men should just be able to rape women with impunity?”

Your initial response, of course, will be a furrowed brow. Then you will say, “of course I don’t think that. And yet I am still, most certainly, a patriarch.”

In this example, you could define patriarchy any way you please; having decided in advance that feminism is non-credible, you have dismissed altogether any feministic notion of what patriarchy is. You could even, if you like, define yourself as a patriarch on the grounds that you support equality between men and women. Yes, that kind of wordplay will wind them up no end, because feminism depends upon a peculiar configuration of words and meanings, which may not be circumnavigated without signaling a threat to the ideology’s power base.

Does the suggestion above sound preposterous? Well, I can but refer you to a real example of a social movement, the success of which has depended, for the most part, on its adroitness at linguistic manipulation. I am speaking, of course, of feminism, the proponents of which have made it their business to recast perceptions of reality through the redefinition of words. But this weapon is available to all those who are marginalized; it is the establishment which must defend its orthodoxy, not the outcasts! And while feminists once made great use of this strategy on the linguistic battlefield, it has become a point of vulnerability for them now that they control the machine, rather than rage against it. Now, you see, they must consolidate their gains; they must conserve what they have created; and thus, they are placed on the defensive, guarding their etymological orthodoxies from those who beg to differ. As I noted in the first lecture, their capacity for controlling perceptions of reality is faltering. The iron is hot. It is time to strike!

But, have I been too quick to dismiss the definition of feminism as offered up by feminists? I think I may have been. Even essentially contested concepts, as W. B. Gallie referred to them, must have meanings which are greater than normative, else communication about them would be rendered impossible. That is – there must be some amount of general consensus over what feminism is, between feminists and anti-feminists, or we would not be able to argue about it! Even despite the differences between a feminist’s view of feminism and of our own, some shared content must exist at some level, or we would be talking about entirely different things. They might be talking about the feminist movement, while I am talking about horse-rearing, although we both refer to our respective subjects as ‘feminism’ – but we wouldn’t have much to say to each other, would we, if this were the case?

So, I shall posit the following as a universally applicable definition of feminism; that is to say, it must fit everyone’s criteria for what feminism is, in spite of the different perspectives that different people hold on its nature. It is a suitably limited definition, since it can encompass only those parts of feminism which all definitions hold in common. So, here it is: feminism is the project for increasing the power of women.

That, then, is what everybody who discusses feminism holds in common regarding the concept, whether they are supportive, skeptical, or nihilistically indifferent. No feminist, I think, would deny that this is, at the very least, the ‘bare bones’ of feminism, even if she would prefer to flesh it out in a lot more detail. But that will not do, for beyond this narrow inference, we disagree with each other. To be as objective as possible, then, we must take only that which everybody agrees upon, and that is our universally applicable definition.

Note that there is no mention of equality. This is because, as I uncovered last week with the help of one Nick Levinson, there are a number of feminists who explicitly did not pursue equality, but supremacy. So, equality cannot fit into the universal definition of feminism, since certain feminists themselves – who were very famously, unequivocally feminist – disavowed it. To say that feminism is ‘about equality’, then, would be to place oneself in diametrical opposition to several extremely influential feminists! And why, that would be … misogynistic!

Nor can feminism be said to be the project for increasing the power of women relative to men, since, in this counter-feminist’s view, feminists are often quite content to increase the power of women in an absolute sense. That is, they endeavor to grab all they can for women, without reference to the status of men. The phrase ‘relative to men,’ then, only serves to imply that women are power-less relative to men at present, thus casting feminism in an unfairly favorable light. In reality, once women do achieve power which is at an equal or equivalent level to that of men, the demands of feminists do not stop. What we find is that female power becomes entrenched, and extended, and when it surpasses male power, this is simply referred to as ‘parity’ and ignored by feminists – at least, when they are not gloating over men’s newfound powerlessness.

Nor are we able to list, in our universal definition, the specific areas of life, or spheres, in which the feminist project applies. This is because feminism is inherently universalizing; it seeks to colonize and dominate every single facet of life where men and women meet. It aims for domination in every sphere of life, actual and potential.

You may disagree with some of the points above, particularly if you are supportive of feminism. But this does nothing to change our universal definition, because all we can say about those points is that they are contentious. That is, feminists and non-feminists, who are educated about feminism, disagree about these aspects of feminism, and it would simply be biased to take one or the other view for granted. That would be like consulting only Jacobins on the historical accomplishments of the Jacobin Club, or like canvassing only conservatives to explain modern liberalism. It would be a good example of poor methodology, and would help us very little in our search for truth. Right? So then, our universally applicable definition cannot be expanded beyond that which we stated before: feminism is the project for increasing the power of women.

We must not be swayed by feminist attempts to deny the universalizing tendency inherent to feminism. In their attempts to win the debate over what feminism is, feminists are notorious for abridging their own ideology to a nub of its whole, and presenting their support for – and your dissent from – feminism as resting entirely on a single issue. Let me give an example, in which you are confronted by the Appeal to Franchise. You have just stated that you do not support feminism. Your feminist opponent’s next move is to reduce the entirety of feminism to women gaining the right to vote – thus implying that you must oppose this, since you claimed to oppose feminism. You must simply remind all onlookers that feminism is about more than this and cannot be reduced to a single item as she has tried to do. You can openly state your support for that single item – in this case, the vote – while nevertheless maintaining your antipathy towards feminism, this being in no way reducible to women’s right to vote.

Essentially, your conscience is clear, and you are free to label yourself a non-feminist – and even, an anti-feminist – sans the implication that you therefore support every single thing that feminism opposes.

So, to recap: the only thing we are all going to be able to agree on is that feminism is the project for increasing the power of women. As you may have noticed, feminists go a little further than this when speaking about what they think feminism is, and they shall have plenty of half-truths and obfuscations to offer up if you ask them politely enough – though remember, it’s not their job to educate us about these things.

As such, we may leave them to their own fluffy fantasies, and move beyond the universal definition to one which more accurately accounts for men’s experiences of the world.

So, here is the definition I offer up: “feminism is the most recent, and presently the most culturally dominant form of Gynocentrism. It is a victim ideology which explicitly advocates female supremacy, at every facet of life in which men and women meet; it does so in accordance with its universalizing tendency, and so it does so in each sphere of life, including but extending beyond the political, social, cultural, personal, emotional, sexual, spiritual, economic, governmental and legal. By female supremacy, I refer to the notion that women should possess superiority of status, power and protection relative to men. It is the dominant cultural paradigm in the Western world and beyond. It is morally indefensible, although its adherents ensure that their hegemony goes unchallenged through the domination of societal institutions and the use of state violence.”

In response to last week’s lecture, Primal offered up his own definition of feminism, which is not quite the same as mine, but the two are certainly complementary:

Gender-feminism is an overarching ideology built on a stack of bald-faced lies. As the primary reverse-sexist superstition of Post Modern age, it forms the foundation for female sexual supremacy in the name of ‘gender’ equality. Like other half-baked Utopian fantasies, it is totalitarian to the core. It is formed from a witch’s brew of recycled but dis-credited ideological relics from the trash heap of history…relics like Marxism, Romanticism and Classism. It’s proponents proudly destroy well-established standards of scholarship to force others to take the ideology seriously. It’s adherents have spread like carcinogenic pathogens in authoritarian institutions…that is wherever power is perverted for political reasons. It’s philosophy is nonsensical, circular, and self-serving. As the primary moral foundation for the mainstream hate groups which operate in the name of Women’s Rights worldwide, gender-feminism is a dangerous dogma and one that has no place in civil discourse.

Both of our definitions are rather lengthy, although I think it is useful to have a statement of exactly what we mean by the term. It could be much shortened and presented as follows: feminism equals female supremacism.

That the shortened version is more memorable is offset by its unfortunate implications that i) only women are feminists, and ii) all women support feminism. Neither i) nor ii) is correct. The charge of supremacism alone is not really sufficient for our purposes; it leaves too much left unsaid regarding what this supremacism is, and about the success rate of feminism so far. For shorthand purposes, it will do, but it should be remembered that it is a reduction of broader definitions as worked out here and elsewhere.

What may be more useful for our purposes in presenting our view of what feminism is is a brief statement of its goals. Feminism essentially seeks the following goals:

(1) The expropriation of resources from men to women.

(2) The punishment of men.

(3) To increase (1) and (2) in terms of scope and intensity indefinitely.

I feel that such a definition will strike a nerve with feminists themselves – because it hits a little too close to home. That the real-world effects of the feminist project have indeed been (1) and (2), and that these have increased in scope and intensity over the years (3) is frankly, irrefutable.

Time has yielded the truth about what happens when feminist-minded women come to occupy the most powerful positions in society, and that is that Men’s Rights are systematically trashed. The more power that feminists have, the more new laws are created to accomplish greater confiscation of men’s property and intensifying violations of their liberty, bodily integrity, and lives.

But there is hope. For it is deeds, not words, that shall speak our enemies. Have a pleasant weekend, everyone.

Adam

Further Reading:

Exposing Feminism. Language manipulation

Alex Schroeder. Progressivism Is Not Progressive

ISP. Feminist False Consciousness

Refuting the Appeal to Dictionary

May 24, 2014July 29, 2019 / rtbavfm / Leave a comment

Lecture No. 3

“Have you ever actually looked up the word feminist in a dictionary? It means equality between the sexes. It is not about hating men. This is very simple and you would know if you actually looked it up” – Diva

Following on from last week’s overview of Gynocentrism then and now, I propose that there is a common thread of female-worship running through, and linking, traditional conceptions of masculinity – historically expressed in what we might call ‘patriarchy’ – and feminism, which has taken over state and supranational institutions, and is poised to unleash the explicit persecution of men.

It may well take many more of these lectures before this is fully elucidated, but I mention it here for two purposes. The first is a reminder that reference to this common thread runs through all these musings: that Gynocentrism has been with us for a long, long time, and has only changed its form, not its content. This is the crux of Gynocentrism Theory, and it is the narrow focus which I am taking over a broad range of subjects.

Secondly, to shift the discussion towards feminism. There is the danger of reading into Gynocentrism Theory a minimization of feminism’s effects, considering that it is only the most modern version of a phenomenon which is centuries old. On the other hand, though, it is the most active form of Gynocentrism that we must presently deal with; it is the enemy, and as the all-singing, all-dancing tremendous final act in this regard, it is a phenomenon worthy of study in its own regard.

Better the devil you know! It is said that it is better to know thine enemy, but feminists are highly effective at obscuring their own intentions, actions, history, and penchant for the use of eristic. Amidst the smoke and mirrors, a chorus of shrill voices from all directions can be heard to proclaim, “it’s not our job to educate you about feminism!”

Fine – then we shall have to cast around for ourselves, burrow for gems of knowledge, and procure our own judgments on what feminism is. And since feminists themselves have disavowed their role as our educators, the conclusions which we reach shall require no sanction from them. If it is not their job to educate us about feminism, then it could hardly be anybody else’s but our own, could it? And yet, strangely enough, when we do seek out knowledge for ourselves, they object most vociferously to our findings, as though they do in fact covet the role of educator after all. It has been repeatedly suggested that we might like to check the dictionary.

This is a spurious request, not least because there is no ‘the dictionary’. There are, rather, dictionaries (plural). The Appeal to Dictionary is one which is made by people who, to put it bluntly, are not very bright. Such people apparently believe that language is a finite array of words, each carrying a single objective definition, the final arbiter of which is The Dictionary.

In the real world, language is ever fluctuating and it is corruptible. It is a collection of meanings, designated by terms – but quite how these are configured is determined by the vagaries of time and place! And very often, people disagree about how terms are, or should be, designated to meanings – and how meanings are, or should be, designated to terms!

The very existence of contested terminology, then, seems to refute the Appeal to Dictionary. Where disputes arise over the definition or use of a term, this is an indication that we have several meanings (or ideas, or concepts, if you prefer) huddled together under the same word-umbrella. To put it another way: there are several things, but they are all designated by the same word. A given configuration of terms to meanings may benefit certain people, and be of detriment to certain others!

Let’s take an example – sometimes, the claim that feminism supports women in making false rape allegations has been refuted by a reference to feminism’s stated support for sexual equality. “Feminism,” a feminist would say, “is about sexual equality, and nothing more.”

And yet false rape allegations still exist – as does feminist complicity in the making of them. This issue has only been deprived of recognition in language. The feminist has expertly obscured the complicity of feminism in the making of false rape allegations, by whitewashing the ideology as being “about sexual equality, and nothing more.” If we accept her argument that feminism only refers to support for sexual equality, then we no longer have any terms with which to discuss or understand false rape allegations, beyond viewing them as a series of unrelated incidents. Certainly, we wouldn’t be able to consider false rape allegations in their proper context, which is as part of a system of control and persecution. The phenomenon of a false rape allegation is surely not explicable by what we understand when we say “sexual equality,” and since feminism is about nothing more than that, we are left with no linguistic resources with which to meaningfully speak about it; we have been struck dumb. In short, we have an existing thing, but it is no longer designated by any words. How then could we draw attention to it, criticize it, oppose it?

Let’s take another example. A feminist may well create a false partition in the problem of Father’s Rights by defining it in such a way that feminist culpability is overlooked. She could, for instance, say that “patriarchy is to blame for the unequal treatment of fathers.” Once again, she has controlled the language – meanings are split between terms, or they are compressed into one, and the intended outcome is that the guilty party avoids being taken to task!

Now, you might think – “why does this matter? A feminist might say this or that, but I don’t believe her; my own experiences tell me that it’s not true, and I’m unlikely to be fooled by what she says.”

That’s all well and good. But there are a lot of people out there who will be fooled by what she says – including those who possess the very real physical power to imprison you, destroy you, or alienate you from your loved ones. Feminists aren’t just saying this to people like you and I – their nonsense gushes forth in all directions, like crude oil from a burst pipe, flowing towards anybody who will listen, and especially those who can “do something about it.” Their message comes through, louder than a rushing waterfall, whether you want to hear it or not – and their whole project depends upon the relentless repetition of a dozen or so mantras, and the sinking of their sentiments into the collective subconscious. This is why they endlessly prattle on, typically parroting stock phrases like subordinate cells in a hive mind! They do it because it works – at least, until somebody stands up and points out that the Emperor’s not wearing any clothes.

And then, all hell breaks loose!

It was necessary to speak at length on this point, because we must realize that political language is never neutral, and implications are always hidden in the configuration of ideas and terms. The role of Men’s Rights Advocates is to critically assess the feminist use of language, and to determine where we would be well-served to separate out several ideas which are referred to by one term, or to compress several terms into one. We should never respond to a feminist argument without first looking critically at the terms through which it is being conducted. To put it in Gamespeak, we must “control the frame!”

The Appeal to Dictionary can be summarily dismissed. Official dictionaries represent establishment positions. Feminism, as it is in vogue, is officially defined in the way that its adherents would like the world to see feminism; it is not defined in a way that describes, or accounts for, the totality of the project. That which happened, or still happens, but does not reflect the establishment view, is simply ignored. To define feminism as

the advocacy of women’s rights on the grounds of political, social, and economic equality to men…

is to brush aside much of its unpleasant history – and to deprive skeptics of the resources for an unofficial linguistic and historical analysis of the term. This old revision of the Wikipedia page ‘Feminism and Equality’ contains plenty of material which disputes the black-and-white dictionary definition, although the page itself has fallen prey to the very same forces which seek to delimit the linguistic opportunities of their critics. Thankfully, Wikipedia archives old versions of its articles, so the efforts of one Nick Levinson in exposing the explicitly anti-male tenor of several famous feminist works has not gone to waste. Let’s get cracking!

Jill Johnston, in Lesbian Nation, called for men to eliminate the qualities they hold as men. “Man is completely out of phase with nature. Nature is woman. Man is the intruder. The man who re-attunes himself with nature is the man who de-mans himself or eliminates himself as man […] A small but significant number of angry and historically minded women comprehend the women’s revolution in the visionary sense of an end to the catastrophic brotherhood and a return to the former glory and wise equanimity of the matriarchies.”

Mary Daly, in Gyn/Ecology, wrote in favor of reversing power between the genders […] “As a creative crystallizing of the movement beyond the state of Patriarchal Paralysis, this book is an act of Dis-possession; and hence, in a sense beyond the limitations of the label anti-male, it is absolutely Anti-androcrat, A-mazingly Anti-male, Furiously and Finally Female.”

“Do women need land and an army . . .; or a feminist government in exile . . .? Or is it simpler: the bed belongs to the woman; the house belongs to the woman; any land belongs to the woman; if a male intimate is violent he is removed from the place where she has the superior and inviolate claim, arrested, denied parole, and prosecuted. . . . . Could women ‘set a high price on our blood’?” – Andrea Dworkin

Phyllis Chesler, in Women and Madness, drew on matriarchal history, Amazon mythology, and psychology and, with some ambivalence about relying on biology alone as a justification, argued that a war between the genders has always been underway and that women would benefit from using their full powers to be the exclusive wielders of political power to produce an unequal society in which men live but are relatively powerless, even if such a society is no more just than a patriarchy, and called for feminist women to dominate public institutions in their self-interest. “Amazon society, as mythology, history, and universal male nightmare, represents a culture in which women reign culturally supreme because of their gender […] In Amazon society, only men, when they were allowed to remain, were, in widely differing degrees, powerless and oppressed […] If women take their bodies seriously—and ideally we should—then its full expression, in terms of pleasure, maternity, and physical strength, seems to fare better when women control the means of production and reproduction. From this point of view, it is simply not in women’s interest to support patriarchy or even a fabled ‘equality’ with men.”

One organization that was named The Feminists was interested in matriarchy. Two members wanted “‘the restoration of female rule'”.

Unless the aforementioned organization and books did not really exist, we are forced to conclude that feminism cannot only have been about the advocacy of women’s rights on the grounds of equality with men. At the very least, what we must say is that some feminists may have supported equality, while other feminists have overlooked equality and have outright supported female superiority. And neither can the latter group be reduced to a handful of fringe lunatics. As Nick Levinson points out (much to the chagrin of feminist moderators), two and a half million copies of Phyllis Chesler’s Women and Madness were sold.

That’s a whole lot of hate.

And a whole lot of energy is spent actively sweeping this kind of thing under the rug, by those who have since realized how damaging honesty can be to one’s case. Modern feminists are far more rhetorically disciplined than their forthright foremothers, and have concluded that unpopular plans are not helped into motion by being discussed openly. Rhetorical discipline adds a whole new layer of subterfuge to all that has been said regarding the designation of terms to ideas. It will not suffice only to look at what they say; we must watch carefully what they do. And haven’t some of the above recommendations come true, per the actions of feminists? Is it not now the case that male intimates accused of violence are removed from their homes in which the woman has the superior and inviolate claim, as Andrea Dworkin hoped for? Have feminist women not dominated public institutions in their own interest, as Phyllis Chesler advocated? As Gynocentrism Theory tells us, women already had a “high price on their blood” – much higher than that of men, at almost any time in history. This simple fact is the reason why it was possible for the prescriptions of radical feminists to be achieved in the first place – and for dissidents to have been so effortlessly marginalized.

Still, times change. Establishments are overturned, and words are officially redefined. If the new definition of a word proves more accurate, then it must have existed for some time, unofficially, before the word’s revision. Sometimes, establishments must change before terms catch up. The dictionary lags behind definition, because the establishment is stuck in the mud. I predict that, as we reach a critical mass opposed to feminism, and shortly before its collapse, we may well see some concessions in the form of alternative definitions of the term becoming accepted.

Adam
Further Reading:

J. Durden. Feminism as a Language Ideology

ArgusEyes. Why I am NOT a Feminist

Davout. Oxford English Dictionary massacres the definition of “anti-feminist”

The Same Old Gynocentric Story

May 24, 2014July 29, 2019 / rtbavfm / Leave a comment

Lecture No. 2

“I’m not cut from the same mold. I don’t read from the same old story” – Pennywise

My readers must understand that the concerns which Gynocentrism Theory addresses are not limited to feminism. Feminism is still fairly new on the scene, while Gynocentrism has been around for as long as recorded history. The Men’s Rights Movement seeks to address problems associated with feminism, but does not limit its attention to these problems. Many of these problems existed prior to the emergence of feminism proper in the late 19th century, although they have been expanded and exacerbated since. Feminism is only the modern packaging of Gynocentrism, an ancient product, made possible in its present form by the extensive public welfare arrangements of the post-war period.

In spite of its radical rhetoric, the content of feminism, or one could say, its essence, is remarkably traditional; so traditional, in fact, that its core ideas are simply taken for granted, as unquestioned and unquestionable dogma, enjoying uniform assent across the political spectrum. Feminism is distinguishable only because it takes a certain traditional idea – the deference of men to women – to an unsustainable extreme. Political extremism, a product of modernity, shall fittingly put an end to the traditional idea itself; that is, in the aftermath of its astounding, all-singing, all-dancing final act.

Allow me to clarify. The traditional idea under discussion is male sacrifice for the benefit of women, which we term Gynocentrism. This is the historical norm, and it was the way of the world long before anything called ‘feminism’ made itself known. There is an enormous amount of continuity between the chivalric class code which arose in the Middle Ages and modern feminism, for instance. That the two are distinguishable is clear enough, but the latter is simply a progressive extension of the former over several centuries, having retained its essence over a long period of transition. One could say that they are the same entity, which now exists in a more mature form – certainly, we are not dealing with two separate creatures. Take any of the great Empires that swept the globe – the Roman, the Ottoman, the Spanish, the British – and you shall find Gynocentrism as the order of the day. Such extensive geopolitical enterprises, historical testaments to man’s triumph over the earth and sea, were built and maintained by men perfectly accustomed to the idea of dying for the sake of their women. It is an idea that has outlived nearly every other, and endures to this day in our American Empire. That men should sacrifice themselves utterly – their very essence, their being and their identity, to save women that they do not even know – is neatly encapsulated in that popular phrase, ‘women and children first.’

(And if you’re paying special attention, you will notice that it is never uttered as ‘children and women first.’ The very thought is absurd! This is because what is really meant by the phrase is ‘women first, children second.’)

The endurance of these social and class codes owes nothing to totalitarian control. Even when staging bloody revolts against tyrannous monarchs and landed elites, men aspiring to power left the Gynocentric code well alone. The self-sacrifice of men is a sexual constant which has survived all regime change. Gynocentrism, it seems, was not entirely without benefit to men; in peacetime, a man could be fairly assured of a stable familial structure and of his own paternity for the children he helped to raise. Regardless, what was offered to men was essentially compensatory. For most of history, men apparently considered this compensation to be reasonable enough – or perhaps, Gynocentrism was so deeply ingrained that they simply did not consider it at all. Through their actions, they affirmed (and renewed) Gynocentrism, and whether it went by the name honor, nobility, chivalry, or feminism, its essence has gone unchanged. It remains a peculiarly male duty to help the women onto the lifeboats, while the men themselves face a certain and icy death.

It is only now, with the political and social developments of the 20th century that have driven a wedge between the sexes, that the kind of thoughts found on this weblog can emerge. Late modernity provides us with new conceptual resources – new ways of thinking, which can be traced back to the Enlightenment of the 17th-18th centuries. Out of this intellectual melting-pot eventually crawled feminism, a vindictive blend of classic Gynocentrism, victim fetishization, radical utopianism and liberal presuppositions.

It would be an oversimplification to say that feminists set out to make gains. On the contrary, they made demands for both gains and losses. They wanted to gain men’s rights, but lose their traditional female responsibilities. This, it seemed, would put women in a social position equal to that of men. It was an argument rooted in the liberal tendencies of individualism, civic equality and self-definition. In rhetoric if not in reality, feminism asserted its points of concurrence with the most admirable aspects of traditional liberalism: equality before the law, the abnegation of arbitrary rule, and so on. Extending rights to all women appeared, logically enough, to be the successive phase of human liberation following the extension of rights to all men.

It was assumed – more fool us – that once granted equal rights, women would voluntarily adopt the accompanying responsibilities that men had always fulfilled. This did not come to be. Feminists were happy to gain men’s rights, and lose women’s responsibilities, but they were horrified by the suggestion that they should adopt men’s responsibilities as a corollary. Rather than men and women sharing the burdens of the world, we got the White Feather Campaign:

This campaign began in the early days of the First World War in Great Britain, where women were encouraged to pin white feathers on young men who were not in military uniform. The hope was that this mark of cowardice would shame them into ‘doing their bit’ in the war. The practice soon spread to Canada, where patriotic women, in response to declining voluntary recruitment figures, organized committees to issue white feathers to men in civilian clothes and publicly denounced the ‘slackers’ and ‘shirkers’.

It is surely worth remarking that many of these women were suffragettes; and thus, even as they campaigned for equal rights with men, they used shame as a tool for ensuring that men, and only men, fulfilled traditionally male obligations. Particularly, duty to give up their own lives, because they were men, for the sake of women. Whatever disadvantages women may have faced at the time, there is surely no greater coercion than death.

Much has changed since the First World War, and the feminist project to slack and shirk on women’s responsibilities while extending their license to act however they damn well please has met with wild success. And it is precisely this state of affairs which begs certain questions, made possible by the conceptual resources we have inherited from the Enlightenment: what if a man doesn’t want to live this way? Why should men continue to fulfill or perform their traditional obligations, when women will not live up to theirs, but neither will they adopt the responsibilities corresponding to their rights at present? The questions arise: were men wrong, all this time, to sacrifice for the sake of women? Should we, in fact, have no obligations to women whatsoever?

The reason why the Men’s Rights Movement arouses such hostility, from both the left and right, is because it is the first attempt in history for a sex to attempt to break out of its traditional role. Feminism is not this; it is the entrenchment of the power that women already held. The Men’s Rights Movement today goes far beyond simple accusations of feminist wrongdoing. Its adherents labor at historical analysis and social criticism, and with the benefit of two-and-a-half centuries of imagination and innovation stemming from the Enlightenment, can easily conceive of a world in which men, for the first time in history, are not required to self-sacrifice for women.

This is surely the future, and it is an inevitable reaction against – thus, an unintended consequence of – feminism itself. In times past, when men could claim compensation for their self-sacrifice, they accepted that this was simply the way of the world. In the absence of compensation, and with the screws being turned ever tighter on men in every sphere of life, they are provoked into questioning the new arbitrary rule, and into formulating their very own liberation project in response.

My statement above – that political extremism, the product of modernity, shall put an end to the traditional idea – should now be clear. Feminism, which is the extreme form of Gynocentrism, shall put an end to Gynocentrism altogether through the reaction which it creates. We are fifty years into the tremendous final act; a grand, orchestral performance, a theatrical display making unprecedented use of sound and light to confuse and cast illusion. But if all the world truly is a stage, then all men and women are actors – with roles of our own choosing, now free to toss aside the scripts we have been handed and create a new story in place of the old.

And when the curtain finally falls, I do believe that there shall be no encores.

Adam

Further Reading:

Paul Elam. To Man Up or Stand Down

Pierce Harlan. Titanic: Its Lessons About

Gender Still Resonate

Rookh Kshatriya. Remembrance Day: A Time of Anglobitch Hypocrisy

Staring Out From the Abyss

May 24, 2014July 29, 2019 / rtbavfm / Leave a comment

Lecture No. 1

“I love an opposition that has convictions” – Frederick the Great

The Battle of the Sexes has degenerated into a Dirty War, and we are, each of us, being drafted into it by forces who care not a whit for equality or fairness.

Propaganda, as a tool of control, is effective only insofar as the vision of the world that it presents concords with the perception of the world experienced day-to-day by its targets. The wider the gap between the perceived world and the propagandistic representation of the world, the less effective – and therefore less useful – the propaganda will ultimately be. We have reached a juncture at which women are increasingly rejecting feminism as irrelevant or inapplicable to their lives, because the world that feminist orthodoxy describes does not appear to be planet Earth. At the same time, we are approaching a zenith of feminist control over the actual inhabited world, which combines state repression with gender tribalism, both forces intensifying exponentially as they use each other as leverage to climb ever higher.

I am reminded of an ancient riddle, which asks, ‘how high can one climb up a mountain?’ The answer is ‘to the top,’ because once you reach the summit, the only possible way is down. Feminism has no obstacles left; total control is within its grasp, and by total, I do mean in the sense that it shall be totalitarian. The victim card has served as an entry pass through the back door of state and supranational institutions. Now empowered over men, feminists have re-established the principles of Valerie Solanas’ Scum Manifesto, declaring – in language clearly evocative of the Final Solution – that we shall soon witness The End of Men. The ‘sex war’ is not cooling down as women approach (or in some cases, surpass) equality with men – it is heating up. Feminists are not only publicly inciting male hatred and getting away with it, they are using their positions in government, in academia, in think tanks and in the media to make their violent fantasies a reality, advocating the renunciation of men’s basic human rights.

To take one recent example, the Secretary of State of the most powerful nation in the world recently announced that an international mobile prosecution unit shall be established specifically to target men around the world. To take another recent example, a leading feminist has suggested that certain legal principles designed to protect innocent citizens from persecution and unjust imprisonment, dating back to the signing of the Magna Carta, should be withdrawn from men. Nor is feminism a problem confined to the Western world. Men are subject to the arbitrary rule of women in India, facing severe penalties for inadvertently causing the slightest offense.

None of this squares with the ‘women-as-victim’ cliché, which has so usefully served feminists in getting to this point. Nevertheless, feminism is firmly entrenched and in control of the mechanisms which boast the monopoly on physical power, legitimate or otherwise. There is hardly any countervailing force which remains. The West has found its new Imperial Mission to replace Global Christendom: enforced worship of women. As any dissenting voice is immediately and violently stamped out, feminists are free to radicalize their anti-male agenda to the point of moral sickness and to unleash unto the world all manner of vindictive atrocities.

For you see, when propaganda has ceased to be an effective tool of control, one seeking control will simply find other means. Control of the state – the monopoly on physical violence – is the means which feminists have sought. But unlike propaganda, which manipulates the mind, state control only brutalizes the body. The power of the controllers always ultimately rests upon the resilience of the controlled, hence consent must still be manufactured. The Roman Empire did not last for five hundred years by the exercise of brute force, but by mass support; the Emperor was glorified as a mortal deity, and even the smallest townships in his realm voluntarily erected statues and altars in his honor. For too long, men have been worshiping at the altar of the female, and it is tempting to believe that this psychological submission will not yield even in the face of physical oppression or extermination – that men will march to their demise like sacrificial lambs, hoping to win women’s favor with their last servile actions. But proclamations regarding The End of Men may well turn out to be as empty as those which were made nearly twenty years earlier, concerning The End of History. The so-called Clash of Civilizations which followed led that author to refute his own position. We should be optimistic that a true Clash of the Sexes will soon have feminist-minded women eating crow.

As feminism grows ever more powerful, and begins to realize its radical ambitions, it will simultaneously exhaust its capacity for manufacturing consent. Those chivalric illusions which ensure the consent of men, and which feminism ultimately rests upon – ‘women-as-victim,’ ‘women-as-precious,’ ‘women-as-helpless,’ and so on – will become rather more difficult to maintain in time. The more force is advanced against men to bridle and inhibit their lives, the more discontent shall be nurtured among them. The misandry bubble is due to burst, and with every example of overreach, which sees yet more good men cast into the role of criminal and subjected to humiliating and vicious punishments, another crack appears in the wall, another step we take closer to the day that the whole hateful edifice collapses under its own weight – and, crucially, under ours.

Our task, then, is twofold: first, to prepare the ground, in order to hasten the collapse of feminism.

Second (and complementary to the first): to construct the ideological weapons to help prevent a feminist resurgence following its collapse.

Both of these goals require, not force, but some propagandizing of our own. Things being the way they are, this does not require us to distort the truth. On the contrary, we shall, for the most part, be exposing those truths which others have distorted; revealing the facts to a wider audience than has yet received them, diligently and unapologetically. As one notable activist in the field recently put it, he does not need to attack feminists – all he needs to do is quote them. Simply exposing feminist hatred to the disinfecting sunlight of the world might well be enough to turn the tide – which is why enormous energies are expended on misdirecting, discrediting, neutralizing and obscuring the arguments and advocates of the opposition.

One key strategy for the achievement of our task was announced at an April 2010 conference, in the form of Male Studies, a new discipline already facing hostility from an academic world that has long been a bastion of radical feminism. That this sore thumb, this thorn in the side of scholarly uniformity should provoke such outrage as it has done should not be surprising. Here is a selection of topics which Male Studies is set to cover:

Socioeconomic factors leading to males’ over-involvement in the criminal justice system, underemployment and limited opportunities as fathers, resulting from changes in child custody law (economics, forensics, law, public policy);

Misandric representations of boys and mature males in the media and advertising (media studies including cinema, television and internet, and advertising);

Accounts of the experience of being male (history, literature, autobiography);

Pressing issues related to the emotional well-being of boys and older males, most notably depression and suicide (clinical psychology, medicine and psychiatry, social work).

Friedrich Nietzsche, writing in the late 19th century, warned that if one gazes into the abyss for long enough, then one shall find the abyss gazing back into them. It must be deeply troubling for feminists, to wake up one morning and find other people deconstructing them, having made it their mission in life to expose and correct feminist wrongdoing.

This would seem to be the reason for the abusive response, from the feminist sector, to the idea of men discussing issues of sex and sexism without the supervision of women. It matters not what feminists think of Male Studies, because feminists are not the discipline’s target audience; its success is not dependent upon their approval, a fact they will no doubt have trouble reconciling themselves to. Regardless, even if they launched a concerted campaign to stop men from discussing their experiences through the fora of academia, they are incapable of preventing this from happening elsewhere. The true sticking point for would-be dictators today is that we live in an Information Age. It is rather difficult to control the flow of information when our very epoch is defined by it. So, let’s have these discussions right here, right now – as long as people can use the internet to congregate and speak their minds, nothing can stop us. Let’s have these discussions in a million other places too, out in the real world – because if men had never spoken up about their experiences, as men, then we would not be looking forward to the commencement of Male Studies in the near future.

There are already a great number of websites devoted to Men’s Rights issues; indeed, these seem to have proliferated over the last few years, sprouting up all over the pasture like so many delicious mushrooms! For most of these weblogs, their content needs no greater unifying theme than opposition to feminism. Given the growing and active network of people concerned about the status of men today, it has become possible to push the envelope a little further. This weblog aims to encourage the intellectual crystallization of what we are calling the Men’s Rights Movement, by taking a narrow lens across a broad range of topics. This weblog is dedicated to the elucidation of Gynocentrism Theory.

What is Gynocentrism Theory? To put it simply, it is a system which explains social relations between the sexes. It supersedes Patriarchy Theory, the cornerstone of all feminist thought. Now memetic, Patriarchy Theory has proved a remarkable tool in denying men their rights, including their most basic human rights to dignity and bodily integrity, on the pretense that all men are oppressors (or at least, allied with oppressive men from whom they receive benefits) and that all women are victims of male power. Gynocentrism Theory is the articulation of many years of effort by various thinkers in the Men’s Rights sphere to describe a vision of the world which more accurately reflects the experiences of men – and many women, too. In contrast to the simplistic, black-and-white tribalism of Patriarchy Theory, Gynocentrism Theory does not equate male fulfillment with the holding of tyrannical power over women. Gynocentrism Theory does not accept that men act as a power bloc. On the contrary, Gynocentrism Theory exposes the divergence between demographics and interests; fundamentally, that while a small number of men may be the ones holding social and political power, this by no means implies that they do so for the benefit of all men; and that in fact, more usually, they do so for the benefit of most women and to the detriment of most men. Gynocentrism Theory advocates that power be understood as multi-faceted, and that policy has historically been a matter of appealing to, and protecting, women.

The above, no doubt, shall make heads spin among those who assume that power at all levels can be identified according to the shape of the genitals of those who get to make important decisions – regardless of what they actually decide.

Any more shall be beyond the scope of this introductory lecture. And so, we shall continue this train of thought next week. Lectures will be held on Saturdays, and students from around the world are invited to attend – or catch up in their own time if they prefer. Discussions shall be held immediately afterwards. Unlike most feminist weblogs, whose authors take after their mentor Mary Daly in systematically denying men a voice, all shall be welcome to speak here, although expulsions shall be warranted in the case that obscene material or personal information is posted. I prefer that feminists be fisked than filtered out, but the fate of truly persistent trolls shall be delivered at my discretion.

I bid you all a reflective day, and I’ll be seeing you again.

Sooner than you think.

Adam Kostakis

Further Reading:

Angry Harry. Gaea IV

The Futurist. The Misandry Bubble

Fidelbogen. For the Benefit of Newcomers: A Review of Some Basic Things

The Feminists: a book review

May 18, 2014October 13, 2024 / gynocentrism / Leave a comment

Many people have read Orwell’s prophetic book 1984, but almost none has heard of the 1971 pulp fiction novel The Feminists, an equally prophetic work detailing events that have unfolded -and continue to unfold- in the area of gender politics. By way of introduction here’s the blurb from the back cover:

THE STORY THAT HAD TO BE WRITTEN—SO TIMELY, SO FRIGHTENINGLY POSSIBLE, YOU WON’T BELIEVE IT’S FICTION!Take a look into the future…women now rule the world—or most of what’s left of it—and their world is not a pretty place to live in. Men have been reduced to mere chattel, good only for procreation. THE FEMINISTS are working to eliminate even this strictly male function…

Men must get permission to make love to any female—even if she is willing—or the penalty is death!

Follow one man’s story as he is hunted for just such a crime. In desperation, he stumbles upon the hide-out of the subterranean people—others, like himself—both male and female—who have broken the law of THE FEMINISTS. Hiding in abandoned subway undergrounds, this group of gallant and desperate people wage a guerilla war to overthrow their enslavers.

Set in the year 1992, the story recounts the rise of misandry and feminist governance that saw women take charge of every aspect of civilization, and of a growing resistance movement (to feminism) that mirrors the sentiment of men’s rights groups that have formed in the decades since the book was first written. The story tells of how one resistance group, while living in a network of secret underground tunnels, plans and executes a successful bombing (which I hasten to add no one in the MHRM would ever consider doing) at a public gathering attended by both the feminist President and a mayor named Verna. The deed is one of many attempts to undermine feminist governance and hasten the end of misandric culture.

During the bombing, the feminist President is injured. From a hospital bed she organizes an emergency meeting with executive members of her government, including her old friend and mayor, Verna, who was also witness to the bombing. The following excerpt below is the pivotal scene in which the President addresses her guests, and where she makes the intriguing suggestion that an increase in female MHRA’s has made it impossible for feminist governance to continue. – PW

***

The president glanced from one to the other of the women, her eyes finally settling on Verna and softening as if she was remembering their long years of friendship during the rise to power. She smiled weakly and then fixed her gaze on her own hands. There was a look of defeat on her face.”It has been the policy of our administration to conceal the unfavorable aspect of Feminist control,” she said, her voice almost a monotone. “I’ve spoken to some of you individually about the resistance in Los Angeles and Chicago.”

”The pigs can be overcome,” the Secretary of Defense interrupted. “We beat them once, we can do it again!”

”No,” the president said firmly. “We won’t beat them again. We are no longer merely fighting the male element of society. An increasing number of females have joined forces with the men.

“Traitors!”

The president lifted her head and stared at the Secretary of Defense coldly. “This country,” she said, “is in the midst of a revolution like it has never known. The only thing keeping us from being ousted is the lack of communication. If the revolutionists in each city did not think they were fighting alone, they would be in control. Fortunately we’ve dissected the country by cutting off all forms of communication.” She met Verna’s stunned face. “The resistance movement in New York has been minor in comparison,” she said. “But all these groups will soon unite. It’s inevitable.”

The Mayor, feeling her legs growing weak, turned and sank into a chair.

“The time has come for us to objectively examine our control,” the President said. “Unless we return the rights to males that make them equals, our country will be torn apart.”

“But they’re not equals!” the Secretary of Defense insisted.

“Thirty percent of the female population has suddenly decided they are, “ the President said. “To retain control we would be fighting our own sex.” She closed her eyes and sighed wearily. “In short,” she said, “we must face the fact that Feminist control has failed.”

The mayor felt as if she had been struck. “Then it’s all been in vain,” she mumbled.

”Not entirely,” the President told her. “Not if we concede now. Unless we allow ourselves to be beaten and forced into male servitude, we can maintain our dignity. Remember, I said equals. In the future, men will consider us in higher esteem. Many of the changes we have brought about will remain in effect. Our control, even though only temporary, has proven that our sex does not make us inferior. “

”Is this what you intend to tell the public?”

”It is.”

”You will create mass hysteria.”

”I don’t think so,” the President said. “Granted, there will always be a segment that will resent my decision to reunite the sexes. I suppose there will be guerilla fighters who refuse to comply, but they will be a minority. I only hope none of you are among them. There are many problems our country must face once the question of sexual superiority is conquered. All of us are needed. We must rebuild our environment and stop starvation.”

***

Source: The Feminists, by Parley J. Cooper (pp. 173-75) Pinnacle Books, 1971

Montana Man Refuses to Pay Bachelor Tax

February 2, 2014September 24, 2023 / Peter Wright / Leave a comment

This photo comes from the 23 May 1921 Batavia Daily News.

William Atzinger, of Fort Benton, Mont., refuses to pay the $3 state bachelor tax. Neither will he be married to escape the tax. But he’ll pay, he says, if spinsters are taxed also.

Volume 8 of The Social Hygiene Bulletin has this note:

The Tax on Bachelors

William Atzinger, aged 35, notified the assessor of Chouteau County, Montana, that he will refuse to pay the poll tax of $3 levied on bachelors by the last state legislature. In his declaration he says, “Spinsters are responsible for my not being married in their refusals of my wooing in the past.”

The report from Great Falls, Montana, further quotes the defiant bachelor as follows: “Tax the spinsters of the same age and I will gladly pay, but otherwise it is class legislation and I stand upon my rights. Furthermore I refuse to get married to escape jail and I refuse to pay a bachelor tax to escape jail.”

Early the following year, the Montana state supreme court ruled that the bachelor tax was unconstitutional (at the same time it also threw out a 21-year-old poll tax that was also imposed only on men).