Needless to say, last week’s post sparked some interesting, not to mention predictable, conversations and response. After sifting through all of the ego-invested brinksmanship by the token feminist reader of RM, the takeaway was actually a better understanding of the latent purpose of feminism.Perhaps not the understanding she intended, but certainly a confirmation of premise.
A handful of my male readers often ask why I don’t moderate comments, or that the message of Rational Male would be better served if I banned certain commenters. I’ve mentioned on several posts and threads as to why I won’t ever do that (except for blatant spamming), but in a nutshell it’s my fundamental belief that the validity of any premise or idea should be able to withstand public debate. People who aren’t confident of the strength of their assertions or ideas, or are more concerned with profiting from the branding of those weak assertions than they are in truth, are the first to cry about the harshness of their critics and kill all dissent as well as all discourse about those assertions.
That’s the primary reason I’ve never moderated; if people think I’m full of shit I’m all ears – I’m not so arrogant as to think I’ve thought of every angle about any idea I express here or on any other forum. However, the second reason I don’t censor, ban users or delete comments is that I believe it’s useful to have critics (usually women or fem-men) provide the gallery with examples of exactly the mentality or dynamic I’m describing in an essay. With a fair amount of predictability, a blue pill male or an upset woman will just as often prove my point for me and serve as a model for what I’ve described.
I never intentionally try to make rubes out of the critics I know will chime in about something, but I will sometimes leave out certain considerations I may have already thought about something, knowing it will get picked up on by a critic. I do this on occasion because the I know that the “ah hah! I got him, he forgot about X,Y, Z” moment serves as a better teaching tool and confirms for me that a critic does in fact comprehend what I’m going on about.
Take the Power Back
So it was throughout last week’s commentary about the branding of the Strong Independent Woman® social template offered and reinforced by the feminist mindset, and endorsed wholesale by pop-culture and popular media. Considering the new outside awareness the manosphere is receiving courtesy of Return of Kings these days, I expect we’ll see more of the point-and-sputter, dismissive ignorance of offended egos, or we’ll see more cathartic overwritten mission statements repeated by feminists confronted with logical arguments that contradict their comfortably solipsistic world-view.
Doctor Jeremy actually started me back on considering gender power dynamics with his comments here:
As always, your article is insightful. I get concerned with the limit to the progress the manosphere can make, however, because I think the discussions are missing a central concept – power. The goal of this branding, social engineering, and gender-role change you identify is the redistribution of various forms of power and influence within our society. For some reason, however, much of the manosphere’s writing and discussion does not seem to include that level of analysis. This is unfortunate, as feminist and women’s discourse is often focused on redistribution of power – and quite successful as a result of that focus.
As support for my point, please review the quotes I have extracted from livingtree2013′s various comments [emphasis mine]:
“But it is not because women want to eliminate men from the equation. It is because women have historically been entirely dependent on men for their survival, which gave men far too much power over us, and we have worked tirelessly to extract ourselves from that position of inferiority.”
“So why would you expect anything different from us? Its simply not going to happen, at least not until the men in power actually force us to obey their will, which truly, I can see coming in the near future.”
“Unfortunately, you guys didn’t want us doing those things because it negatively affected you in the power balance, but that didn’t stop us from needing it.”
She is not talking about independence. She is not talking about self-esteem. She is talking about who has the power to control the interaction and call the shots…
As far as power is concerned I think anyone who’s read the Rational Male for more than a few posts knows I quote Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power more often than any other resource here, and regularly use those laws to illustrate how they apply to intergender relations. That said, I have dedicated posts to the influence power has in personal dynamics, and I certainly recognize, if sometimes indirectly, the power dynamic in Frame, Dread, and certainly in The Feminine Imperative.
I fully understand the redistribution of power in our gender landscape from a social perspective, but the fundamental question about any form of real power isn’t about who has it or not, but to what ends they apply it.
I felt so strongly about the Truth to Power essay that I included it in the Rational Male book. The salient point in that post was this:
Real Power is the degree to which a person has control over their own circumstances. Real Power is the degree to which we control the directions of our lives.
I expect that would align with what our token, self-identifying feminist LivingTree was repeating, but the underlying question is what are women using that power to achieve?
As I stated prior, feminism as a social influence, has never been about its stated goal of egalitarian equality between the sexes, but rather it’s been about restitution and retribution from the masculine it perceives as its historical oppressors. This was the original intent of feminine independence (before it became the brand it is today), a separation from the dependency (perceived or actual) of women on men. However, the problem inherent in that separation is that in creating a new, autonomous sex role for women, the innate differences and deficits that the former complementary interdependence with men satisfied had to be compensated for.
All of the inherent weaknesses of the feminine that were balanced by the masculine’s inherent strengths had to be provided for in order to achieve this new independence from the masculine. I should also point out that in this feminist separation the masculine is also left in a deficit of having its own inherent weaknesses balanced by the compensating strengths of the feminine.
Power Slaves
I’ve quoted that feminism is the mistaken belief that a more equitable society can be achieved by focusing efforts solely on the interests of one sex.
Sarcasm aside, this is exactly the use to which women have applied the power that feminism and the feminization of society has afforded them since the sexual revolution. Feminism is not, and has never been about leveling a playing field or equality amongst the genders, it’s been about power and applying it to separating from, marginalization of, and eventual eradication of, the masculine influence that the feminine imperative wants restitution and retribution from. LivingTree illustrates this for us here:
Independence for women meant we didn’t have to tolerate abuse anymore because we had the option to leave. It meant that if you left us, we wouldn’t be completely desperate. It meant we didn’t have to cling to you guys for support. It meant we could make decisions about our own lives. It meant we didn’t have to be “seen and not heard”. It meant we didn’t have to be a slave to a stereotype anymore. It meant we could be self-actualizing if we wanted to. It meant we could pick and choose which man we wanted to mate with. And it meant we could admit we had sexual desires.
Tucked into LT’s recitation of feminist boilerplate is the true application and intent of use of the power women’s emancipation from the masculine wants to achieve – direct control of the conditions dictating their innate hypergamy.
The gist of LT’s reasoning for women wanting power, and “Independence” (as a brand or otherwise) from men is due to women’s innate need for security. This need for security and certainty is literally written into women’s DNA, their neural wiring and hormones. As the ‘nurturers’ of the next generation of humanity, evolution selected-for, and reinforced the biological and psychological mechanisms of women with the best capacity to filter for situations that would provide her and her offspring with the best possible security in a chaotic and insecure world. This drive for security is what’s at the root of hypergamy, and in all fairness has been a successful survival mechanism for the human species.
Hypergamy’s constant, limbic, survival-level question for women is “Is this the optimal condition I can secure to ensure my wellbeing and my (future) children?” Whether she’s been married for decades or is out on the town with her girlfriends, that question nags a woman in her hindbrain from childhood to death. Hypergamy’s question and doubt is at the heart of every unconscious shit-test a woman will ever deliver. Hypergamy’s unrealizable quest for optimization extends from the individual woman to women’s social influences. From the micro to the macro, Hypergamy’s constant want of an unachievable contented security defines the Feminine Imperative.
Rigging the Game
In terms of women’s pluralistic sexual strategy (Alpha Fucks and Beta Bucks) that question extends to who she selects as a sex partner to breed with, as well as whom she selects to be the provider for her long term provisioning. At the heart of it, women’s desire for independence and the perceived power they believe it should give them is an effort in controlling the conditions that they believe will satisfy Hypergamy’s question. Every popular woman’s issue you can list will find its way back to the want for control of the circumstances that dictate how well a woman can satisfy her Hypergamy.
Fat acceptance, the right to vote, child custody and paternity laws, divorce laws, slut walks, accusations of rape culture, more women in the boardroom, feminization of men and culture on whole, hell, every item LivingTree mentions in her comment, just name the issue and underneath the social or personal veneer is the clutching after of some usable power to control the conditions that will satisfy her need for security and optimize women’s Hypergamy.
LT is correct, women don’t want to eliminate men, they simply want to control them, both directly and indirectly, socially and personally, subtly and subconsciously as well as overtly when necessary, to comply with satisfying their innate hypergamy. They want independence from men’s influence in the process of satisfying hypergamy – they want to rig the game by replacing his genuine desires by forcing him to comply with her control of his conditions. Women want the power to control men’s desires, their ideologies, their sexual response, their individualism and the decisions that result from them all in order to optimize hypergamy
The problem in all this effort for control is that nature stagnates in homogeny. Androgyny, homogeny, are the first order for inbreeding. For as much as women make efforts to emancipate themselves and change the rules of the game to better fit their deficiencies, they are always confounded by the innate drives and desires of men. They get frustrated with men who wont play their version of the game, or worse, the ones who play it more poorly than they themselves do. So they jail them, they shame them, they pathologize his sexual impulse, they condition feminization into them from their earliest development, they punish them for not playing the game that should always end with them optimizing hypergamy’s nagging doubt – in spite of falling short of it under organic circumstances. For all the delusions of independence, autonomy and the fantasy of some form of control of the process, they find men will simply not cooperate. They wont give them the satisfaction of optimizing their solipsistic hypergamy, because the Men who have the capacity to do so, the ones women want to be satisfied with simply aren’t playing their version of the game.
