An example of how proposing and testing a new theoretical model revealed the truth.

Readership: All
Theme: Problems with The Red Pill
Length: 1,200 words
Reading Time: 6 minutes

Do Women Possess Moral Agency?

img-1783681165-6a50d08deda051.57296614.jpg

For 10 years, this question was kicked around in the Christian Manosphere with nary any forthcoming conclusions beyond Donal Graeme’s speculations. This question is an important one, because within the Western Guilt-based ethical structure, the answer determines women’s moral culpability — Are men responsible for women’s behaviors, or are women responsible for themselves? The assumption that women do NOT have agency, which had stood for centuries, was the lynchpin of Chivalry and other gynocentric cultural norms.

This question evaded a comprehensive assessment until 2022.  It turns out that the topic is quite complex. It took Σ Jack two months and more than 25 posts (and counting) to pick this one apart. It continues to be an issue of confusion.

Bad Data, Bad Model

The difficulties surrounding this question of Female Agency were, in fact, a quintessential example of the Fundamental Problem of modeling.

Forming an empirical model of female agency was elusive because the aggregate data (e.g. consider all the women you have ever known) offers very little evidence to inductively conclude that women DO possess moral agency.

img-1783681167-6a50d08f6f30f5.09503687.jpg

What we see is that as soon as women are faced with a situation in which they must assume responsibility and exercise agency, they deny having agentic capacity and become embarrassingly hypoagentic.

What we see is that women chafe, complain, falter, make excuses, and attempt to shift responsibility, all in the hope that a Wh!te Knight will step up to the task and relieve her from her moral duty.  Then if things go awry, she can always blame the simping sucker who valiantly but vainly attempted to save her day.

We seldom see ANY woman instantiating moral agency of her own free will, so it was easy for men to conclude that they are morally incompetent dufuses. And to the extent that this belief was in place, Chivalry remained appropriate.

A New Theoretical Model Reveals the Truth

St. Dalrock did much to undermine this belief, not by directly confronting the topic of agency, but by patently assuming that women DO have agency and then systematically examining hundreds of case studies of chivalry, complementarianism, popular doctrine, feminism, and other cultural norms through this lens. Although Dalrock never formalized this assumption, comprehensively, his viewpoints proposed an alternative theoretical model of Female Agency, colloquially known as The Dalrock Route. Over his 10 year tenure of blogging, the answers became much more evident as it was revealed that Chivalry, gynocentric doctrines, male hyperagency, and the long-held, widespread belief that women lack agency permits, enables, encourages, and leads to the manifestation of female hypoagency in reality.

Now it is increasingly recognized that women DO have agentic capacity, but they absolutely DETEST exercising it for a plethora of reasons, and there are a large number of incentives for women to deny it altogether.  Also, a gynocentric culture works in a concerted effort to enable women’s escape from moral culpability, but this is also gradually changing.

img-1783681168-6a50d090af7c16.25740744.jpg

Some evidence that women DO have moral agency is revealed in how Women Think Being Emotionally Mature and Respectful is Witchcraft (2023/12/5).  They KNOW what they ought to be doing, but they’ll hamster up some false justification for why they don’t or shouldn’t have to do so.  The real reason is because they loathe being spiritually obedient.

The New Model of Female Agency

The new model of Female Agency that is currently gelling is that women DO possess moral agency, but they must be taught, trained, and disciplined in how to exercise agency from a young age to get it down pat. As for men, it is the responsibility of each woman’s male head (father or husband) to teach her how to exercise agentic capacity, foster her growth, and hold her accountable. If a woman refuses to recognize her head, then she’s on her own — ‘independent’ as they like to call themselves. Women are resisting these changes, kicking and screaming all the way just as little children do, but now that they’ve removed their own veil of propriety en masse, their nakedness has been exposed and they can no longer evade the truth. There’s no going back to the 1950s now, but that’s exactly what they wanted.

The interesting thing about this new paradigm is that those men who continue to stick to the old model of assuming that women do NOT have agency tend to fall into one of two extremes.

img-1783681170-6a50d09214c5f9.04989352.jpg
  1. They become hyperagentic imbeciles, AKA Chivalrous Wh!te Knights.
  2. They become pred@tory, e.g. Male Feminists, PUAs, etc.

In fact, these are the only men who are willing to tolerate and play along with women’s ruse of hypoagenticity.

There are a couple differences between these two extremes.

  1. The man’s motivations. Chivalrous men genuinely hold good will towards women, whereas PUAs view them as toys to be wound-up and set into gyrating motion.
  2. Whether the man is willing to preemptively assign a certain level of dignity and agentic capacity to a woman that just isn’t there.  That is, men of the Wh!te Knight variety are willing to ascribe more virtue — chastity, good will, intelligence, moral agency, and so on — to a woman of average or better attractiveness than what she actually possesses — a Feminine Halo Effect leading to pedestalization. In contrast, PUAs regularly mock and belittle women to arouse their indignation (and attraction, much to their debased delight).

Concerning the former category of men, when these two antithetical beliefs are combined — female hypoagency + the hyperassignation of female dignity — it results in a situation in which the man is doing all the work and is perpetually disappointed with a woman who uses him as a doormat.

The latter category of men are more likely to hold a woman accountable, ironically, which is necessary for her to develop her agentic capacity.  This is why we often see that men who deny female agency actually fare better with women, even though they usually have no sense of responsibility in the matter.  What we can learn from this is that it’s very important for a man to discern exactly what a woman is capable of in order to keep her on her toes and deal with her properly and effectively.

The inconvenient truth arising from all this is that as long as women cling to a hypoagentic identity and behave and think of themselves accordingly, then they will only attract weak, supplicating men and predatory men into their lives. Then they will lament being “unlucky in love”, perceive themselves as ‘victims’, and blame men for all their woes.

Concluding Statements

img-1783681171-6a50d0936198e9.80309994.jpg

To briefly summarize this topic as a case study of the Fundamental Problem of modeling, we see that the usual methods of devising a theoretical model (i.e. gathering data, inductive reasoning, and so on) only led to conclusions that confirmed the original assumptions (i.e. that women do NOT have agency). (This is the problem of induction.) This was misleading because the lack of evidence prevented the core issue from being penetrated (that women’s assumed lack of agency prevents them from instantiating agency). It was necessary to develop an alternative theoretical model (based on the assumption that women DO have agency) to be explored and tested. As this theory developed, it became evident that the newer model was more accurate and comprehensive, and therefore superior to the older model.

Looking back, it seems we should’ve known this all along.

Related