Sunshine Mary has been digging into the feminine imperative, trying to understand the mechanics of it. In challenging the concept she is doing the sphere a favor by forcing a more rigorous examination of it.
In How doth the little feminine imperative grow? she describes the interaction of a group of mostly home schooled young men and women. The young women (American Heritage Girls) recently joined up with an existing group of Boy Scouts for a joint Christmas celebration. When it came time to enjoy the cookies, the girls all went first:
I noticed my daughters cutting into the front of the line at the buffet table, along with all the other AHGirls, and I heard one of the older Boy Scouts loudly instructing the cubs to stay back and let the girls go through the buffet line first. The girls all looked a bit startled by this but, faced with a long table full of treats, happily skipped right up to the front with nary a backward glance…
The thing is, no girl asked or appeared to expect to go through the food line first, though they also didn’t object to doing so (they also didn’t thank the boys). It was the boys who were enforcing this on one another, and they were doing it very proudly.
As Sunshine Mary points out, it was one of the boys who directed this.
It just appeared to happen spontaneously and willingly.
This causes her to question whether the feminine imperative is really a valid concept, or if this isn’t something strictly due to the nature of men:
While the feminine imperative may be a valid concept, I do not at present agree with Dalrock that it is women defining social rules to meet strictly female needs.
Numerous commenters on her post noted that it is very natural for men to look after women, and this has always been the case. Indeed, this natural protectiveness men have for women is part of the mechanism which leads to the feminine imperative. However, it is only part of the mechanism. The other side is vehement objection to reciprocity, and this very much does come from women. To the casual observer the scene Sunshine Mary describes where men defer to women and the women don’t bother thanking them (or truly even appreciating the gesture) seems to “just happen”.
The reality is that women’s passivity is far more superficial than it appears. Vox Day recently explained why women tend to be passive aggressive:
…passive-aggressive behavior is an intentional attack on another individual made with at least some degree of plausible deniability concerning the attack, the intent, or the target. The reason for the plausible deniability because the passive-aggressive individual wants to be able to attack someone else without giving his target a justification for striking back.
Should he be questioned, the passive-aggressive attacker will usually affect to deny he was making an attack, or that he intended any such thing, or that the person he was obviously attacking was, in fact, the target….
This is a perfectly reasonable conflict strategy for women, who are on average smaller, weaker, slower, and less intelligent than men.
The seeming passivity of women in the process of rewriting social norms to the exclusive benefit of women is what is throwing Sunshine Mary off. She can easily test this by coaching one of the boys to suggest that the girls show some reciprocal form of deference to the boys during a future celebration. Perhaps the girls should serve the boys refreshments during their next celebration, as Anonymous Reader suggested:
One way to damp down the entitlement princess training just received by the boys / young men deferring to the girls / young women would be to cause the girls and young women to defer in a different way to the boys and young men. For example, at some future time you might consider having the AH girls serve the Boy Scout boys, perhaps by seating the boys at table and having the girls bring trays to the tables.
If this is suggested the lie of the girls’ passivity will come out in force. It won’t come out in the form of a logical reaction, even if on the surface it appears to start that way. For example, they are likely to bristle at the idea of having their moxie damaged by deferring to the boys, and make a feminist argument for equality. However, if this is simply about equality one could then propose that instead of serving the boys the girls have the boys go first through the treat line, and agree to take turns at this from here on.
At this point the reality of the feminine imperative will become evident, because while the girls were seemingly passive when everything was going their way, any deviance from this will be met with emotional outbursts. Whoever proposes either true equality or simple reciprocity will become the object of great irrational anger, and at this point the passivity turns to aggression. While the girls (and their mothers) won’t know why they are so angry, they will know that whoever proposed such a thing is a terrible person. Sunshine Mary described just this sort of thing regarding Joseph of Jackson in a separate post.
Another excellent example of the passive aggressive enforcement of the feminine imperative occurred in August when Zippy Catholic linked to my post Losing Control of the Narrative in his post Rubbernecking Past the Death of Masculinity. Commenter Lydia was outraged that men were being allowed to notice very large numbers of women delaying marriage to focus on casual sex and career, as well as divorcing frivolously. That I could notice such things was in her mind proof that I am a defective man and husband:
If the blogger linked is supposed to be an example of someone who appears to care deeply about marriage and the family, you can keep him. I don’t care if he’s a Christian. I don’t care that he knows feminism is false or that lots of Christians are, unfortunately, feminists. (Whoop-de-doo.) Someone that callous and cynical, who freely thinks and talks in the terms of “Game,” who pretty obviously thinks that all women are prima facie sluts, has had his chivalry and his capacity for wonder permanently damaged if not destroyed. I wouldn’t want him or his followers in the so-called “Christian manosphere” (shudder) coming within a hundred miles of marrying one of my daughters.
…what does one expect from people who want to wander around the blogosphere wallowing in talk of the sluttishness of women and the needs of poor men to protect themselves from these predatory females?
…How would a man who thinks and speaks that way view his wife as a gift? Where would be that capacity for joy and wonder and blessing?
Lydia’s complaint is that I am being allowed to think differently than than she would permit, and that Zippy is compounding the problem by exposing his male readers to such subversive ideas. Her argument isn’t that the facts I’m presenting are untrue, but that I’m committing a thought-crime against the feminine imperative by acknowledging such a painfully obvious pattern. She is there to make sure no such thought-crimes occur in the minds of Zippy or his readers, lest they too become defective men:
…my conclusion is that the occupational hazard of being immersed (maybe perforce, because of one’s job, for example) in the situations in which women have ruined men’s lives is a particular level and type of jadedness and a damaging of that ability to see a woman as a gift. I think that _especially_ the fathers of sons should want their sons not to suffer that kind of damage, especially not when they still have the opportunity,hopefully, to go through life without suffering it.
She reinforces this further down in the discussion:
No one should even be able to *think* of nonsense like #1-#4…
She takes special offense at my pointing out that frivolous divorce exists and that it is in fact regularly encouraged by the church and the culture:
This portrays women as somehow determined by the outside world to behave wickedly and destroy everyone’s life (including, what the manosphere doesn’t seem to realize, her own life in a very real sense) on a whim. Wow, that’s darned insulting. *Not one* of my close female friends is “resisting divorce porn.” The idea is risible. They’re just happy and busy and living their lives, love their husbands, etc.
Having established that divorce porn isn’t a problem and having chastised men for thinking women are tempted to utilize a system designed for them to abuse men, she later explains what the real problem is. It turns out that homosexual husbands and “rape porn” have much to do with it:
Frankly, I think that some (indeed, numerically quite a few, though I won’t pronounce dogmatically on the total percentage) cases where a woman initiates a divorce are cases where _she_ has lost _her_ “bet” in marriage and has suffered the consequences of the risk she took–where, for example, her husband ended up addicted to rape porn and refused to stop, where he was keeping a mistress or sleeping around, where he was an active homosexual, where he was genuinely, seriously abusive, or plenty of other situations.
During the long exchange (130+ comments) Zippy and I both encouraged Lydia to point out where my post was either factually or logically incorrect. I don’t believe she directly responded to Zippy’s request, but to me she explained that she would not do so because I am not her friend. My specific request was:
I’m just trying to break through the internet tribalism and have an actual discussion. At some point can we break past claims that the other guys are “internet tough guys” who probably don’t love their wives, and have a real discussion? This is all I’m asking.
To which she replied:
No, not really. I have an extremely full Internet life, probably too full. In fact, certainly too full. Plus a real, in-person life. What you call “tribalism” I call friendship.
Yet, while she was too busy to point out where my facts or logic were incorrect, she wasn’t too busy to wage a one woman filibuster in the comboxes of Zippy’s blog post. She was sadly ultimately successful in this, to such a degree that Zippy followed up with a post asking if it is reasonable to consider such things.
Lydia’s marathon emotion driven objection to my post is evidently out of character for her, and according to Zippy she is widely known for her use of facts, logic, and reason:
You haven’t truly tasted irony until you’ve seen someone lecture Lydia McGrew about using facts, logic, and reason.
I’ll have to take Zippy’s word for that, because her lengthy filibuster of what she deemed crime-think displayed none of these qualities. However, assuming he is correct, this makes the example all the more pertinent. Threaten the feminine imperative and you will unleash an unthinking emotional tirade focused on you personally and not on the ideas being discussed. The woman enforcing the imperative likely herself can’t see how irrational she is being; she only knows how angry she feels at the men who are violating the imperative. Other men notice what happened to the previous thought criminal and are often cowed into silence.
This is how the feminine imperative “just happens”.
Update: Several other bloggers have written their own thoughts on the issue (Vox Day, Frost, Zippy Catholic, Sunshine Mary, and Ballista74). See also Rollo’s recent post on the feminine imperative and employment law.
Incredible.
Ah the times-they-are-a-changing!
There’s nothing she can do to stop men from becoming aware of misused power.
Wow. Great analysis. I read SSM’s post but I couldn’t put my finger on what was missing. I need to keep that word “reciprocity” at the forefront of my thinking. Of course as a woman, it’s not something I’ve been required to practice much. Passive (even to the point of ambiguous) gratitude is about as much as is ever expected of me, and plenty of females think any gratitude at all is too much.
I think this is right in that the feminine imperative doesn’t “just happen”. I would add that it has been by design. The passive aggressive part is that women don’t want it to appear to have been by design. The emotional tirade part of it is that women like it this way. Having men serving the female imperative without even knowing it is much to their advantage. Lydia’s shrieking was a result of men getting too close to the truth.
The vehement objection to reciprocity is a result of this obsequious deference to women, letting them go first, holding doors, saying “excuse me” and “i’m sorry”, as an outgrowth of chivalry and our American experience. All men are equal, all men owe all women deference because women are “the weaker sex”. That mindset has been part of the fabric of US culture for so long and become so firmly entrenched, that it has become simply “the way it is”. Many women simply expect to have doors held, chairs pulled out, and allowed to go first. Many people in their mid 40s and younger simply don’t know any other way of life. To that way of thinking, a man is expected to help a woman, who is entitled to that help simply because she is a woman and because she needs help.
On SSM’s posts many men said they received disapproving looks and beration from women saying they don’t need help from men. My experience has been just the opposite. More than once I’ve been on the receiving end of public dressing-down and disapproving finger wagging for NOT holding a door, for NOT helping a woman with something, and for NOT deferring to women.
Before the political correctness and feminism movements, there was a code of conduct that required women to show at least some gratitude and grace. Around 1960 to 1970, the expectation of gratitude and grace started eroding. I suspect a big part of why the reciprocation isn’t part of the equation anymore is because the political correctness movement demanded that men and women be seen as total equals in the workplace and in public life, and because of a cultural coarsening that has been progressing for about the past 60 years.
One final thought: the feminine imperative perpetuates itself by casting itself in a moral dimension. In the feminine imperative the woman establishes herself as the relationship’s guardian. If it serves the interests of the woman or of the relationship, it is “moral” and “good” and “right”. If it serves the man’s interests, then that is “immoral” and “bad” and “wrong”, because by definition HIS objectives and goals always stand athwart HER interests or THEIR interests.
Conversely, whatever serves the woman’s interests by definition serves the relationship’s interests, because her interests and objectives are always good and right and moral.
The thought police are on the way.
@ Dalrock
So your theory of the feminine imperative is that it operates based on accepting benefits (handouts, charity, and the like) and then denies reciprocity.
It’s an interesting view, but IMO doesn’t encompass the very active role women have taken to changing our laws into something unrecognizable to any previous civilized society. While the denial of reciprocity is present, I’m not convinced that women are passive actors.
In Sunshine Mary’s case, I wonder if one of the girls ever so courteously hinted that the girls should go first. Young men are not particularly known for restraining their sexuality, In such a situation it’s not unreasonable to think a young man may think he’s improving his chances with the girls by doing this, while we all know he’s proactively failing a shit test.
Of course, Sunshine Mary’s blog post doesn’t cover this information one way or another. It’s possible she didn’t see it. But that’s one the challenges in spotting the feminine imperative…it teaches men to act in the best interests of women without the reverse being considered. Part of the subtlety lies in the underlying culture. If the implication of every social interaction in the media present this, people will think it’s normal with or without the concept being explicitly stated.
Dalrock’s test for reciprocity is probably the best way SSM has of testing for this. Given her authority as an adult, she SHOULD be able to ask the girls to do some sort of nicety for the boys who let them go first in line. As much as they resist, they’ll show the strength that they follow the feminine imperative.
Dalrock wrote:
But why? Why should there be opposition to reciprocity? How does that serve the feminine imperative, assuming such a thing both exists and is orchestrated by women?
Think back to the Costa Concordia disaster and “women and children first”, and the outcry against the men rushing the lifeboats. Older men and women, and Christian conservatives including Sheila Gregoire, were shocked. How could this be, they fretted. Don’t these men know they are just supposed to let the women and children go first? They are just supposed to die for women and kids they don’t know, well,,,,,, just because they are men! It’s such a part of American life (or had been) that women felt they don’t have to respond in kind — it is just the way it is.
Ceer wrote:
Yes, I am planning to test this idea. I don't know exactly what I'm going to do yet, but it needs to take into account the fact that these are other people's children and be respectful of that, so if anyone has suggestions, let me know.
Now then, if the girls and their mothers embrace the idea and are eager to reciprocate, will there be a concession from this corner of the web that the feminine imperative either does not exist as it is currently conceptualized or at the very least is not primarily FEM driven?
SSM:
“Why should there be opposition to reciprocity? How does that serve the feminine imperative, assuming such a thing both exists and is orchestrated by women?”
Because if women were expected to show grace, it would be an admission on their part that male deference is not an entitlement nor a gift; and can be withdrawn if not incentivized.
Because if women were expected to reciprocate, it would be an acknowledgment that women as well as men are subject to a written and unwritten code of conduct; that the rules apply to women as well as men.
Reciprocity means obligations and accountability. Do you want to have obligations to every nice guy that is doing you favors out of the blue? do you have a guess of what those obligations would be? Do you want to pay back for all the benefits you have been receiving… when these were offered for “free”? If reciprocity is expected, what kind of person does it make you for not returning the favors? but do you really want to return the favors?
No reciprocity puts you on a pedestal. Reciprocity puts you in a negotiation.
Nature though. Males display females select. Courtship is given for free. There’s no guarantee of reciprocity in courting. And there shouldnt be one.
What is missing here, or what has been invented, forced, deviated… is that all men are expected to court women “or else”. And never to expect anything in return or else. Forced pedestal. Under the pretense of the opposite game, equality… one without reciprocity. Yah. Fucked up.
*courting = courtship.
“Why should there be opposition to reciprocity? How does that serve the feminine imperative, assuming such a thing both exists and is orchestrated by women?”
Because if women reciprocated freely, it would be an abrogation of their social and sexual power.
Deti, I don’t totally follow your 5:25 comment.
You say
and
Are you saying that chivalrous behavior is more in effect now than in the past? But the women from NeW that I wrote about a few days ago disagree and say chivalrous behavior has all but disappeared among young men.
Also, as I read it, it seems like your first quote and second quote contradict each other. Can you clarify?
Reciprocation would mean to open their legs. Men offer commitment, women offer sex. The boys making all the girls pass first are not expecting to have a coca-cola in between days. They want to be recognized and elevated among their male peers and win the sexual competition. Reciprocity would mean that the girls accept that offer and open their legs. So no, they shouldnt.
They should say thanks but no thanks, if anything else.
Just that the free – truly free – candy, favors, advantages, spoils, etc are too much to resist.
Why stop sucking a sucker?
@ Sunshine Mary
For just this one instance, I doubt it. It will show that for your group, the FemImp is more ingrained in the boys than the girls. Also, keep in mind that girls have a follow the leader tendency. If all the mothers uniformly push this, there’s likely to be little resistance to it.
I had a similar experience as well: I mentioned to a new girlfriend, why I did not want to get married (she asked) : I said I don’t want to be a slave to a woman who can unilaterally take my kids, my house, my freedom, my savings and my future income away, on a whim.
Upon hearing my answer she went absolutely crazy. She was physically shaking with anger, her voice went hyper-sonic and she just kept yelling some incoherent blather, at me. I just stood there, shocked by her reaction. The result: I never saw her again (thanks god!), and never talked to a woman about marriage again.
I often thought about it and wondered what caused her to react this way. I think fear was her primordial motivation, she felt threatened and was scared that men are figuring out the obvious scam the the western matriarchies are doling to them. She knows her gravy train of female privilege is built on the backs of men who are oblivious to their own expendability and exploitation. A new generation of men who are aware of the raw deal that the matriarchy presents them with, and who decide to tune out, is a very real threat to the very survival of our civilization.
To those who think that men are not capable of turning their back on society, it only takes a quick look at the history of Ancient Rome and Greece to realize that it can indeed happen (not even a “bachelor tax” introduced by Emperor Augustus could convince Roman men that marriage was worth it; interestingly, men lost interest in marriage shortly after “no fault” divorce become popular in 1st century BC).
YOHAMI wrote:
Interesting comment. But the girls in this case weren’t being courted by the boys, unless you consider all male-female interactions as some kind of potential-courting.
SSM:
“Now then, if the girls and their mothers embrace the idea and are eager to reciprocate, will there be a concession from this corner of the web that the feminine imperative either does not exist as it is currently conceptualized or at the very least is not primarily FEM driven?”
Only in that one instance. The feminine imperative is a part of American work life, social life, church life, leisure life and public life. It is simply the way men and women interact with each other on a daily basis, day in day out, year in year out, in public and in private. It is this way by design. It manifests everywhere: at work, on the street, in a line at Starbucks, in a hospital waiting room.
You want this to be male-driven as an outgrowth of old chivalrous norms invented by knights and feudal families of the European Middle Ages. But feminism has bastardized chivalry and turned it into something completely unrecognizable. Women had to show grace and gratitude for expressions of chivalry. That is simply not expected now.
Yohami nailed it: women object to reciprocity because that would impose obligations on a woman and require her to be accountable for her conduct.
Not all of the interactions are courtship, we have sisters, mothers, etc, which we want to protect. And we want to protect the elder and the weak etc.
But the pretty and young? Courtship.
@ Sunshinie Mary
My take on this concept is that people, particularly men, are taught to be chivalrous without regard to whom they’re giving chivalry to or the power differential. Aurini discussed this not too long ago. Chivalry has continued more or less unabated while the original context has changed. 1) There is no longer the social convention for women to act with propriety.
2) Contemporary law provides a de jure power of women over men, creating a different aggregate balance of force.
Yohami is exactly right. To amplify:
women object to reciprocation because to them, “reciprocation” translates to “He will expect me to have sex with him.”
Those young men were nice to those girls because there’s an unspoken suggestion that if they are “nice”, the girls will notice them and they will win the sexual competition, and get sex.
SSM:
I don’t think the two paragraph segments you quoted are contradictory.
The first talks about male deferential behavior towards women, and women expecting it (literally shaming men into it) with no reciprocation.
The second talks about the lack of reciprocation and why — political correctness and feminism.
@ Sunshine Mary
Allow me to take a stab at it. It’s a combination of issues. First, Chivalrous behavior has disappeared from the ranks of attractive men…IE, the alphas. This is due to the fact our current feminized society offers them nothing of value. The mechanism that chivalry started under was made a success by alpha knights of the middle ages being taught beta skills in order to make them better able to attract and keep a long term mate. Second, is in issue you brought up. The men of this group are to be expected to fulfill the role of Chivalry, but the women aren’t expected to reciprocate by fulfilling their traditional roles. This functions as a large scale shit test where any man who signs up is subconsciously set up for failure.
Concerning women and reciprocation to men, it comes down to this:
If you feel nothing for them, why reciprocate?
No relation, no reciprocation.
@ Ceer
What I want to know is this: is the concept of Feminine Imperative something that ya’ll have your jaws locked on, a concept which every interaction can be construed as supporting and examples which seem to go against it are discounted?
Nota bene: I should say I am not vested in trying to disprove the FI. I only want to know whether it is a real thing or not, and if it is real, what exactly is it (where did it come from, how is it perpetuated, etc). My questions are not designed to be contentious, but only to inquire. I cannot just accept things I read in the manosphere as being true without investigating their veracity – no one should blindly accept anything. That would make us a cult. Let’s not be cultish, the way feminists are.
“unless you consider all male-female interactions as some kind of potential-courting.”
Unless the man and woman involved are related, yes. All male-female interactions are some degree of “courting”. Every interaction between a man and woman has sexual undertones.
Every time a man sees a woman, within a split second in his mind he looks her up and down, front and back, assesses her fitness as a sex partner, assigns a Sex Rank to her, and decides thumbs up (I would have sex with her) or thumbs down (I would not have sex with her).
I often thought about it and wondered what caused her to react this way. I think fear was her primordial motivation, she felt threatened and was scared that men are figuring out the obvious scam the the western matriarchies are doling to them.
I think actually with most women the reaction to commentary that could be viewed as being negative in some way about women generally is to take this personally, and act as if the comment were directed at them personally. That is the most common reason, by far, that women react that way — it is assumed that the speaker is referring to the woman in question and her female friends. This is why the most common, by far, response is “I don’t know any women who are like that” or “I am not like that and none of my women friends or acquaintances are like that” and so on — this is, of course, the fallacy that an anecdote can defeat a not always applicable yet nevertheless generally true statement, but the motive is based on taking the statement personally, and evaluating its validity against the woman herself and her own experiences/female friends, rather than in a more objective and detached manner. In this, again, the critical point is the failure/unwillingness/disinterest/inability to differentiate between the objective and the personal. This isn’t a “flaw”, per se, it is just a part of how women are socially psychologically put together — an attack on the herd is an attack on the self, and vice versa –> this is where the sisterhood idea comes from, and where its basis lies.
Deti wrote:
No, I don’t want anything. Truly. I really do want to understand what is true, even if I hate it. Believe me, if my motivation were “what I want”, I would not be reading the The Rational Male. 🙂
And I don’t think the FI was invented by knights, although I did write about that on my blog to highlight the power of mythology on our cultural norms. I actually suspect it is far more ancient than the Middle Ages, and I do not believe it is a uniquely American construct, although we have developed a particularly toxic set of inter-gender norms using these very old behavioral patterns.
Thank you for clarifying your 5:25 comment. I understand what you are saying now.
YOHAMI
Reciprocity would mean that the girls accept that offer and open their legs. So no, they shouldnt.
Well, I do agree with that.
But IF all male-female interactions are some level of courtship, then should females not accept any help or favors from males, no matter how much the males implore them to accept? Is this not an unfair burden on females, to have to be constantly on the lookout lest some man try to hold a door for us, and then to have to refuse to walk through it?
What I want to know is this: is the concept of Feminine Imperative something that ya’ll have your jaws locked on, a concept which every interaction can be construed as supporting and examples which seem to go against it are discounted?
I think where we are perhaps getting muddled up is assuming that because it is the feminine imperative it is therefore solely engineered by women. In reality those are two different questions, i.e.,: (1) is there a feminine imperative and, if so, in what does it consist and (2) who and what are the means by which this feminine imperative is enforced socially. Because the idea is that the feminine imperative is to a substantial degree biological in origin, therefore it must be the case that both men and women have been involved in its development and enforcement over the millenia, feminism being only the most recent example of this. That, however, is a separate question from whether such an imperative in favor of the female sex in terms of social rules exists.
@ deti
At what age would you say that males begin to do this?
In my original post, the majority of the children are in late grade school, with the range from 5 to 18. The boy whom I first saw instructing the younger Cub Scouts to stay back appeared to be between 10 and 12 years old. Even the 5-year-olds did not object, though. Were they assessing the girls in this way?
“Now then, if the girls and their mothers embrace the idea and are eager to reciprocate, will there be a concession from this corner of the web that the feminine imperative either does not exist as it is currently conceptualized or at the very least is not primarily FEM driven?”
Well, no.
As you’ve said these are children and too young and suggest able to act freely on their own.
By getting the mothers to agree you’ve know mandated reciprocity by mandate from authority figures.
True reciprocation occurs on it’s own absent of outside influences.
Since none of the girls insisted on waiting their turn we already have an answer.
Here’s a much more valid and moral test (if you’re up to it)
Try to teach biblical submission to married women in your bible studies group and if they will agree whole heartedly to the concept and execution of behaviors then I would agree to a concession.
But that’s not going to happen!
ROFL
You should have a head start as these are clear biblical concepts in a church setting,but I say you would fail.
@Sunshinemary
I agree that your questions are a positive thing, as I pointed out in the opening of the OP. I suspect that some of the static you perceive in response to your post is due to the very passive aggressive nature of women like Lydia. I don’t believe this is what you are doing, and probably more importantly I don’t think it should prevent us from thinking critically on the issue.
I also agree with you that saying that chivalry is always an effort to get into a woman’s pants is a gross oversimplification. Not all chivalry is related to courtship, and in fact the vast majority of it isn’t. The men who gave their lives on the Titanic had no expectations of getting sex out of their choice to drown. However, women are now very comfortable accepting both the courtship related chivalry and the non courtship chivalry without any expectation of reciprocity. In the area of courtship they no longer expect to 1) Only accept the favors if they are seriously considering the man in question and 2) Honor their marriage commitment.
That women like Lydia are so deeply offended that I would point out slutty behavior and frivolous divorce shows just how far the culture has come. There was a time not too long ago where a woman who considered herself traditional would instead be offended at the widespread harlotry which has become the norm in our culture, and work to curb that instead of provide it (passive aggressive) cover.
@ Sunshine Mary
You can certainly ask. I think that most of the commenters here will agree that your blog has shown that you’re in earnest, rather than some feminist troll.
Should your girls accept a subservient activity gladly, I’m perfectly happy to admit that the FI hasn’t completely consumed their behaviors. In fact, since they’re still young, I’d be surprised if they didn’t accept to do at least something courteous for the boys.
I think Deti’s comments on this thread are useful. They underline the problem nicely, but don’t provide a comprehensive definition. I’m reminded of a comment I left at Spacetraveller’s Sanctuary here:
http://thesanctuary-spacetraveller.blogspot.com/2012/07/manhaters.html?showComment=1342840210088&m=1#c2607830672353829492
The post is about man hate (you could also call it abuse of men), which I believe to be related to the feminine imperative. I sent a permalink to the comment where I try to define misandry. IMO, feminine imperative differs from misandry, but the two are related.
Let me attempt a formal definition for the feminie imperative: The attempt at changing of law or social convention or custom to coincide with women’s interests irrespective of mens. Viewing situations and actions from a feminine perspective with emphasis on benefits for women while at the same time either ignoring detriment to men or claiming detriment to men doesn’t exist when it does.
@ Sunshiine Mary RE: Deti
Puberty. We men then continue to do this throughout our lives. To be fair, we do something similar to men, which is to look them down and up to assess their potential as a threat. To a woman who doesn’t know about this, I bet it looks like similar to what we do with them. It’s all about assessing physicality.
@Tom:
“Upon hearing my answer she went absolutely crazy. She was physically shaking with anger, her voice went hyper-sonic and she just kept yelling some incoherent blather, at me. I just stood there, shocked by her reaction. The result: I never saw her again (thanks god!), and never talked to a woman about marriage again.”
Brendan has already explained why she acted like this. Women can – sometimes, with great effort – distinguish between comments directed at their sex and themselves personally. But their default mode is to take every comment personally. Solipsism, you know.
But I think you drew the wrong conclusion by never speaking to women about marriage again. It is, in fact, a great way to determine who you’re dealing with. Any woman who reacts more or less like the one you described is terminally damaged goods and needs to be dropped instantly. Consider it a surefire do and dump tell.
Do you all essentially agree with Ceer’s definition? I like it, and it appears “neutral,” yet it’s a bit vague. Is there anything anyone would would add, which wouldn’t give the impression of bias, to a REASONABLE person? Also, is there an accepted “male imperative?”
“Feminine traits are called weaknesses. People joke about them; fools ridicule them; but reasonable persons see very well that those traits are just the tools for the management of men, and for the use of men for female designs.” — Immanuel Kant
“All women are subtle in exaggerating their weaknesses; they are inventive when it comes to weaknesses in order to appear as utterly fragile ornaments who are hurt even by a speck of dust. Their existence is supposed to make men feel clumsy, and guilty on that score. Thus they defend themselves against the strong and “the law of the jungle.”” — Friedrich Nietzsche
“Unless the man and woman involved are related, yes. All male-female interactions are some degree of “courting”. Every interaction between a man and woman has sexual undertones…”
Prior to puberty there is still a dynamic taking place. Girls use shit tests from an early age:
http://heartiste.wordpress.com/2008/12/26/game-starts-at-birth/
When boys are schooled in the fi, girls first supplication feeds the girls attention seeking behaviours and reinforces the princess mentality. Hamsters grow strong under such conditions.
@SunshineMary
“But why? Why should there be opposition to reciprocity? How does that serve the feminine imperative, assuming such a thing both exists and is orchestrated by women?”
That’s a question that answers itself. Create a table in your mind of taking and giving: The ultimate “win” on this table is to take from the other while giving nothing in return.
A country that trades with its neighbors is better off than an isolated country. The country that convinces its neighbors to give them something for nothing is even better off.
It also lends credence to the theory that women have an innate “drive” to get as much resources as possible from men, and to protect what they already have from being taken from them if possible.
For all the bragging Mrs. McGrew does on her blog about having a PhD, she certainly has trouble writing a clear sentence; nothing like using five words where one would do to obscure one’s point. Anyway, I bolded the part that interested me, about seeing women as a gift. Translation: If you notice that we women are often not very nice, you will no longer be able to pretend like our presence is God’s gift to you. Truthfully, Mrs. McGrew’s comments cause me to have to concede
Dalrock’s and Rollo’s points:
and
She really does seem to be channeling her inner Wizard of Oz and exhorting men to pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.
The so-called ‘feminine imperative’ is plain old sophistry. You all are disappearing up your own assholes. Should have stayed home and read the Bible.
Lydia’s behaviour could more easily and readily be understood as playing for and defending Team Woman.
I would say no. The reason being because you would have to make a conscious effort to perform the test, where as no such prompting was necessary for the boys. Observing a process will change the process.
Whether the girls resist the idea or not, the boys’ unconditioned response was to defer to the girls without having outside influence in that moment. If you were to observe an unprompted response by the girls deferring to the boys you might have a case.
You mentioned in that thread that you had to remind your girls of how nice the boys were for their deference. The reason this reminder was necessary is because their unconditioned default reflex was simply to take advantage of the situation, genuine gratitude isn’t even an afterthought. Expressions of a socially expected gratitude is a conditioned response, it isn’t the same thing as genuine organic gratitude.
Oh pfft, CL.
The concept of the feminine imperative is just a different way of stating what Steve Moxon wrote in “The Woman Racket” several years ago — namely that society’s rules always have been stacked in favor of women as the owners of the rare resource of womb space, and that men, especially inferior seeded men, have always been assigned a disposable role in society because of this. Men and women alike support this, generally, because it was adaptive for the species to do so in evolutionary time, and we haven’t really had enough time since then to evolve away from it. So it does “come naturally”, if you want to look at it that way.
“Team Woman” is a reality that is something that both falls from, and supports, the feminine imperative (which exists in other species as well) — that is, women evolved to have herd-like behavior because this supports their own initiative over and against male physical power, and counterbalances it. The successful human societies were patrilocal, meaning that they were arranged around a “band of brothers”, which acted to counteract the herd force of women quite effectively — that is, our species evolved a form of male social organization that outcompeted other ones in part because it offset to a substantial degree the female power center of the herd against unrelated males warring against each other, and actually this is what made “patriarchy” possible in our species as compared with others, where the males never moved away from itinerant gang warfare in a meaningful sense — a situation that defaults to “Team Woman”, or in this case, “Team Female”, due to the natural power of strength of numbers and solidarity that flows from the female herding behaviors and the mechanisms that exist to enforce that socially.
So the feminine imperative develops as an evolutionary adaptation to support women’s interests in the context of (1) a social order which is based on a band of brothers male blood kin basis and (2) a biological reality which admits that womb space is a fundamental reproductional constraint for the species as a whole. Favoring female interests in this context makes sense, because, again, in the band of brothers context, monogamy is the norm, and sexual access is doled out in a male-rough-egalitarian way (i.e., the best men get the best brides, but almost all men get a bride). In that context where female weakness is a given, even in light of the herd behavior displayed by unrelated women (something which was likely enhanced by the growth of patriarchy as well, but hardly can be seen to have its basis in it, given that it exists in other species which are decidedly not patriarchal in the human sense), the feminine imperative makes sense, as a set of social rules designed to favor women — something which was supported by men and women alike for different reasons.
It seems the feminist imperative has intertwined itself with the feminine imperative.
Cases in point:
The 8 Presidential Councils for women,the UN women’s groups,the endless local free legal and shelters,the unConstitutional VAWA laws,ect.
The ‘imperative’ is so strong as to break the foundation of justice itself,the presumption of innocence in the courts.
The pandering,bowing and scraping come from a legitimate fear of offending this powerful demographic and their mighty knight supporters.
Look at “The Plan” for Australia.
This is worldwide in scope.
Feminists are now running the State Dept,DOD,military actions,Treasury Dept,so and so so forth et all.
It is unimaginable in this day and age to wonder if it exists or not.
The fact is all men must tread on eggshells in public and in private for fear of repercussions from the systematic enforcement of the imperative.
Is there a male imperative?
Apparently not,I see no evidence of that at all.
All points to priority for the wimmins and chillums.
If a man violates that basic principle he is held to account by all members of society.
Rather severely I might add,even upon baseless accusation,that is how powerful it has become.
In a word, yes. Not in the same overtly sexual sense that they will at 18, but yes, they recognize girls are a different species — but one they intend to study, dangerous and yet fascinating, like a species of poisonous snake — and that some are more interesting than others. I can still tell you the name of the girl I had a crush on when I was 6 years old in first grade, and who the #2 and #3 girls in my class were (a blonde, a brunette, and a redhead, in that order, oddly enough).
The 11-year-old who started it was most certainly White Knighting to impress the girls — maybe a particular girl. The 5-year-old boys may have just followed his lead because he was older and taking charge.
Sunshine Mary, if you take charge and suggest that the girls do something nice for the boys, or even let them go first next time, the girls themselves may not balk much because they’re young enough that they haven’t been corrupted much yet. I do know some young girls from very traditional families who enjoy serving meals, for instance — but they haven’t been to college yet. You’re much more likely to get push-back from their mothers (or fathers), who will complain that their girls shouldn’t be subservient to or taking a back seat to a bunch of boys.
If you step up and try this experiment, and the adults don’t object, then I’ll agree that the feminine imperative may not be as strong as we think, at least in some pockets of society. I’ll also eat my hat.
I should say that when I say “feminine imperative”, I do not specifically mean female-defined biological interests, per se, but rather the set of social rules and conventions relating to inter-sexual relations that flow from the interests of the society as a whole in light of the constraints presented by female biological realities. In this I may define it a bit differently from Rollo, but my general idea of it is similar enough to his, I think.
Irish Farmer
Create a table in your mind of taking and giving: The ultimate “win” on this table is to take from the other while giving nothing in return.
Note that this is a variation on the “prisoner’s dilemma”.
CL
The so-called ‘feminine imperative’ is plain old sophistry. You all are disappearing up your own assholes. Should have stayed home and read the Bible.
Female imperative can be found there IMO. But no surprise you do not want it discussed.
Lydia’s behaviour could more easily and readily be understood as playing for and defending Team Woman.
That’s part of the F.I. As you should fully well know.
To review: women require two things from men, sperm to make babies and resources to raise said babies. For most of history, this required something from women – like sex, exclusive sex, long hours working to help prepare food for winter, etc. and so forth. Since children are expensive, there’s a natural tendency for women to want to maximize their return on minimal investment (in any given man).
To maximize benefit to themselves, ideally both the Alpha sperm and the beta resources should not incur any liability upon women, they should be “free goods”. No surprise that women have from time to time come up with the idea of “free love”, but somehow it always turns into the horrid oppression of alpha harems. Until the modern world, where women can “marry” millions of betas via government. It’s like giving out free slushies on the corner in July, many people will take one or two, but some people will just stand there and take and take and take until they physically can’t take anymore. Then they will demand more anyway.
Another way to look at it:
In the “ideal” male world, men would just get sex from women whenever they want it, without having to do anything to get it.
In the “ideal” female world, women would get resources, “stuff”, whenever they want it, without having to give anything up to get it.
Which of these two hypotheticals more closely resembles the current world?
@ driversuz
My opinion is that marriage 1.0 was made up of a reciprocal male and female imperatives. Men were expected to be manly, provide for their wives, be faithful with regard to sexual options, and if the need arose, protect his women and children with his life. In turn, women were expected to be submissive, not sleep around before or during marriage, keep the home in order, and raise children.
You could argue that under the marriage 1.0 system (aka traditional marriage) the requirements placed on the woman represented a masculine imperative, with the important exception that a reasonable exchange was granted in the form of protection, companionship, social status, and activity.
I really thought about whether or not to include ignoring detriment to men in the definition of Female Imperative. Certainly, that’s how it’s done today. But doesn’t have to be the case.
By the way, for the experiment to be fair, you can’t explain it. In other words, you can’t say, “Hey, since the boys let the girls go first last time, they should go first this time. It’s only fair.” If you do that, people will be forced to agree — no one wants to be unfair — even if they’re grinding their teeth and cussing you behind your back. Just say, “Hey girls, let’s let the boys go first, and while they’re getting their food, we can get the drinks ready” (or whatever).
Then wait a couple seconds, drop a pin, and see if you can hear it.
I tend to think that Dalrock is correct regarding predicting the AHGirls’ response to any reciprocity, but it seems that SSM is going to put it to the test and find an answer.
But my real take from reading this article is that Lydia is certainly an excitable young con artist. Er, I meant “lady.”
“Expressions of a socially expected gratitude is a conditioned response, it isn’t the same thing as genuine organic gratitude.’
That is true,that is why it’s so enjoyable to see a woman with ‘old fashioned’ values that has been conditioned by background experience and/or by way of personal enlightenment to know and show real appreciation.
It has become so rare that those few good woman show like diamonds under a spotlight.
So I do feel kindly to ssm and Cl for trying so hard to get down to brass tacks on the matter.
Intuitively they know it’s in their best interest to understand the motivating factors in the male mind.
The new woman of today has no desire to understand male reward systems,she relies upon sheer aggression,proxy violence,power of law,and purer sexual power (with disdain) to obtain her ends.
It is more rewarding spiritually to not disdain those who are committed to your best interest.
(Don’t bite the hand that feeds)
Those strong empowered gals use strong cognitive dissonance to deny that men do *anything* for them,when in fact they do all the heavy lifting in most any circumstance.
It is our innate kindness and politeness to defer and hide exactly how much and how often we support women.(Because it would be impolite to expect ‘the reward’ for every small deed such as tire changing,door opening,ect.)
However it (sex) is the primary motivator of these subservient acts,this latent sexuality is morphed off to the side in cases of elderly,ect,but as a GROUP men perform chivalry because those women did the job of creating offspring for *some* man.
That is the closest thing men have to herd solidarity,in the context of putting any woman or child first.
Procreation
To go against the tribes procreation is an offense.
You may note that *others* outside a demographic tribe and/or less readily available sexually get lessor or none of the chivalrous performance.
The fems call this ‘homophobic,ableism,ageism,racism,ect.
But it’s just people we care *less* about due to being on the out fringes of our procreative tribe.
@ Dalrock Re: Lydia
I would have no trouble viewing a woman as a gift…that actually IS a gift to men in her life. I’ve known several. Our culture teaches people to be combative, so this isn’t something to be expected without active teaching. Earlier in my life, I’ve always approached women in the same fashion, to be pleased that they’re talking to me. Frankly, they hate that. Women have taught me that they hate my interest. So, the onus is on the woman to BE a gift to men if they want to be treated that way.
@Brendan-
“I should say that when I say “feminine imperative”, I do not specifically mean female-defined biological interests, per se, but rather the set of social rules and conventions relating to inter-sexual relations that flow from the interests of the society as a whole in light of the constraints presented by female biological realities. In this I may define it a bit differently from Rollo, but my general idea of it is similar enough to his, I think.”
Well yeah,that’s what I said with a lot more words later on.
There are certain fine distinctions and exemptions(exceptions) that are most revealing.
Mitchell
I tend to think that Dalrock is correct regarding predicting the AHGirls’ response to any reciprocity, but it seems that SSM is going to put it to the test and find an answer.
SSM is a statistical outlier. She has put ideas to the test before, although the experiment with D.H. did not last very long.
But my real take from reading this article is that Lydia is certainly an excitable young con artist. Er, I meant “lady.”
I do not believe it is accurate to describe Lydia McGrew as “young”. My impression is she is of middle age.
There’s really just two shades for me.
The “It pleases me that your pleased by my pleasing you,” and
” I want to get the hell away from your aggressive ass.”
It’s more in effect now than it was 30-40 years ago, but less than 100+ years ago. During the early, heady days of feminism, women really did get mad at men for holding doors for them and things like that. But in the past couple of decades, most women have realized that life without those little niceties really kinda sucks. So they’ve stopped objecting, and men have cautiously gone back to doing them. Not to the extent of medieval times, though, so it’s both more and less than in the past, depending on what past you’re talking about.
hey dalrock another aweosmez postz. merry christmas!!!!!
i hope you wirte a bookz soon!!! i will offer to my seriveez of editing your work and making sure all da spepelingz and grammarz are correctz!!!
all da best in 2013 may it birng you lotz of lzozolzolzolzolzolz’s the whole year throurghz
i am glad dat da world idd not end in 2012, as den der would be no more aldorkca posts which would make me sadzzz zlzlzolzolz
bestz wishes 4 a new yearz,
GFBFM zlzlzlzlzl
AR tries to dismiss my comment as an example of the ‘feminine imperative, but that is nonsense. I never said I didn’t want it discussed; I simply made an observation.
The ‘feminine imperitive’ has been discussed for a while now. Ask yourselves which has caused the most virulent reactive denials from women: the current discussion, or the Team Woman discussions?
If Steve Moxon, whoever he is, has already laid it out, why does it need to be defined and hashed out all over again?
Let me give an example of the Feminine Imperative that is always present, and yet so subtle I doubt very many women, and perhaps a lot of men, even notice it. I find that with my wife, when we are going through a crowded shopping mall or other public area, we will inevitably get separated, with me falling farther and farther behind. Eventually, she will berate me with, “why can’t you ever keep up with me?”
Well, there is a reason. In a crowded situation, men are subconsciously trained to yield and give way to women. Women have no such restraint. Thus, in a crowded situation, women will invariably just push forward with men yielding to them as they do so. The women don’t even realize it is happening because a path magically appears before them. Men, on the other hand, are impeded by having to yield to women (and frankly, they are also politer as regards other men as well). This is the reason I fall behind when my wife and I are in a crowds. She can push through, I cannot, and I have to wait for other women to pass before I can move.
A related example is behavior of shoppers in a store, or of people pushing shopping carts in a store. Men pushing carts or shopping will yield to women. Women, however, will simply barge through, whether it means going through men or other women to get what they want. Shopping cart “selfish” behavior is similar. Most men have been taught that, when they stop, to place their carts on the side of the aisle in spaces that will not block others. Women, however, have no such consciousness. Thus the common experience of a woman simply leaving her cart in the middle of the aisle, making it impossible for others to get around, while she ponders whether or not to buy a product. A man would never behave in such a fashion.
Women, because of deeply engrained gender privilege, are often simply oblivious that they in fact have that privilege.
SSM
Are you saying that chivalrous behavior is more in effect now than in the past?
Cail Corishev
It’s more in effect now than it was 30-40 years ago, but less than 100+ years ago.
Perhaps a more accurate statement would be this: it is more demanded by women than in the past. If we time-travel back to 1952 (the dreaded “fifties”) I believe we would find a world, in the US anyway, where a man who did not defer to a woman when entering or exiting an elevator, who smoked in a restaurant after a woman objected, etc. would be chastised by other men. Smoking in an elevator might get a man the bum’s rush off of the car on the next floor. These societal norms were enforced informally – rarely would anyone decide to “call a cop”. It wasn’t white knighting as we now understand it, though, because it was expected that all men would do these things, and all women would graciously not overdo their privilege. A man who asked the ladies at his dinner table in a restaurant “Do you mind if I smoke?” and who received agreement was under no obligation to take seriously some sudden hyperventilation from across the room, “Oh! You beastly man! I can’t abide your smoke!”, indeed the women at his table would likely handle it by shaming the hysterical woman themselves. There were social norms, and most people abided by them, and those who overdid their privilege didn’t get away with it for long, both men and women, without someone – usually of the same sex – chastising them in various ways.
Then the Do Your Own Thing era came along, and all sorts of social norms were trashed.
Now, as Cail says, women have decided they don’t feel quite so full of moxie as in the 70’s and 80’s, so they want those male obligations back. They want them enforced. Now. And there are White Knights around willing to do that; demand that men cater to women in many ways, but rarely if ever even make the slightest suggestion that women in turn owe something – anything – even the slightest, sulkiest mutter of “thankew” in return.
This is, again, like handing out free slushies on the corner in July. But only to some people. Others can drink water out of the gutter…
Because the perspective offered by Moxon, which is systemic-descriptive, has often gone lacking in these discussions over the past several years. There isn’t a legitimate reason to shy away from it. I think the concept that men have always, as a sex, been systematically disadvantaged vis-a-vis women in society as a whole undermines the intra-female narrative, which colors and informs the interpretation of experience for many women, to such a degree that it is received in a quite hostile way — even when it is explicitly described that certain no longer present social and cultural norms both offset and justified the previous social expression of the imperative. This is terribly subversive for a sex that is accustomed to viewing itself as subjects or victims, take your pick — the reality is that neither descriptor is terribly accurate when looking at the positions of the sexes as a whole, rather than the positions of one man and one woman in particular. That is the issue, I think, and why it raises so many hackles. It bites right at the subjective/objective issue.
Cl
AR tries to dismiss my comment as an example of the ‘feminine imperative, but that is nonsense. I never said I didn’t want it discussed; I simply made an observation.
An “observation” that contained the suggestion some people have climbed inside their own anus, and an injunction to “stay home”.
I’ll rewrite CL’s latest little test in the style of Ring Lardner: “Shut up, she explained”.
CL, this ain’t Dodge City, and you ain’t Lydia McGrew…
Well, there is a reason. In a crowded situation, men are subconsciously trained to yield and give way to women. Women have no such restraint. Thus, in a crowded situation, women will invariably just push forward with men yielding to them as they do so. The women don’t even realize it is happening because a path magically appears before them. Men, on the other hand, are impeded by having to yield to women (and frankly, they are also politer as regards other men as well). This is the reason I fall behind when my wife and I are in a crowds. She can push through, I cannot, and I have to wait for other women to pass before I can move.
This is probably culturally related. Friends of mine who have been to the marketplace in Bangkok, Thailand report a different experience.
Myself, in crowds like that I strive to play “Junior Ninja”, anticipating the pseudo-Brownian motion and attempting to ‘be” where others are not, and to “not be” where they are. Sometimes it even works. A friend of mine who studied Akido years ago says he uses some of the circular movements of that art to just glide through crowds.
I googled Lydia McGrew. Her phonics lessons are well planned out, and I honestly think she’s trying her best with the world she’s found herself in. All of us are. And perhaps, being somewhat new to red pill/manosphere thinking, I am somewhat more sympathetic to her given that her initial reaction is very similar to my own when I started reading heartiste and vox day and, yes, even Dalrock.
It doesn’t feel good to read this stuff. I was looking for answers about why a patently horrible relationship ended, a relationship that I wanted to back in spite of the abject pain it brought to everyone involved (although I certainly received the worst of it, and I can tell you plenty of stories regarding social proof, sh*t tests, the carousel and the like). She is reacting emotionally; she is not likely experiencing the worst of what the current SMP does to people, men and women alike, or maybe she is still grieving for what has been lost and is thus not ready to look at it in the cold reflection of truth in our fallen world and her own fallen nature. It’s hard to do that. I responded with the same hand-wringing and rationalizing and pleading that she does in that thread over at Zippy Catholic.
Is she defending the feminine imperative? Yes, though I think she’s doing so obliviously and not from a malicious place. Please don’t take this as latent uxorious behavior; I don’t think her emotional response was proper, nor that anybody acquitted themselves poorly in debating her (to the degree that actual debate took place). I only want to remind the commentariot that the information and analysis offered on the manosphere would be painful and challenging to anybody who has even an ounce of emotional investment in the blue pill world, regardless of how bluntly or crudely it is presented. We don’t need to use kid’s gloves, but we shouldn’t be too surprised when somebody gets upset by being cold-cocked by reality.
And since I’ve owned up to my own internal pleading and burying my head in the sand, I should also add that I am enormously grateful for the work done by the gentlemen and ladies in dealing with the awful, difficult truth. We’re not all initially ready to handle the truth as presented here, but you never know where a seed sown may eventually sprout a fruiting tree.
in response to the cub scouts story.
there are two main reasons why this phenomenon occurs. really its one reason but one point leads to another.
the first one is that men are taught in our social system that this is the way to the hearts of the laides (and in men, to their vaginas). and many men that involve themselves in communities like ours stop there. this is the main answer to them. that men are brainwashed by the feminine imperative. but this actually leads to a deeper issue.
that issue and my second point are human nature and adaptation. yes, you could say men enforce this imperatve, and your point that women passive agressively reenforce it. men by nature want to care for women. it is because we are stronger and they are weaker and we have adapted (or been designed if thats your gig) to protect them because that is integral in protecting our community. the reason so many men (so called “betas”) have a hard time dealing with the modern liberal social dynamic is because it isnt NATURAL. not exactly because it is shamed out of their social circles. you could say our society evolved faster than we can adapt. thats why most men demonstrate the provider protector archetype even though it doesnt work. its how we are wired. and changing your behavior to suit a new social climate is difficult work indeed. physically as well as (and moreso) emotionally and mentally (and spiritually for many of us).
this is the real heart of the matter. we may enforce the imperative, but thats because it is a mutated version of our nature that is expected but no longer works. this will always cause frustration, which we see males of our modern society infected with everywhere. the “alpha” archetype may be attractive to women to mate, but historically communities didnt survive if men didnt protect women. and the fact that they no longer require protection (or are grateful for it given they no longer need, nor “deserve” it even based on the equality doctrine) makes our instinctive compulsion pointless for us, and makes a method most find uncomfortable the only real option.
deti says:
December 26, 2012 at 5:34 pm
“Think back to the Costa Concordia disaster and “women and children first”, and the outcry against the men rushing the lifeboats.”
Actually, another interpretation of that ship wreck was the women were blocking the life boat, dithering, instead of getting on, (e.g. — “Should we wait for Judy or not?”) and a few men finally decided to simply walk around them and get on the boat. And, the women, so used to the Feminine Imperative, took that as unacceptable behavior, and listening to them you’d assume the men knocked the women down and walked over them. They assumed men were supposed to wait and wait and wait on Their Royal Majesties. There are no feminists on a sinking ship.
Are y’all aware that ‘sorting’ at the entrance of a life boat dramatically increases rescue time? School fire drills can empty a large building in a very short time, because there is no sorting. If you put a feminist at the doors of a school during fire drill and do not let a boy go out until the last girl is out, exit time changes from maybe 3 minutes to a very long time.
On the Titanic, many life boats left the ship not full, thus increasing loss of life. Sorting should only be used when there are simply not enough life boats, but even then no boat should be lowered until it is filled by men, if no women are present to board.
Mitchell wrote:
From Mrs. Lydia McGrew’s post A rant against the Men’s Rights attitude:
I don’t know if it’s the FI or not, but it’s definitely a subtle way of shaming young men into ignoring reality.
SSM, that particular rant is anything but subtle.
Demanding unconditional trust of women because they are women is IMO a facet of the FI.
Right, that’s a textbook example of it. She is basically saying “Yes, there are many men who have been screwed, but young men should not be made aware of this, because it will make them assess women differently than otherwise.”
Yep, we can see the reason for that, obviously enough.
The other notable feature of the rant SSM linked to is this: 100% fact free. There are no facts. There are McGrew’s solipsistic thoughts, her opinions, the NAWALT fallacy, the MDTT fallacy, and that’s it. Long on emotion, lacking on facts. Two men attempt to engage her in adult discussion, and fail – more NAWALT, more MDTT, handwaving anecdotes and some refusal to see the reality of what women from the Boomers (that’s in their 60’s, Lydia) on down are really like in many, many cases.
So it’s basically “Shut up, you horrid, beastly men, and stop saying those things about The Ladies!”.
That sort of thing probably worked pretty well in the 70’s, amongst the conservatives. I saw it in the 80’s and 90’s. Too bad, so sad, nowadays it only works on the ever-shrinking White Knight crowd.
And as a post script, I observed the entire debacle at ZippyCatholic’s blog. What he missed, and seems to still miss, is the obvious: a woman decided to tell him what he should write about, and made it stick. That means she told him what to think about, and what not to think about, and to some degree made that stick as well.
Bossing men around in order to keep them from thinking too much about the nature of women is definitely within the sphere of the Feminine Imperative.
Thanks, Ceer, and I’m glad you said this:
“I really thought about whether or not to include ignoring detriment to men in the definition of Female Imperative. Certainly, that’s how it’s done today. But doesn’t have to be the case.”
I fully agree that in modern society, it does ignore the detriment to men, but I suspect that women in past eras actually understood how much they depended on men’s sacrifices, and were far less likely to ignore them and take them for granted. So I’d say that the degree of female grace and gratitude is a “learned” behavior. But the concept of a just “exchange” is probably natural to women (when they don’t have the luxury of being unaware of it.) Right?
***
I am continually confounded by the modern woman’s insistence that her value should not be determined by her uterus. Males and female interact in a non-stop series of “exchange” interactions, and not always defined as “I’ll give you food if you’ll bear my children.” but those exchanges are little more than a relatively shallow social dance. Feminists refuse to acknowledge that the rarity of ova, relative to sperm, is the ONLY thing women possess which men (as a whole) can’t survive without. It’s the one thing that only women can offer, which men find worth dying for, especially in large numbers. The uterus is the single reason why women are NOT oppressed; if men could reproduce without us, they would have no reason to protect us. Were we to strip away all of the technology and surplus (created largely by males) that separates society from constant mortal danger, women would have to compete head to head with men for every bite of food we eat. Without the uterus as a bargaining chip, most women would beg for the opportunity to be slaves, because the alternative would likely be starvation.
I know I’m going off on a tangent here, so please indulge me. Is my view too extreme? I don’t believe that I am devaluing women, I think I am pointing out the human female’s greatest, most valuable asset.
Great article Dalrock. Now I hope you all understand why the manosphere uses direct and crass language at times. It also explains the power of MGTOW and the value of “fuck you bitch” Never talk to women even when you are you are talking to the men that are listening. I never really have seen the FI thing quantified like that but it does explain why things work the way they do. The boy scouts are picking up some habits and the blue pill scout master has no idea what he is doing to them boys leaving them feral like that.
“…all women have within them an Inner Buffy who is just waiting for the opportunity to dump her husband one day in fit of hormone-driven pique because he fails to put his socks in the hamper…”
No, Lydia dear, not all women, realistically only about a quarter to a third of women. Still lousy odds in any smart man’s book.
“This portrays women as somehow determined by the outside world to behave wickedly and destroy everyone’s life (including, what the manosphere doesn’t seem to realize, her own life in a very real sense) on a whim”
Self-destruction is the end goal of complete and total autonomy, as ozconservative explains many a times
The lesson learned in reading zippycatholic’s post, “Rubbernecking Past The Death of Masculinity”:Never try to hold a discussion with a hamster while its on its wheel, especially a hamster who’s never been out of its cage.
Well, I am not sure why you are missing the other control of all this.
The Pale. Now (with apologies to the Celtic among you) the concept comes from Norman/English Ireland, centred around Dublin. If you stayed within the rules of acceptable behaviour, you were accepted within society as a commoner, guildsman, goodwife, gentleman (enough land to keep a big horse and maintain armour) and Lady (wife of same).
If you did not keep to the rules of chivalrous behaviour (as defined by the Normans and the Clergy (who were Norman) you were cast out, into that Celtic land of cheiftans and barbarism, where your status meant nothing or less than nothing.
You were “beyond the Pale”.
Gentlemen honoured and courted Ladies. Being a Lady was not synonymous with being a woman but an artifice added to that — a limitation on behaviour. It led to reciprocal behaviour.
With the democratization of society women now demand the priviledges of being a lady — which include protection and provision, as well as romantic interest — without the duties, such as loyalty, working tor the family, modesty, and chastity.
The modern tactic is to ignore the loud people who demand this and look for the quiet introverted women who exude these qualities as part of their nature. Natural ladies, if you like.
And one of the qualities of those women is honest puzzlement about the reaction of their peers.
Hey sluts!
We are gonna make sure every single guy within the sounds of our voices know what a bunch of banged-out, worthless, unmarriageable whores you are…
Oh, I’m just kidding, so calm down.
But seriously, though, I (among others) will be planting this thought in the minds of as many men as possible.
Anything I can do to thwart women like whats-her-nuts there is well worth the effort. Just think, ladies, legions of men dedicated to undoing all the privileges to which you have become accustomed, and for which you show not a whit of gratitude.
Ain’t no room for whores on my wagon, they can walk.
Chris, are you channeling Edward Rutherford?
@Driversnz… had to look up the author, have read the books, but no, was considering it from a historical perspective — main source (I have to confess) was a BBC book and series on the Normans.
This is a very interesting post which I will re-read: in the meanwhile perhaps you will enjoy this piece of feminine imperative:
This Christmas I was talking by phone with my gf, and told her that my young nephew (aged 17) was up-loading to Youtube his performances on ‘Minecraft’, indeed, I had been viewing his Xmas day effort where he goes round what to me looks like a Palace and in secreted places first finds presents and then selecting the correct tool (hammer, axe, shovel) breaks into the present to get the goodies. Girlfriend (the possessor of both undergraduate and graduate degrees, and with two published books to her credit) thought this completely stupid and pointless and that it showed boys just enjoy being violent.
Last Christmas (“I gave you my heart, the very next day you gave it away”) I sent her a necklace of Lapis Lazuli which made her purrrrrrr with delight. Now where and exactly how did she think those beautiful stones came from and how did she think they were initially found and prized free from the earth? Cargo-cult?
[…] which causes the men […] to approach any woman, even the most innocent, wonderful, carefully raised, Christian young woman, with an intention to smoke out her Inner Buffy in order not to be “taken in” and ruined like those many men who have become statistics.
And that would be a bad thing how?
Driversuz,
I think we would find, even in some post-apocalyptic, nuclear-winter, all-women-have-been-sterilized-by-radiation survival-of-the-fittest-type situation, that men would still protect and provide for women, even in the absence of reproductive incentive.
This is because we generally like women and enjoy protecting and providing for the ones we especially like.
If it was as simple as ‘need incubater fer babeez’ some of our sharper minds would have solved that issue by now.
Your analysis isn’t incorrect, just, as you said, on the extreme end of correct.
Driversuz (is that a he or a she) seems concerned that he is going too far; I think not: there is simply nothing that women are capable of doing that a man cannot do just as well physically or as well mentally: women are thus dead-weight. These is a saying, common, I believe, in the Army, which probably explains its directness: ‘If they didn’t have cunts, we’d hunt them’ – that is to say for food.
Anyone familiar with Das Rheingold, learns that Loge, having searched the world, at Wotan’s request for an alternative reward to the giants Fasolt and Fafner for building Valhalla – to whom Wotan had carelessly promissed Freia the goddess of youth as compensation for the build, and who now has no intention, and never did, of complying with the bargain – concluded that there was nothing which men valued above ‘women’s beauty and love’ … however Loge has a cunning plan: “stay tuned to this channel for another exciting episode in The Ring of The Niebelung after these messages from our sponsors because it is never over until the fat lady sings (some sixteen hours later)”.
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The jig is up.
From Dispelling the Magic:
https://rationalmale.wordpress.com/2011/11/01/dispelling-the-magic/
Lydia’s ego-investment into the feminine imperative is evident in her binary, absolutist responses. Lacking the critical thought necessary to defend her perspective she resorts to what similarly invested women use – feminine shaming tactics couched in feminized spirituality.
Here’s a good example of the feminine imperative, in the bad sense:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/dec/25/fathers-disappear-from-households-across-america/
NEWSFLASH!! – Huge rise in single mothers. Men obviously at fault.
Not once in the article is frivolous divorce rape or other disincentives mentioned. It’s all about men being irresponsible and absent.
The feminine imperative is not only about female primacy and privilege, it’s also about being able to avoid incrimination or other responsibility for the results of one’s (gender’s) actions.
Feminine-operative social conventions fluidly evolve and adapt to adjust for new socio-sexual environments. I could easily use examples of self-sacrificing Chivalry or the Warbrides dynamic to illustrate this here, but the most obvious, and arguably the crowning achievement of the feminine imperative is the evolution of feminism. Feminism is a meta-social convention with the express purpose of advancing the feminine imperative.
Chivalry worked for a few centuries, but that was only until men realized they’d signed on for a raw deal. Eventually they became aware of women’s intrinsic duplicity. That duplicity may have an overall species survival value, but once men become aware of it a new set of social conventions needed to be developed. First feminism, and later social feminization, became the next paradigm to effect the feminine imperative.
The trouble now is that, just as with chivalry, men are becoming aware again.
Hypergamy, while inherently cruel, is in fact a proven species survival schema. However, because of women’s place in our biological order, they must be the filters of that hypergamy. Ergo, the necessity of a dominant socio-sexual framework defaults to the feminine.
By sheer force men can and have taken control of that dominant framework, by rape or religion or any number of other moral constructs, but women’s fluid, social reengineering of those constructs circumvents and repurposes them. If you need an example just study the history of western civilization; we’ve ‘progressed’ from a society that owned women as property to women’s default ownership of men’s property, their future property and the means for them to acquire it all through the same social convention (marriage) that was intended to prevent women from engaging in their evolved propensity for cuckolding men due to their innate sexual pluralism.
From Chivalry and Altruism:
https://rationalmale.wordpress.com/2012/01/24/chivalry-vs-altruism/
In essence Chivalry was the feminism of its time. The feminine imperative took the original idea of chivalry – a code of honor amongst men – and attached to it a code of acceptable conduct for men in relating to women. In doing so it effectively remodeled chivalry to benefit the feminine and limiting the power men held over them by enlisting other men to participate in regulating it.
Sounds an awful lot like the feminized social architecture we live in now doesn’t it?
How do we know there is a feminine imperative?
Female bloggers insisting that there is no feminine imperative.
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Let me add my two cents.
I was talking to a woman at ourReunion and talking about old friends. She was upset at a particular guy and said “She slept with this girl for 3 years, but refused to marry him.” After about 2 minutes she talked about anothercouple saying – “She finally left him. How much can a woman tolerate? She deserves happiness!!” See the female imperative – guy ditches girl, guy bad. Girll ditches boy, guy bad. That is classic female imperative. In both thecases she puts herself in the woman’s shoes (gender identity) and pronounces the rules.
I know a lady of about 50 years, who was dating a guy of the same age. Suddenly she noticed a black patch on her sofa. It was his hair dye. She got upset and asked him to go there and then. He was surprised. She again asked him to go. He felt rejected and hit out at her. She suffered injuries. A female hearing this will put herself in the woman’s shoes and say – “What rot! If I dislike a guy I should ask him to go.” But reverse it. A guy is touching a girl’s boobs and suddenly finds that she has falsies. He is upset and goes away. Angrily she throws stuff at him injuring him. A female hearing the story would feel – “Of course – rascal!! He desreves it”
That is female imperative. Because females have formed a union which supports one another and which thinks right and wrong based on the situation.
Deti. Come on now. Is that really what you think?
If I argue there is no flying spaghetti monster, does that mean there is one?
SSM:
I’m being a bit flippant here; and wasn’t really referring to you.
You should expect some of this when you come to the locker room.
I’ll put on my serious thinker cap now.
This is a post of the utmost quality Dalrock and extremely important work!
I am wondering how the lack of reciprocity fits in with the form of reciprocity one usually finds in patriarchies. For example, a PUA from an African country wrote about how when he was young the boys were taught to be tough, work hard and provide for the women, while the women where taught to, even as children, serve the men food and do housework etc. while the boys did none of that. The boys later in life risked a lot, did harsher things etc. THere is a form of equal exchange in this. Men provide, protect and give masculine gifts and women nurture, learn homemaking skills and dote on the men in return. There certainly is an instinct in women to understand and enjoy that exchange and to me it seems fair. How does that form of exchange and reciprocity match with lack of reciprocity discussed here?
Rollo
And in the back row a new generation of women, the 22 year olds, scream “where’s the party?” as they upload a fresh set of nudes shot in the bathroom from their cell phones.
Lest any believe this to be an exaggeration, whilst searching for some information on modern amateur photography (digital imagers rather than chemical film) I stumbled across at least two or three websites devoted to this very thing, the narcissistic self-shot nude image. I won’t bother to link, obviously they are extremely NSFW and I doubt Dalrock wants such links on his blog anyway.
The point is obvious. There exists an entire subgenre of amateur pron that consists entirely of images of nude young women; images that they themselves took with their own camera or phone, in the privacy of a bedroom or bathroom; images that they themselves set loose on the internet. Traditional, conservative women make much of the evils of teh pron, in terms of “men looking at that stuff”. But when it comes to young women posting selfshots, eh, not much to say.
TradCon women have much to say about men who succumb to temptation, little to say about temptresses. I’m informed that the author of the book of Proverbs took a different approach. Maybe these oh so TradCon women should consider reading their Bible some time?
On a surface level I think that Lydia has unrealistic expectations regarding gifts. She thinks all women and girls are gifts or gifts in waiting. Not true. A prudent wife is a gift. A non-prudent wife is not a gift. House and wealth are an inheritance from fathers, But a prudent wife is from the LORD. Proverbs 19:14
Just because a gift is valuable does not mean it does not require future work, maintenance, polishing, and prudent use. If I receive a new Lexus with a red bow on top for Christmas, I value it. But, the fact that it was a gift does not mean I never have to have the oil changed, the tires rotated, or be careful when driving on icy roads.
Suddenly she noticed a black patch on her sofa. It was his hair dye. She got upset and asked him to go there and then
I dare say she did him a favor. Now on to the next poor sap.
“How do we know there is a feminine imperative?
Female bloggers insisting that there is no feminine imperative.”
It’s sort of like when feminists claim there is no misandry.
FYI, I just added an update to the bottom of the OP with links to follow on posts on the discussion by Vox Day and others, along with Rollo’s latest post on the fi.
I could probably write 10k to 15k word essay just setting up some background going into this topic, given the breathed of detail in how humans operate, but I really don’t have that amount of time or energy. (Plus, do you really want to read that? haha)
So, the Short Version: We all have multiple Imperatives in our lives. Self, Family, “Clan” and extended out. Further, we have self-chosen ones: Religious, Social or Political. When they are *not* in conflict with each other, they are hard to notice and to suss out. You can only tell how someone values those after you put them in conflict.
One of the better examples would be Tribal politics in most African nations. The Tribal Imperative pretty much ruins any chance for there to be stable governments. It’s Tribe over all others; thus the Tribal Imperative. Further complicating matters, whoever ends up the head of the Tribe that’s in power takes their personal Imperative and places it over even their Tribe. The Tribe does better than the rest, but the Head of the Tribe does better than anyone else. Which ends up causing fights for the top spot. (One of the hilarious tricks that Modern governments lucked into is making the “Top Job” pretty terrible, all told. Though that only worked in the States until FDR.)
So, the “Feminine Imperative” is one of those that Men don’t have, directly, but it can be co-opted into them. (We’ll save White Knight discussion for another time) It is the default position that when a situation will have differential benefit along Gender lines, that it should be to the benefit of Women first. Thus, you won’t see it when the situation, generally, doesn’t involve a differential. However, once that differential shows up, or Imperative’s power is threatened, it shows up with horrible force.
If you want a non-Gender version of it, here’s an example from a few years ago. Some second-rate opinion writer had an Op-Ed about a possible military coup. I don’t remember the details, as it really wasn’t serious, but the Democrats in the House of Reps actually called a press conference to specifically address it. It cut hard against partisan lines with everyone denouncing it. The reason is this: “Civilian Control of the Military Imperative”. The logic is very, very basic for anyone that details with true Power Politics. Civilian Control is absolutely essential for a Modern Society to operate. Yet even a hint at that undermining that control and the Democrats, who only support the Military when its doing something not in American interests, became flag-waving super patriots. At least for a news cycle. And they did it to cut against any possible undermining of the Civilian Control Imperative. (Obviously, they’d be the losers in Military Coup, but it’s more than just that.)
I can actually find a bunch more displays of different Imperatives in politics (“That Policy is Great! Don’t let it near my State/District!”), but I’ll use one of the more hilarious tricks you can pull on a woman. The trick is this: get a nice White Knighting diatribe going. Hit all of the points about how horrible guys are. Then, point out this stereotypical “bad man” is the guy they’re dating/engaged/married to/screwing. Watch the Hamster Explode. What you’ve done is force the “Personal Imperative” above the “Corporate Imperative”. “Her” man obviously isn’t like that, yet he is and she was nodding along with you for 5 minutes.
The Feminine Imperative isn’t actually much different from Women having a “corporate, gender imperative” that Men don’t. Much of this is down to a pretty simple dynamics issue: What’s good for “Men” will almost always be good for “Women”. So, why would guys think about the “Men” specifically first? Male Intra-sex interaction is built around not starting fights, so what works to the benefit of that will work to the benefit of Women. Further, as the Men will generally be responsible for the well-being of their Families (which, amazingly enough, include Women), a Man will keep that corporate well-being in mind when making the major decisions.
What Rollo is talking about is actually another form of “Regulatory Capture”. Women have the most to benefit from the social rules, as they have both power and capability there. Thus, they have the single biggest interest in making them the best for themselves. This is an outcropping of Self-Interest, but there’s a corporate gender aspect to it that Men simply don’t possess. (As a technical point, the whole “Battle of the Sexes” stuff was always hilarious. Women won’t win *any* War.)
Now, much of what we “see” when talking about this stuff is actually a mix of overt emotionalism in place of logic, for the sole purpose of shutting down debate, with “Holier than Thou” posturing. These women “feel” something is off. There is no argument made, so there’s none to respond to. Which actually does wonders in cementing the idea, to most guys, that women aren’t terribly smart. (Don’t underestimate this point, as it’ll be very important in the future.) But, and this is also important, it’s a fairly good way to shut down discussion for a short while. Though, as with all things, defenses based on emotion only last so long. The “Truth” will eventually win out, it just takes a while. E.g. Communism.
So, to wrap up, you could find a way to disprove of the Feminine Imperative. It’s not going to be easy, however, as it’s one of many “Interest Lines” that women will have. Further, it doesn’t apply in all situations, as their own personal interests can easily outweigh it. Proof of its existence is in Dalrock’s post. At least as it exists in Lydia. She’s elevated the worst of Women over any consideration for a Man’s future/life. As we’ve seen this exactly method and point of view show up all the time, the Feminine Imperative is not a tautology. Nailing down its exact realities, however, is a little harder.
@Driversuz:
From a strictly Utilitarian and Economic point of view, women are just terribly inferior males with the ability to have babies. From most other points of view, Men still like Women. There’s a reason with put up with a *lot* for them. Which is why we’ll protect them, most especially if they are “ours”.
It’s hard to express the joy you get from holding a woman you love in your arms. But this is also where the “softly, softly” approach will tend to come from. Women “feel” frail to Men, because, to us, you are. So, we protect the weak things that we value. It’s pretty straight forward, though maybe not said often.
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Looking Glass: Your response is as brilliant as Dalrock’s original article.
I’m assuming you’ve read Sheppard’s _All About Women: A Procedural Analysis_. If not, grab it (Jack Donovan has republished it over at Amazon for Kindle). It backs up everything you’ve written.
It’s one thing for those red pill brothers to understand, at a visceral level, what’s going on. It’s a higher talent to deconstruct it and put it into plain language for people. You do a good job at this.
LOL AR, they will call themselves a Proverbs 31 woman whilst taking the photosnap of their figure for posterity. I’m sure the irony is not lost on them though…
Opus, I’m the “Suz” you already know, but WordPress appears to hate me (since I can’t figure it out, it must be WP’s fault!) and usually identifies me as “Driversuz.”
Vicomte:
“This is because we generally like women and enjoy protecting and providing for the ones we especially like.”
Well said. It sure does drive some women nuts that men feel “entitled” to choose which women they “like,” and why they like us, doesn’t it?
@8oxer:
I haven’t, but I’ll look into the book.
As for my writing, it’s still no where near being up to snuff. And, I’m sad to say this, but this type of analysis is pretty much child’s play to me. But, if life had gone a little differently, I’d probably be writing Technical Theology and Political Philosophy at the moment. (I’ll still probably get back to it, but that’s probably 20 years from now) So, this stuff is actually pretty easy. It’s just the outcropping of lots of other work I’ve done.
If you really want to see something amazing, get me writing on “Religion”. I’ll rock your world in a way you didn’t know you had. (Bad “Game” joke intended!)
I just think women are born with an innate need to make every little thing revolve around them. That to me is the imperative.
Suddenly she noticed a black patch on her sofa. It was his hair dye. She got upset and asked him to go there and then. He was surprised. She again asked him to go. He felt rejected and hit out at her. She suffered injuries. A female hearing this will put herself in the woman’s shoe
Not to put too fine a point on it, but I’m in the woman’s corner on this.
Think of it this way: If some slut comes to your bachelor pad and mooshes her bright pink hair dye into the fabric, would you not order her out? You have to live there. You probably paid a lot for your sofa. More than that, though; it’s an intractable sign of self-centredness and disrespect.
When I’m invited over to someone’s home, I don’t leave semi-permanent stains everywhere. I suppose I’m old fashioned, but some things transcend the “all women suck” meme, and one of those is bad manners.
Fabulous discussion. One thing I’ve found very useful in considering, and attempting to understand, human behavior, is contemplation of the behavior of other species, especially the primates to whom we are most closely related. There is very little human behavior whose roots cannot be found especially in the behavior of chimpanzees, our closest relatives (both the common chimp and the bonobo, who differ in significant ways), and baboons, who though not so closely related, still provide an important mirror as a social primate species.
Are all human interesexual relations basically about the possibility of sexual intercourse? Check the chimps: sex is an issue only when the female is in heat, during which time she madly copulates with every male in the troupe (presumably to confuse the issue of paternity, so that every male in the troupe will be kindly disposed to her offspring, who just might be his). (I don’t know if female chimps are actually able to sequester spermatozoa within the body and so select exactly which little wiggler actually “gets lucky”—presumably the most alpha of the bunch. Females of other species do this, I know.)
When she’s not in estrus, she’s just another chimp, and I don’t know enough about chimps to know how the males relate to her. Certainly the males will protect the troupe from outside dangers, and probably females, being weaker, won’t do any of the fighting. I suspect there must be some species awareness of the reproductive value of females to the troupe, which itself would excuse them from defense duties, along with what other privileges? Do males defer to females otherwise, say, in competition for highly-valued, scarce food resources? I don’t know. What I’m certain of is that female chimps don’t play the kinds of games with male chimps that female humans do with male humans—because most of the time the chimpettes simply have nothing to offer that the chimps would be willing to die (or perform some lesser service) to get, since they don’t copulate except when in heat.
Human females, on the other hand… as my anthro prof at UC Berkeley put it 50 years ago (perhaps my very first, faint red pill moment), “are always in heat”. According to Helen Fisher (note: a female anthropologist) in The Sex Contract (1982), it was somewhere around 50-100,000 years ago that human females adopted the strategy of displaying signs of sexual receptivity continually, even when not fertile, so as to capture and retain the attention of a male (or males). Males of all species are always mad for sex—those who were not did not become our ancestors—but this comes out in behavior only when sex is a possibility, which means when a female within range signals receptivity.
After roughly 1.5 billion years of sexual evolution, males are so mad for sex that species have had to develop “rules” for male behavior so that an occasion of female estrus would not develop in many cases into a male bloodbath that would be bad news for the species. Thus gorillas, for instance, stage elaborate mock fights (the chest-beating and all that) to determine dominance without actually having to fight to the death. Male kangaroos, on the other hand, actually do fight to the death, as do males of many other species who can afford it.
(Not sure about lions, though I do know the life of a male lion is far from the leisurely indolence most people imagine; though he’s spared the chores of the hunt, a male’s tenure as head of a pride is generally fairly brief, before he’s knocked out of his place by a younger, more fit male who’s spent his entire life heretofore in preparation for this one battle—and who, if he wins, immediately kills all the cubs in the pride so the females will come into estrus and mate with him. Until the next younger male comes along and whups his tired old ass. Thus the Female Imperative, a.k.a. Nature in its raw form.)
Why did human females begin displaying sexual cues even when not fertile? Because they needed help. It was about then, so the theory goes (at least as of 1982; I don’t know how it might have been refined since then), that the human brain begin its huge, still poorly understood spurt of development into something very different (and far larger) than anything seen on this planet before. As a result, human infants, when carried to term (i.e. to the same level of development at which most similar mammals, e.g. chimps, are expelled from the womb into the world), began killing their mothers in very dangerously large numbers during birth: their heads were simply too large to go through the birth canal. It was a tragic, fated collision between the evolution of the brain and the restraint on broadening of the human female’s hips imposed by another recent innovation: upright walking (a lot of walking) on the savannah rather than the life in and among the trees to which we’d been theretofore accustomed (chimps again).
Something had to give. What happened, in the usual fashion of blind evolution, was that those mothers who had a tendency to give birth prematurely survived, and eventually became the norm. Cruel, but that’s “Mother” Nature (the very same Goddess the feminists wish us to worship; another essay may explore why “God” is male). But then these surviving mothers were left with very helpless, “technically” premature infants who needed full-time care and nurturance, not to mention diligent protection—for a time amounting to a year or more—to survive.
In yet another irony, these human infants’ feet did not possess opposable big toes—again due to the adaptation to upright walking—so they were unable to cling to their mothers on their own as baby chimps do: they had to be carried, which chore permanently tied up one of their mother’s arms. (It’s unknown whether their mothers at that time retained enough body hair to cling to as do female chimps; clearly body hair in females has been selected against in humans for some time.)
Thus a mother with a new baby was rendered almost as helpless as her baby. She needed help. And who was around, unencumbered by babies, who might be able to help? The males of the troupe. So somehow it happened that those females who displayed some manner of courtship behavior—and were willing to copulate—even when not fertile (as when nursing a baby) attracted the interest of a male or two, who would then be motivated to provide some food or other services to keep their new girlfriends happy. Thus the genesis of pair-bonding in Homo saps (chimps do not pair-bond).
So: Are all intersexual encounters among humans basically about sex? Pretty much yes. This behavior became so important to the species’ survival that, as noted, little girls learn to be seductive long before puberty—and little boys learn or are taught “chivalry” at the same time. Homo saps is by far the sexiest species on the planet; since, unlike other species whose sexual behavior is ruled by estrus cycles, we essentially get no time off from the imperatives of sex (the force which, as the saying goes, “makes the world go round”), it is practically impossible to separate sex completely from any human activity. Ask the monk whose mind shows him porn movies while on the meditation cushion. It’s everywhere.
“Chivalry”, as noted, was basically one codification of Homo saps’ rules for inter-male relations, to avoid the bloodbath of unrestrained competition; then it was broadened by female fiat to help govern males’ relations with females. It’s no accident that self-appointed male guardians of female prerogatives are referred to hereabouts as “White Knights”.
None of this was or is ever really pretty; it’s just how the System works. The two most dangerous creatures on the planet have, over time, worked out ways of getting along and working together, to their mutual benefit and thus to the benefit of the species to which they both belong, which couldn’t survive without their cooperation. But that big brain tends to produce a lot of ideas, and since everybody is basically looking out for him- or herself first, the arrangements keep having to be renegotiated.
For one thing, it’s become clear to me recently that human females have basically resented their “enslavement” to the priorities of their offspring, at least ever since those imperatives became much heavier than those suffered by female chimps. So over the development of human culture and civilization, females have taken advantage of every opportunity to relieve themselves of the more onerous duties of motherhood. Ever notice how wealthy mothers always have nannies for their babies? They get to have the status and emotional bennies (some at least) of motherhood without a lot of the work.
Mother chimps carry their babies during their first year and more; they never put them down, or if they do, it’s only briefly and they remain very nearby. Human mothers have taken advantage of the conveniences of civilization, and have gradually separated themselves more and more from their babies, leading for instance to the modern SUV-style “perambulator”, where the baby is totally out of physical and even visual contact with the mother. And to the “cry-it-out” method of getting babies to sleep: put the baby in a crib in an empty room, leave the room, close the door and let the baby cry himself to sleep.
Human babies, for the first year or two, are not all that different from chimpanzees, only with less hair. We still possess pretty much the same limbic brain as chimps, and the same instincts, including one that tells us that if we can’t feel and/or see Mother, we’re likely to be some tiger’s lunch, and soon. Those crying babies aren’t just fussy; they’re in desperate fear for their lives. And subjecting them to such experiences causes deep wounds, traumas that affect them (i.e. us, since nearly all of us these days have been reared in these ways) all their lives. And that, I suspect, have a lot to do with many of the “discontents” of civilization.
Anyway, that’s another discussion. And probably more than enough; I apologize to any who find my musings over-long; a symptom of intellectual excitement. But then, if you did, you probably didn’t read this far. Those who did, I hope you found something useful. I like to look at the big, or deep, picture, to help understand subsets thereof.
Pingback: The Imperatives « On the Rock
@Feminist Hater:
I just think women are born with an innate need to make every little thing revolve around them. That to me is the imperative.
Actually, that’s true of all of us; it’s called “ego”. Helpful, I think, to keep in mind that women are not so different from men (or vice versa) in this regard. Always easier to see the beam in your sister’s eye than the mote in your own, as a famous man once pointed out.
The “Female Imperative” under discussion is actually Mother Nature’s Imperative, and women are as much slaves thereto as are men. The difference, as noted above, is basically a matter of the difference between a limited supply of ova (and of female time and energy) vs. an unlimited supply of spermatozoa. Once the next generation is well on its way, we are all expendable, women as well as men, so far as Nature is concerned. Partly, I suppose, because women are less disadvantaged by said “Imperative” than are men (or at least so it seems), women have less incentive to look deeper than the “bennies” they seem to be getting from the System. But in truth it eats them just as it does us. Until we wake up.
Which is why all the great religious leaders—who try to figure out why the world works as it does, i.e. why we suffer and how we can stop—have been, and probably will continue to be for the foreseeable future, men. Because we’re one step removed from the Imperative, thus are able to see it, however imperfectly, if we take the trouble to look. Which, of course, most men, like nearly all women, don’t.
Just a thought: Feminists are, indeed, haters. If you’re a “feminist hater”, you’re placing yourself on the same level. Try understanding first, and maybe you can help make the changes that need to be made if we’re going to get through this without a whole lot more unnecessary suffering.
Oops, got the quote wrong: “And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?” (Matthew 7:3).
See, ego. Sorry.
If you need another illustration of the Feminine Imperative just wait five minutes, reload any major news website and presto,..
http://www.cnn.com/2012/11/16/world/flirting-work-reaction/index.html
…illustration delivered.
You don’t even need Google to hunt an example down, just refresh your browser.
You could view it as a shit test. Women will instinctively push in the direction of gaining privilige but giving nothing in return. If there is no resistance to demands the demands will increase indefinitively until the demands are just as extreme as the demands a women will place on the most unmasculine betaized herb in a relationship. Men push back on this push from women to the extent that they perceive it is reasonable given what is needed in order for society to survive and thrive. Men perceive that society needs to give women advantages for free IF THEY ARE NEEDED in order for the society to survive and thrive. Men willingly sacrifice themselves if there is need but stop doing so when there is no need. Because society ultimately functions best when you don`t sacrifice more males than absolutely necessary men will tend to push back against female privileges as much as is beneficial. As in relationships women are programmed to just push indefinitively without INITIALLY considering the consequences at all. Consequences and direction are, in society as in relationships, the realm of men and so men are programmed to and best equiped to perceive what level of male sacrifice is necesarry. Women consider the consequences and take them to heart only after having been told by the men in a sufficiently alpha way what they are and that they are important.
That men do not push back too hard is accomplished in three ways. One is that men instinctively very easily sacrifice for women in these ways and feel glorious honor feelings by doing such sacrifice. Second is that men, as a group not necessarily individually, naturally perceive consequences for where society is heeded by doing a or b, fairly accurately and without too much hamsterization. Critically is reason three. By women pushing and pushing against the men mens doubts are tested. If the man doubts the direction his woman will perceive it when pushing against him and he will receive an unfavourable reaction. As important he will also through her pushing become aware of his own doubt and eventually give in if he has too much doubt. So if he is not absolutely certain he needs to sacrifice himself his womans testing will reveal that and he will sacrifice. If he is fully certain that he does not need to he will not sacrifice himself and his woman when pushing him to will perceive his strength of conviction, feel secure and happy and will happily go on with less female privilege and less male sacrifice because she in experiencing his strength of conviction and alpha assurance that makes her content and happy. The calm, content and happy feeling she gets from pushing up against a man and receiving alpha reassurance is natures way of communicating to her that her man has shit in order and there is no need to worry.
On a societal level this will function in the exact same way. Men are best at perceiving the needs of society as a whole and its direction. Women push for prilillige always. If the men are sure enough that special male sacrifice is not needed they push back against it with such conviction that women on a societal level feel a calm, content and happy feeling from the strength of the norms and the solidity and conviction with which men uphold them and are then happy with a more balanced deal.
Unbalanced deals between women and men are the result of crisis and as such a sign that things are not all well. Balanced deals are signs that society is so strong that it can afford to treat even the men well and so signifies that things are going very well. We are made to have better more rewarding emotions when we are living correctly and in beneficial ways and thriving than when we are not. The feelings women get from the balanced deals will be better than from unbalanced deals because of this. When deals are unbalanced women on some level feel the unfairness just as they do when they are tormenting a betaised husband with excessive demands and so start to feel a combination of arrogantly superior, bitchy, selfishly entitled, malcontent, INSECURE and contempt for men. In a more balanced deal women have to treat men better because on a societal level men make women feel masculine strength and submissiveness in relation to treating the men well and so feel some sense of submissiveness, feel more compassionate, feel more giving, feel good about themselves as opposed to arrogantly bitchy and feel secure and feel some sort of general respect for men.
Currently we are living in a society that does not need to churn out massive numbers of babies to survive and grow. We are in a consolidation society that does not need tons of babies to have a few of them to survive or tons of babies to outgrow neighbour societies. Our societites are relative to previous times stable and we are better of reting people well to get the most out of them rather than treating them shitty to squeeze the most out of them because of harsh conditions. So we don`t kill the old when they can`t work for food anymore as is actually done where food is in short supply, we don`t kill the mentally retarded and the psychologically weak or give them less food as is done in less prosperous societies but we go out of our way to treat the well. We doN\t treat minorities like shit because we can afford to etc. do so. The last step on the ladder of better treament as societies prosper is to treat the men better. It is in a sense the height of cillivastion. Things are so good that even the beasts of burden can be treated well. We are in the age where we can afford to have empathy even for men. It will disapear if need be but right now we can have it. As is natural it is men who have started to perceive the need for change and demand it and as is evidenced in the manosphere women, after some pushing and back and forth, are starting to listen and take direction from men. I will say it is evidently clear that exactly as my theory predicts the women in the sphere feel better on several layers after reprograming themselves to a more balanced set of norms than when they before entering the sphere where living with internalized norms from an unbalanced societal deal between men and women.
great post Philalethes ~
In a valiant Khe Sanh like siege, I fought off 10 women for days in a Facebook discussion room on the topic of women’s suffrage. My wife watched, amusedly, as I fended off attack after attack on my manhood, intelligence, physical appearance, etc. Almost all of these women self identified as conservatives. An amazing experience, all in all.
*All* male/female relations are sex-driven. Some relationships are peripherally based, but it’s all about making yourself appear to be “more suitable” than the other members of the herd/horde.
Eg. I’m a 15 year old bagger at a local supermarket. It’s my job to load and carry out bags for various shoppers. For most shoppers, I do the bare minimum. For a select few (let’s say, 3 to 5), I always go above and beyond. In modern times, the women would think of me as a “cake eater” or a “cub”. In the past, however, those women would go home and tell their daughters about “the helpful young man at Kroger’s who carried those heavy bags to the car.” They would have “known”/noticed that I was only giving that exceptional attention to the mothers of a chosen few girls in my class/grade. Then, assuming that I was attractive (or, at least a step up from the daughter in question), they would have planted a few seeds in the girl’s mind. “That Alston boy isn’t that bad, Mary. I’ll get Dad to ask around and see what the men think about his family.”)
In case it wasn’t clear, this was an actual example of courtship that I was told by both parties (husband and wife, married since 1949, passed on in 2008 and 2006 respectively. I even used their real names.) It works as an example of
Hypergamy-boy was the son of the head foreman at the local factory, girl was the daughter of the lowest-ranked accountant. Boy’s father earned more money than girl’s father, and had a steadier income. Boy also had a job that displayed strength, unlike girl’s weedy and small-boned father.
Female solipism and it’s increase over time-even in the Sixties, it would have been rare for a woman to immediately think, “He’s nice to me and I’m old enough to be his mother. Obviously, he wants to have doggystyle sex with me!” In older times, women were off the market (barring widowhood) once they had children, so mothers would assume that a courteous boy was trying to get in good with their daughters, or a niece, or (in the case of the relatively few, but still present career women) their pet worker or student. Now, with the advent of single motherhood and later marriage, *every* positive overture is seem as a come-on (even when the overture is being given to a decidedly unreceptive woman, a la the chivalry-decrying feminist or lesbian.)
Feminine imperative-as stated above:”When women are empowered to see any man as a potential lover, they will look at *all men* as potential lovers. In a patriarchal environment (which tends to be strongest in less-fertile areas of the world, such as the desertified parts of Africa, mountainous parts of Asia and Australia) women soon figure out that even a “poor excuse of a man” is better than slow starvation (to wit: the most loyal women on the planet are desert Africans, Arab/Caucasus/Persians and rural Chinese, to the point that they’re of the few classes of women who will welcome a concubine or second wife. They’ll *sabotage* her if necessary, but if she’s tired of trying to be bedworthy and her sons have taken their share of the father’s wealth, they’ll turn a blind eye…) However, as soon as even the paltriest amount of plenty is on the horizon, it’s time for “equal rights”. In the post-Depression era (to include up to about 1951), girls learned very early that there were things that they *did **not** want to do*. Sure, you **could** become the new Rosie the Riveter, but why do that and be exposed to sharp metal and sweltering heat when a man could do it? Why spend 9+ hours a day in some sterile office with no one to talk to, when a man could do it? (For minority women) Why put up with the catcalls and assaults on your virtue (I’m not saying that every majority or minority male did so, but it only takes a couple of curious bosses to spoil the soup) when you can send a man out to do it, and use the wedding bands to tell guys that you were taken? But, once feminism allied itself with the black rights movement, it became an *imperative* for women to at least *try* out the wide world. For the women who chafed under the idea of subservience to any man, there was no problem. For the women who wanted the best men possible, the idea of enduring even the the most innocuous attentions from lesser men was an insult(never mind the fact that work wasn’t actually “fun”!) So, workplaces became more feminised. They started with Secret Santas and potlucks (which were actually female signals of provision: “I’m a great cook!” “I know you better than I know myself! See my gift!”), then they rescinded the idea of post-maternity resignation, *then* they struck with sexual harassment (after all, a good worker shouldn’t be sidelined *just because* she’s a mother, and a good worker shouldn’t have to worry about grabby hands or smutty double entendres…) And if people complain, they make comments about the unsuitability of using racial slurs (never mind the fact that white women have always made up over 50% of all affirmative action hires, to the point that they’re now the majority in any non tech or finance-based corporate environment.) This ends up putting minority men against white men, which mimics the social Darwinism that women love to see. In the end, as GBFM has immortalised in song, “Alpha fucks and Beta bucks, that is how we roll…”
One example of the feminine imperative I remember comes from the last presidential election. In the second debate, Candy Crowley injected herself into the debate by trying to fact check Romney. Liberals cheered and some wondered, “Why couldn’t Jim Lehrer, the man, have been strong and forceful like this lady?” But imagine what would have happened if Romney had called Crowley out: “Are you keeping score Ms. Crowley? No? Then know your role and shut your mouth.” The headlines would have screamed about Romney the bully, Romney the cad, the caveman, the sexist, the woman hater, the defective husband, and all around bad guy.
Women can challenge men as rudely as they please, but woe betide the man who tries to answer tit for tat instead of bowing and scraping. She reserves the right to play her “I’m just a girl” card at any time, and then her coterie of beta orbiters will swoop in to leave anonymous comments speculating about your psychological profile, economic status, and dating life.
Women impose the feminine imperative by supporting laws that benefit them (e.g. laws that improve their economic status, making them less attracted to their male peers) and preventing laws that do not benefit them from being enacted.
Beefy ~ yes and lezboes (Lesbians) are the worst – they have a vagina between their legs and dick between their ears. They think they are men when it suits them to be aggressive and assertive and then when that gets too hot they run to the victim status and claim their vagina empowers them to special treatment…
a state of affairs which give a new meaning to the term ‘dick brain’!
I really think we are missing some important distinctions. I posted this idea on my own blog but thought I’d drop it here, too, and would appreciate feedback on whether it seems right.
The feminine imperative: protection and resources are preferentially and willingly provided to females by related males (related by family or by marriage), which benefits both sexes due to the increased survivorship of offspring; this is primarily a micro-evolved biological construct. Resistance is useless due to differential survivorship of offspring.
The feminist imperative: protection and resources are preferentially but unwillingly provided to females by all males regardless of relationship, with no concomitant benefit to males; this is primarily an artificially imposed social construct. Resistance is useful.
The feminine imperative wants protection and resources from everyone. From every man and every woman. Anyone interfering with this is casted out or shamed out of the tribe. Or manipulated into agreement.
Or. The female imperative is to make *everyone* part of the same family so all of them give resources and protection, and to annihilate anyone and everyone who cant be absorbed or is a threat to that nucleus.
The feminist imperative is something else. To make women into their idealization of men, while banning all men from the tribe in the process.
It seems to me that the feminin imperative operates like an input/output machine where input (male behaviour) is defined by female utility (function) and output is approval or disapproval of behaviour.
Now there is nothing wrong with women seeking to maximize personal utility, the problem arises when men refuse to seek approval, self define and maximize personal utility (ironically availing themselves to the same strategy women use).
Lydia would be within her right to judge the character of her daughter’s suitors (employment, faith, wealth, personality, physical characteristics etc.) but refuses to allow men the same right to use their own metrics to judge her daughters.
Hypocrite.
Dalrock, completely disagree with your take on this one. In my opinion, Lydia was showing Mother Bear Tendencies. She knowingly or perhaps unknowingly perceived that game can be used on her children and destroy the upbringing that she hoped to ingrain into them. Through the manipulation of women tendencies, bad men could/would corrupt her daughters and bring harm to them. MBT cannot think logically, just an urge to go for the jugular and stop the threat.
This was evident in the way that she refused to see that your sight is not about PUA game, but masculine game. She saw a threat in her mind to her offspring and went into a rage. I did not see the FI in her responses.
+1 Wudang
+1 Philalethes
This blog is awesome.
DeNihilist, you are seeing what Lydia wanted you to see.
The reality is simpler: any discussion of the FI of necessity will touch on the disposability of men.
Femininists do not have any objection to that, they just don’t want men to know about it.
The “vehement objection to reciprocity” is an unsustainable, and therefore temporary, contemporary phenomenon. We don’t get anywhere by discouraging the protective instincts of boys toward the weaker sex. That only strengthens the dynamic that destroyed reciprocity in the first place. And the girls? Are they young exemplars of feminism or unthinking kids? Use Occam’s Razor. Stop interpreting every phenomenon through a glass darkly.
Nature will out. Women are tough until they encounter true fear, no matter how many self-defense karate seminars they attend in their peaceful, prosperous first-world nation. In extremis they revert to their long-forgotten nature, where they find comfort and refuge in being what they are meant to be: strong through vulnerability.
Our hijacked institutions only recently began failing to impart the wisdom of experience to their young charges, and these lessons used to be impositions of right conduct without justification or explanation, differentiated between the sexes, and based on the very nature that women revert to only in emergency these days. But those novel institutions are fated to die from lack of replenishment — they were distorted to attack la différence, which stymies the procreative impulse. Their influence will collapse with their unproductive and childless deaths, just as any totalitarian system must.
The little home-school girls and boy scouts are not inert pawns in a grand game of ideology. They are preliminary versions of thinking and acting individuals who will proceed as normally as they can under a gradually enervating tyranny of lies. They see that boys are taller, stronger, more fearless. They eventually intuit that men can provide and protect against their inborn vulnerabilities, even now, when it is effectively illegal to notice such things. Even now, they are giving over to delirious transgression against the regime in the bedroom, no matter what they preach in the daylight.
The moderate majority travels the path of least resistance, and during this unfortunate period into which we were born, obeisance to feminist platitude is the way of least trouble. But not for much longer, in the grand scheme of things. We were born close to the peak of feminist ascendancy. It’s easy to despair and in that despair to imagine that ascendancy permanent because we never knew a time without it.
But faith too will out. Those who have faith in the future prove it by producing the children to live there. The sterility of feminist theory and practice is the surest sign that even they don’t have hope for the utopia they promise. The radicals are just promoting inherited platitudes without examination too, only at a greater pitch and ferocity, because unlike the majority they don’t aim to avoid conflict but seek it out to give their emptied and otherwise faithless lives meaning.
Take them away from the context that fuels their preposterous rage, and I will make a gentle and doting grandmother of the dykiest termagant they have, just by showing them what manliness actually is, rather than what they fear it to be. And thereby do we introduce women back to womanhood, rightly understood, in sweet conflict the way the sexes always have.
Matt
DeNihilist
human females don’t give a damn about their kids (off spring) All they care about is making sure everything is about themselves children are a good way to claim mother title and to get CS,foodstamps, dominate and control a man ( children are at times called hostages) etc etc.
Rollo’s understanding of chivalry as “the feminism of its time” is wrongheaded, likely a function of seeing history through modern imperatives.
Chivalry wasn’t a conspiracy to overthrow male power. It was code of honor that demanded the universal recognition of female vulnerabilities. Only the denial of vulnerability — against all reason and nature — precipitated the end of reciprocity.
Women didn’t reciprocate by offering value-in-kind. They reciprocated by acknowledging the generosity of a man with surplus strength, giving it freely. Whether they were capable of opening their own doors thankyouverymuch was beside the point. Men were more capable by nature, the task was easier for them. The gestures were strictly unnecessary and therefore an even greater tribute than providing the merely needful. His gestures aimed to shelter ladies at his own expense, for men naturally have a greater store to expend.
But chivalry was never meant as a one-way protection of the unladylike. You never offered your coat to the woman who insanely spat at the very notion of being cold. You wouldn’t get the door for a woman who defined her worth through the fantasy of achieving all things without assistance. Chivalry was an offering of male strength in the service of ladies who understood how to receive the offer. Now comes an ideology that makes the entire weaker sex unladylike. Chivalry never died. It lost women delicate enough to understand it and therefore worthy enough to receive it.
The solution cannot be to regard this healthy understanding of the sexual difference as a proto-feminist conspiracy. Chivalry has adopted new modes and cryptic forms while the aging harpies yet fill the skies. It is performed in secret, away from their jealous eyes, where the women who want to be ladies aren’t forced to choose between their instinct and public condemnation. It is underground, where men and women may rediscover the truth about themselves outside of official custom, where the power of men is free to assert itself completely, and even more important, the vulnerability of women is free to express itself in submission.
A generation of secret rites will give way to a generation with a toehold in public, who will give way to fearless iconoclasts, who will give way to the last stages of an uncontroversial transformation of custom. And then feminism will be a vestigial memory, like tombstones with names of dead eminences who were quite popular when they lived, and who only remain eminent with niche scholars among the living.
Strange deviations from nature always turn up as footnotes to history. Nature itself persists and defines the continuity between the ages. Chivalry is congruent with nature, feminism is anti-nature, which was all the rage in the 20th century when we imagined rightly-designed artifice to be the equivalent of the crooked timber of man — if only we can straighten him out enough! One custom will go extinct and the other will come back to life, not because people want it but because it has to.
Matt
Here’s one of my favorite writings on the “feminine imperative”:
http://rationalmale.wordpress.com/2012/12/06/shouting-in-the-wilderness/
Hello everyone. Why didn’t I find these sites sooner. I had some natural alpha but at 50 I’ve had the shit kicked out of me. I remembered this article as a crack of light onto the mystery of women. This is my first post. Read down you’ll all see why I posted this. I read the original
file:///C:/Users/Micheal/Documents/Interview%20with%20Jane%20Christmas%20%20Macleans_ca%20-%20Culture%20-%20Lifestyle.htm
again:
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/lifestyle/article.jsp?content=20071001_110023_110023
The other side is vehement objection to reciprocity
Reciprocity is probably not natural human behaviour (at least for some societies). Recently I had a ?chance? to watch some anthropologist by occupation and a big fan of Amazon indians by hearth. He described one tribe where he spent decades (I do not remember the name). And admired their way of life.
So, men in his narration essentially behaved like aloof jerks, were exciting (unpredictable and easy to piss off – to even kill you), promiscuous, delegated most of the work to women, etc., etc.. Just results of the game as a natural state.
But back to the core. He also explicitely mentioned reciprocity. The people do not recognize any kind of reciprocity. Not even gratitude or simple thanks. When you help someone it is simply your thing/problem you did it. He did not mention if they expect help but from the rest of narration is suppose they do.
@Johnycomelately,
Good point about the hypocrisy.
Lydia does not know enough about Game to realize that the natural leaders and high status guys in her church’s singles group and in the home schooling social groups are born with Game and will naturally use in on her daughters. That Game will fly right under Lydia’s nose.
I would be impressed, and change my tune, if Lydia actively pushes and prods her daughters into multiple dates with the homely, shy, introverted, lacking in confidence church beta guys.
I don’t see any layered complexity to either the claims about the imperative or Lydia’s superficial observations (w/ admission of same as pasted in Dalrock’s piece).
That chivalry, or that which is the male performance part of the imperative, is organic just isn’t the case. Someone I know…………just drove 14 hours with wife and their two younger kids in the car, one boy one girl. The trip was a case study on this issue. As I said, its not complicated. Wife as passenger ever needy, ever asking driving husband, “my phone has no signal, the i-net hotspot isn’t working, its hot, its cold, its hot again, please hand me that pillow, get in the other lane, too fast, too slow, stop here, if it piles up to the point where there are 6 “suggestions” pending and a sigh escapes his lips, “Whats wrong, wow, why are you in such a bad mood?”
that is teaching the kids the imperative plain and simple, and I dare say all but the rare wife does this at some level. It is organic in HER….not in him. It bends reality like Doppler shift to fit that the requests are not requests, rather that is just the normal atmosphere, the air, life…..the fish in water…..its the man’s reaction with anything but cheerful acquiescence that is the outlier. Once the 7 year old girl said to her dad, “gosh dad what’s wrong?”……start’em young. The 16 year old boy takes it in like survival training.
Lydia and her rambling about how stupid it would be for women to file divorces frivolously as it harms them too is a millimeter deep and (in her case especially) a mile wide. She frames pat observations, conventional wisdom, nothing to see here EXCEPT exactly what all the other pedestrians see.
I’m glad Dalraock that you posted this because the topic deserves exploration for reasons beyond our normal motive. That is that the female imperative is present asymptotically to 100%, even in the most dogged red pill-ish women. SSM once admitted inadvertently here.
A key part of the feminin imperative is to maximize a woman`s mating opportunities. Redistribution of wealth does not only ensure the survival of offspring but gives the freedom to take maximal advantage of hypergamic opportunities. You see the same pattern in tribes that share all the food. Instead of being stuck with a boring provider the women get the freedom to mate with the sexiest men and to change between them whenever they seem to loose their edge or someone more sexy comes along or just for varieties sake. The function of that is to ensure only what seems to be the best sperm at any given time. I`d say that unless held in check by men women will over time always set up norms to facilitate the most beneficial breeding opportunities.
@ empath
The description of the woman in the car made me laugh. Not that I’ve ever behaved that way. No. 🙂
@ all
This comment from Wudang up-thread was really interesting. It was long, but if you skipped it, you should go back and read it. On first read, I can’t really disagree with anything he wrote.
bobsutan
That link you put up was awesome. Ruined my whole morning routine. Nice to see things dicussed openly on display.
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Traditionally, the girls at the scout meeting would have done something like curtsey to acknowledge the mens sacrifice. Today they are entitled to go first without any sign of acknowledgment that they were given an unfair advantage. In fact, the idea is that they weren’t given an unfair advantage at all because they are entitled to go first in virtue of being girls.
Traditionally the women wouldn’t even be there. They would home, after having prepared the meal and drinks for their boys and husbands mind you. This was a Scouts Dinner I’m presuming and in the past, women were NOT invited, except to clean up afterwards.
The reason this worked in the past was because at home, the men were leaders and respected and were seen to have a duty and responsibility for their own families and those of their greater community. The letting women go first in the line and helping them at the side of the road and letting ‘women and children go first’ in the cases of emergency; and also treating them with love and kindness, was an act of graciousness from all men in the community as the women were taught to show them a level of respect designated for those of status and leadership.
In the past this worked because most men were respected as leaders in one way or the other. Today, not so much.
I like how she said sluttishness instead of sluttiness. Her subconscious mind couldn’t even fully say that women were slutty (even when talking in the negative) without trying to belittle the idea and make it seems less of an issue.
King A. Matthew King
Chivalry wasn’t a conspiracy to overthrow male power.
Rollo has addressed the canard of “conspiracy” before. Please read that soon, in order to avoid further errors.
It was code of honor that demanded the universal recognition of female vulnerabilities.
And thus chivalry served the Feminine Imperative, by providing women with the high quality, “proven” sperm they desired for babies, and the resources to raise children.
The first step to learning, King A. Matthew King, is the ability to admit ignorance, to admit “There is something that I do not know”. That is commonly referred to as “humility”, the quality of being humble. Those who arrogantly assume they know all, when they clearly do not, tend to find it very difficult to learn anything. Just a thought for you to consider.
It is digusting seeing these boy scouts defer to women at so young an age. Testament to the feminist indoctrination. These will be the same men who will get LJBF to the girl they have been ‘great friends’ with for years.
lets not get to cute with the logic. Women don’t think in terms of resources for long term anything but themselves. Also lets not play apex fallecy games on ourselves. Not every man was a knight. I bet the number of knights in a kingdom was as a percentage on par with the number of fighter pilots we have today. The biggest mistake Men make is place way to much logic in female decision making. An example would be the concept of hypergamy, gina tingle will at a drop of a hat destroy any logical conclusion of behavior before you can say who’s hamster is that.
Just read the Emily’s list was the largest political campaign
donator in the US and Australia.
The Us Speaker of the House credits Emily’s list for his victory.
Women will herd and form groups to pay the pols,men will not,they compete.
You need cash to buy rights these days,and men are either spending it themselves (MGTOW) or on women.(Majority)
Women who often re-distribute those mens money to political groups for women.
See how that works?
All for the FI.
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What Matt really needs to do is research the influence the holy roman empire had over feudal europe during the late 1300’s and the real reasons it instituted codes of chivalry – to exercise control over moneyed landowners and their growing militaries through religious moralism.
Then Matt might do a bit of research on the rituals and institutions of the courtly or roman-tic love practices of the early to mid 1400’s. You see, the institution of chivalric codes worked so well for the roman catholic church that the feminine imperative of the time began to see what an excellent tool of social control it was and wanted in on the action. So it added it’s own spin to the notion of chivalry and thus began the rituals and ‘courtesies’ of courtly love.
If Matt had spent a few more semesters in liberal arts and humanities his understandings of chivalry would be less about fanciful notions his pastors told him about it and more about the factual history of of western culture.
Agree with grey…..too much logic assigned to what is a lower brain function, automatic.
Also, the feminine and feminist imperative are exactly the same thing. Shaving this down is unnecessary. Creating subtypes and categories may be academically interesting, but unlike medical school, studying this requires no specialization.
It’s not quite narcissism. It’s a little solipsism as to the frame of thought. It’s controlling and manipulative, and in a perfect world it would be outed like the male sex drive, as something to restrain. worse though the sex drive has a purpose, the FI is self centered even if inadvertently.
A few more semesters in liberal arts and humanities.
Then we could watch the bridges and buildings erected and we would know why.
Rollo suggests:
And now SSM is acting out and getting way too defensive because a bunch of men dared to call her out on her statements and rethoric. Female bloggers who decide to interact with the Manosphere seem to follow the same pattern, although I guess it shouldn’t surprise me anymore.
I used to think that swallowing and accepting the Red Pill shouldn’t be difficult for a woman who has an attractive man committed to her and keeping her hamster calm. Now that even SSM is freaking out, I’m not sure anymore. It seems these women are living in some sort of bubble and literally cannot get it through their heads that the great majority of men aren’t like their husbands.
@HH
Darlin’, I’m not freaking out. Well, not much anyway!
But seriously, I just raised some questions and made a few tentative assertions, and it was like “Somebody get Rollo Tomassi on this chick, stat!” Now I happen to like and respect Rollo, but some of his commenters are practically wetting their pants and calling me an “evil daughter of Eve” (actual quote) and such. There’s just no gender equity in the manosphere, I tell ya! Where’s Gloria Allred when you need her?? j/k 🙂
The emoticon I use for eye-rolling is <.<, as looking askance is usually close enough.
King A. Matthew King, thanks for the demonstration of your idea of true Christian humility.
It is interesting, not to mention quite clarifying.
“Lydia and her rambling about how stupid it would be for women to file divorces frivolously as it harms them too”
Similarly, eating Cheetos and drinking Mountain Dew all day is stupid because it makes you fat and causes health problems down the road. How does Pepsico manage to stay in business, I wonder? Hmm…
Ive no skin in the game but calling out one’s lack of humility as a rebuke is only a cut above pointing out spelling errors.
Um, excuse me empath, but you forgot the apostrophe in the word I’ve. 🙂
@ HH
They do all seem to follow to same path don’t they? This should only reinforce that women will never be the ally of men. For you SSM, it not that you had questions its the way you posed them. Its as if you found the one thing you think the manosphere is wrong on and your trying to blow it up implying were wrong on everything else too. Well darlin, were not wrong on the FI and were not wrong on anything else either. Now take your FI thinking and be gone with thee.
Another female the manosphere thought was on their side bites the dust. How long has SSM been around?
Anonymous Reader wrote:
STOP. I am humble before my Lord God, not sniveling men. Meekness is a trait that women are blessed to exhibit, as it is congruous with their nature. I prostrate myself before neither people nor potentates, nor powers, nor principalities, nor thrones, nor dominions. I am a worm before the Alpha and Omega, the Redeemer, Christ crucified and risen. And by my obedience I am dignified into an impossible friendship with the Sovereign of the Heavens and All Creation:
Your pansy “idea of true Christian humility” is precisely what continues to feminize the church in the modern era, all out of character with her history. Be a man and warrior of the Ecclesia Militans. “I did not come to bring peace but a sword.”
Also, put away the sarcasm now and forever. It is the surest sign of cowardice in rhetoric.
Matt
Gee, where ever could I have gotten the idea that some men in these parts can get a bit paranoid at times? Was I ever off base there!
In other words, by asking them? How else does one pose a question?
Well, I guess if by “blowing it up” you mean asking “what is the FI, how is it defined, what does it look like in action, where does it come from, and why are there so many divergent definitions if it is really a real thing” and if by “implying we’re wrlong on everything else too” you mean “agreeing with 99.9% of everything Dalrock has ever written” then yeah, I guess you caught me.
Well. I can’t argue with that logic. I was not aware I was signing on to a cult.
I’m sorry, whose sandbox are we playing in here again? Hint: not yours.
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Passive agression. Check.
Shaming language. Check.
Appealing to another higher male. Check.
Well Id be shocked, if i didnt know it was coming.
King A. , Matthew King
STOP. I am humble before my Lord God, not sniveling men.
In other words, too arrogant and prideful to ever try to learn anything from anyone.
(By the way, the Earth really does orbit the Sun, it isn’t the other way around as you likely
believe. Make a note.)
Meekness is a trait that women are blessed to exhibit, as it is congruous with their nature. I prostrate myself before neither people nor potentates, nor powers, nor principalities, nor thrones, nor dominions.
Bah. The golden, marble, wooden and clay idols you are no doubt ready to prostrate before are common and pagan enough. However, I speculate your true god is Woman, on her pedestal, as is the case for so many he-manly patriarchal “traditional” men. Which one are you willing to give 10% of your income to, and which one do you expect men to give up everything for, eh?
The actions and the words…always compare the actions and the words.
Your pansy “idea of true Christian humility” is precisely what continues to feminize the church in the modern era, all out of character with her history. Be a man and warrior of the Ecclesia Militans. “I did not come to bring peace but a sword.”
The contempt for diligence, humbling the ego to the task, and other basic techniques of true learning is duly noted.
Also, put away the sarcasm now and forever. It is the surest sign of cowardice in rhetoric.
Oh, the irony.
SSM’s asking questions, and humble enough to admit she has a bias. She’s shown an ability to learn both as a commenter and on her own blog. That puts her far ahead of the majority of women.
The question of “what is the Feminine Imperative” has been discussed for a while at rationamale, to the profit of many participants and readers. I don’t see SSM trying to shut down discussion, unlike other drive-by posters that pop up from time to time like toadstools after a soggy rain, either. And unlike them, she’s generally not arguing from pure emotion.
So she’s useful and adds to the discussion, or at least doesn’t try to sidetrack it. And make no mistake, a civilized nation is going to be one in which the feminine imperative is under control, one way or another. So it behooves men to get a grasp of this obvious feature of women, and understand it, the better to be able to channel it and contain it.
Years ago I wound up helping a friend collect bales of hay from his field. This is an old story, so the bales weren’t all that big, 50 pounds or so, and the baler was on its last legs so it still used baling wire rather than twine. The drill was to move bales from the ground to the trailer behind the tractor, and when the trailer was full it went over to the hay stack and was unloaded. Repeat until done, whenever that is. There was a neighbor who had dropped over to help out. He was a man of not too many words.
I’d moved hay bales before, helping someone else feed horses,so I had the sense to wear work gloves, but had never bucked that much hay. The neighbor watched me for a while, and eventually made a few quiet suggestions about how to get the most work done with the least wasted motion and danger of getting hurt. I was ready to take any suggestions that would reduce the struggling I was doing to keep up with the work. When we were unloading the trailer after a few trips he offered me a baling hook, asking with a little grin if my tetanus shots were up to date. A baling hook used properly moves hay bales quickly. Used incorrectly it pokes holes in things other than hay bales. Best to pay attention to those that know more, when dealing with such tools. I paid attention, intently, to what I was told. No holes in anything except hay bales.
I learned a number of useful things that day, because I was aware of my own ignorance about parts of the job & wanted to get it done properly and safely, so I was willing to take instruction. False pride, a know-it-all attitude, and so forth were strongly discouraged by the men and women I grew up around. Perhaps because they were from a different country – the past – where people sometimes died- some quick, some slow – if they were too proud and full of themselves to take instruction, or learn with a humble and attentive mind.
Here ends my boring little story.
@ AR
“SSM’s asking questions, and humble enough to admit she has a bias. She’s shown an ability to learn both as a commenter and on her own blog. That puts her far ahead of the majority of women.”
This, times a million.
Look… SSM’s a woman. She’s never going to fully understand the male point of view. And you know what? That’s just fine. It’s unreasonable to expect her to do so. Just like I, as a man, will never fully understand the female point of view.
Bottom line: SSM sees much how things are messed up in the feminist west, AND she is sympathetic to the plight of men, AND she is willing to engage us in dialogue to try to understand where we’re coming from. What the hell else can anyone possibly want from her? I mean, really…
Seriously, I’m not sure what it is with some men in the ‘sphere who look for the slightest possible excuse to dump on every woman who comes by this neck of the internets, regardless of what she does or says…
Retrenched, it is very easy for a man’s “Interrogate – Friend or Foe?” (IFF) detector to get stuck. It is part of the process of learning the truth about women. Take an average chump who has been through a bad case of one-itis, who pedestalizes all women as more moral, more clean, more better than he is (“girls don’t fart!” I was once told by some romantic fool). Now, he puts on the glasses. His blurred, false vision clears up, and he sees them as they are – and it disgusts him. They are just as horny as, well, he is! They even fart, and then blame some man or a dog for it! At this point, a lot of repressed anger bubbles up, like lava breaking through the floor of an ancient building in Atlantis. This results in seeing women as potential dangers, and that in turn gets the IFF detector stuck on “enemy”.
It’s just a stage that many men go through. I suspect that most of us work through it, although some don’t. But there’s always another man just coming to the stage of “what? Women do THAT? WHAT?” and such men are very likely to find their way to androsphere sites, such as this one. Where they are likely to display their deep, long-developed, and righteous anger against any female human who comes in sight.
That doesn’t make it right, and so from time to time some man (my turn, this time) will have to remind such angry men to save their anger for more appropriate targets. And sad to say, there is no shortage of appropriate targets for righteous, masculine anger. No shortage at all.
But SSM’s not one of them.
OK ill bite. When has a woman been your ally?
Amazing. It just dawned on me how in my culture its the females who are socialized to display chivalry toward the males. In my culture it would have been the boys who would have gone for the food first, but they would have EXPECTED the girls to wait, possibly even until they had seconds, to go up for theirs because that is exactly how we girls were raised. In my household and millions of households in my culture the women cook, serve and wait while the males of the family eat to their limit. Then, whatever scraps are left over, we eat. And then we clean up the entire mess.
Odd isn’t it? This role reversal of chivalry. Perhaps that’s why Hindu men are stereotyped as being delicate?
Amazing. It just dawned on me how in my culture its the females who are socialized to display chivalry toward the males. In my culture it would have been the boys who would have gone for the food first, but they would have EXPECTED the girls to wait, possibly even until they had seconds, to go up for theirs because that is exactly how we girls were raised. In my household and millions of households in my culture the women cook, serve and wait while the males of the family eat to their limit. Then, whatever scraps are left over, we eat. And then we clean up the entire mess.
Strange, isn’t it? This role reversal of chivalry. Perhaps that’s why Hindu men are stereotyped as being delicate?
Are you satisfied within your own life and marriage? It seems you are more concered with others’ private lives and dating games than focusing upon your own life. You love to hang out the “dirty washing” in full public. Are you lacking in sex? Missing out on something? I am sure there’s quite a bit happening in your subconscious. You should focus onto becoming a better Christian and Husband and mind your own business of what takes place between others.
Anonymous?
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What SSM neglects in her analysis related above is that the young girls and boys are indoctrinated to the imperative so early that such behaviour as she recounts is reflexive and thus appears to arise organically.
And who is Chief Indoctrination Officer? Mom.
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I think men both young and old are naturally gracious toward women, as witnessed by the Boy Scouts. In the past women were taught to be reciprocally polite toward boys and young men in return. I can think of examples from my youth where young women would always share a dance with a young man when asked, even when they weren’t particularly attracted tp them. It was polite and gracious, and this was in a working-class industrial suburb. My (female) boss, with whom, surprisingly I sometimes share red-pill truths with, says that in her rural youth, she too would do the same – there was never any shaming of young men that she could remember.
Post feminist revolution and the shaming is well and truly on. We men must acknowledge that there is no point to graciousness. Being a white knight is out, since there is no reciprocal grace. This isn’t natural behaviour for men, and has to be actively pursued. I for one can’t wait when one of my wife’s lesbian friends has a flat tyre on her car and expects me to help change it!
As for Lydia McGrew, I wish her daughters good luck. Christian men are the best husbands: it is written into the code that they live by – their relationship with Jesus Christ their Lord – to love their wives and not be harsh with them. To be kind to them. They are commanded to live in peace with others whenever possible. They are commanded to raise their children to love and serve the Lord. Does Lydia McGrew want her daughters to back away from Christian men and into the arms (or more aptly onto the dick of ) of…Alpha Man?
Given that the story with the scouts and 4H group has the 4H group “joining” the scouts for the event, it is unlikely that the “female imperative” was in play. Rather, the concept of hospitality would be foremost. Scouts always defer to guests at the food line. It is, therefore, a poor example to analyse.