The Social Pathologist starts off on good footing in Marx and the Feminine Imperative when he writes:
Now, I do think that the Feminine imperative holds true, especially for the avowed feminists, but for the average woman, I don’t think she wakes up in the morning desiring to consciously or unconsciously screw men over.
But….. Rollo and Dalrock’s highlighting of the subject did get me thinking and I think something else is happening. I do think that the effects of the feminine imperative are real but what is enabling this is not some underlying power conflict but something more complex and therefore harder to understand and tackle.
But later he stumbles by suggesting it is simply about women getting the benefit of the doubt for immoral actions:
I really don’t think there is such a thing as the feminine imperative, what I do think though, is that Western Women are privileged to enjoy moral indulgence–it’s their get out of jail free card, and currently, Western Women are exploiting this phenomenon en mass to avoid moral responsibility. When a woman does something consciously dumb, rude or evil, there are many resources in Western Culture she can draw on. Sure, men can access some of these resources, and criminals frequently do, but women have far deeper pool of cultural “treasure” to get out of jail.
The problem is the feminine imperative is much more insidious than simple moral indulgence. The feminine imperative has warped our very ability to think morally. For example, a recent commenter at Dr Helen’s blog offered the following helpful dating advice for men looking for good women:
…I have found that when men “go there too soon,” a woman feels regretful or in some cases objectified… Whether or not they were they said “no.”
So, if you are looking for “the one,” patience is the best. “Getting women in bed quickl” is the fastest way to get a woman out of your life, if you ask me. A good woman wants to wait, and you want a good woman for the long haul, I would think…
I guess I can only offer the “good-girl, looking for life-long partner” perspective. They are out there, maybe fewere and fewer?
How many even inside of the manosphere can spot this for what it really is? Most will mistake it for Christian sexual morality or at least something along those lines, instead of what it really is, the cuckoo chick which pushed Christian sexual morality out of the nest when no one was looking. Modern Christians can’t spot this for what it is so they nourish it as if it were their own. It takes a vigilant eye to spot this parasitic imposter as the feminine imperative masquerading as sexual morality. The beauty of it is even the woman writing this likely has no idea of what she is actually doing.
Where I think many are getting hung up is in the explanation of the mechanics of how all of this happens. This is certainly a valid and interesting discussion, but whether or not you agree with Rollo on the mechanism doesn’t invalidate the phenomenon. Something very real is happening, and it follows what is generally a distinct and recognizable pattern once you understand what a feral woman’s mating script actually looks like. In essence, what Rollo has done for us is both point out the pattern and offer an explanation at the same time. He may or may not be right about the explanation, but the pattern is as undeniable as iron shavings surrounding a magnet. We don’t have to know the mechanics of electromagnetic fields to see that there is a pattern there, and those who are objecting to the concept of the feminine imperative should take the same approach. While the mechanics may be in question, the result is undeniable.
Warbler tricked into feeding Cuckoo chick image licensed as creative commons by Per Harald Olsen.
“So, if you are looking for “the one,” patience is the best. “Getting women in bed quickl” is the fastest way to get a woman out of your life, if you ask me.”
She has that confused with men’s thought process. If a man sleeps with a girl too quickly HE is the one who won’t take her seriously. HE is the one who won’t want to stick around and will get her out of his life.
http://3rdmilleniummen.wordpress.com/2012/11/11/manosphere-advice-for-women-on-how-to-keep-a-man-or-how-not-to-get-pumped-and-dumped/
“A good woman wants to wait, and you want a good woman for the long haul, I would think…”
Damn straight!
Beta Husband (to Slutty Wife): Do you have something you’d like to tell me about your past?
Slutty Wife: What are you talking about?
BH: Your film career.
SW: Uhhhhh…. what are you talking about.
BH: A couple of guys at work found a video series about girls at the college you went to online. They watched it and sent me the jpeg. Guess who girl number 3 is.
SW: I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU! THAT HAPPENED BEFORE WE EVER MET!
BH: I can’t believe you never told me you made a porn flick that’s out on the internet! Don’t you think I should have known about that before we got married?!?
SW: That WAS NOT MY FAULT! My boyfriend promised no one else would ever see that tape! And I really needed the money for my tuition!
BH: How does that even make sense?
SW: I AM FORGIVEN! My pastor said so! And why are you looking at porn, anyway? You’re a perv!
BH: Wait…. You made a porn flick, and now I’M the perv??????
SW: Your a rapist! Wait until our pastor and my divorce lawyer hear about this! Get out of here now! I’m calling the police!
This is a good short post.
“Where I think many are getting hung up is in the explanation of the mechanics of how all of this happens. This is certainly a valid and interesting discussion, but whether or not you agree with Rollo on the mechanism doesn’t invalidate the phenomenon. Something very real is happening, and it follows what is generally a distinct and recognizable pattern once you understand what a feral woman’s mating script actually looks like. …. While the mechanics may be in question, the result is undeniable.”
I was on vacation when the original discussions came out from Sunshine Mary, Rollo, and here. So I didn’t have time to wade into the discussions or want to do a post or anything after the fact either, so I just lurked through most of it.
By far the most interesting conversation I saw about the whole thing was on Stingray’s blog though, which is where I joined in with Matt on a discussion. In a small number of very long, detailed comments, I gained more understanding about both the term and what the term seems to have done to the community’s thought process than I have since Rollo first started using it.
http://verusconditio.wordpress.com/2012/12/27/the-male-imperative-vs-the-female-imperative/#comment-2799
What I found was that, while the term itself “Feminine Imperative” is a great marker on a road map, it does little to map out the actual territory we’re concerned with or the phenomenon itself. Rather than actually dig in and explore the territory it seems like most of the time we refer to it from afar, describe the general ways to get there, the rough descriptions of what is around it, but avoid getting our hands dirty by digging down into the mud and muck of our problems.
By being such an easy roadmap, the term seems to hinder and obstruct our understandings or explorations at times.
A great example of this is simply found in the length of time that it took for this discussion and outbreak of posts to occur at all; or that (from what I can tell), that it took a woman’s post questioning the mere existence, workings, and origins of the female imperative for this discussion to happen. As men, most of us understood what the term implied and demanded relatively little explanation for where the term came from or how the functions the term was describing weave their poisonous influences through our society in a way that has allowed them to proliferate so rapidly yet put all of western world on track for a Roman style crash course of civilization.
I’m not saying that the “feminine imperative” doesn’t exist. Merely that the term seems to have caused us to be lazy, possibly even sloppy. I say this in that the manosphere as a whole seems overwhelmingly slow to try and delve into the behaviors it uses the term to describe. I myself am guilty of this as well. I’ve used the term since Rollo started using it, never delved that deep into it either; it’s damn hard to find the time or energy to be a part of a subculture stripping off layers of lies while still pursuing your goals and living life. Especially when an idea just seems to make so much sense the instant we started using it as a community.
I’m not sure what the solution is. Roadmaps exist for a reason, and terms are nothing if not roadmaps for discussions. I think as men we just need to be aware of over using the term instead of exploring and getting lost in the area it refers us to. We stick to the well traveled roads, occasionally venturing on a smaller path of thought, but rarely start roughing it in undiscovered (or rediscovering) the intellectual landscape so that we can present it to society when the truth starts being the only thing left amid a ruin of lies.
I think this is important because if we don’t have the map filled in with all the gritty details by the time mainstream awareness hits we risk a few things. We as a community risk looking foolish, losing the frame, having the frame co-opted by feminism, and/or simply floundering and setting the truth backwards in terms of societal awareness.
The thing is that it has been explained by Rollo in some detail, but quite a few disagree with his entire explanation, or even pieces of it.
It probably does make sense to discuss and elaborate some more, as a blogging community, as to what it means, in its different permutations, some of which may match Rollo’s ideas and some of which may not. Not to defend it against women, but to simply be a bit more clear. It probably should be a bit more precise than being a swiss army knife.
It is emergent behavior brought forth by women using a combination of feminine wiles and some centralized propaganda to further what they think are their goals. Most women don’t even know they are engaging in it. It is indulged because we think we can afford it.
In other news, there is also a “children’s imperative”, where children (and corporations) manipulate parents into more and more goodies. Once again, we indulge this because we think we can afford it, and because it seems like the easiest path.
I think a distinction could be that the FI, as we have described it, is something that defines the “default worldview”, when it comes to the relevant issues. It isn’t so much indulged as being the normative narrative that exists in our heads that both informs what we think is normative and justifies it to ourselves and others, in a reinforcing manner.
Thanks for the post Dalrock.
I think you make a good point. Call it what you will, there is an observable pattern at operation in how women behave and react to things.
I do have one question, and forgive me for being mr thicko, but you said this was a cuckoo version of Christian morality.
Am I right in understand that what makes it the false copy is that there is no mention of marriage in here? The there is an expectation of sex before serious commitment, just not “too soon” which makes it look similar to the “wait until married” real deal of Christian morality?
Also agreed, it is turned on its head. Guys will seek to have their fun and move on from loose women, not that women wont want to stick around.
I would note that I think the end result of the Imperative is not achieved because they are exceptionally organized or effective, but rather, so mindless and so much consistently alike in their natures. There are women who see it for what it is, but the deceit can be so sparkly, most of them live there.
The thing is that it has been explained by Rollo in some detail, but quite a few disagree with his entire explanation, or even pieces of it.
From observation, it seems that most people who disagree with the concept of the Feminine Imperative, and Rollo’s dissection and discussion thereof, do so not from an evidence-based viewpoint, but from an emotional viewpoint. That is to say, they argue against it because they don’t like it and don’t want to believe it.
That is generally a very, very bad basis for belief.
@Jason
In Christian sexual morality there is the marriage bed and fornication. This new false version replaces that with the female preferred form of promiscuity (serial monogamy). Fornication becomes moral if it there is “commitment” (male investment) and romantic love involved. What this does is ensure that the promiscuous female can secure investment from the men she has sex with. If this were instead feral male sexuality presented as morality the rule would be that sex was moral so long as the woman was willing to be part of a harem. Note also that the woman’s own promiscuity is blamed on the man, because if she doesn’t say no the man must have pushed too hard. The reality is there is no commitment on the table here, only two parties engaged in promiscuous sex. The female imperative teaches us that promiscuous sex is moral if men agree to play the promiscuity game on the woman’s terms. How many people do you know who would even notice a problem with her comment?
This woman refers to herself as “one of the good girls”, while implying her penchant for hopping from sex with one man to another in her search for a husband.
Brandon
I’m not saying he hasnt explained it. Im saying that it doesnt seem he’s explored it as an intellectual idea and hasnt questioned the why or the how. He seems to just arrive at conclusions without much of a journey nor an explanation of how he got there.
This means theres a large chunk of the process that very few in the community are able to explain to fellow men in a clear oe rational way. We point to markers and patterns without. Being able to explain any o f the details.
For instance
Its an accepted fact in the communit that most men can only see the truth we offer after we get burned. Why? Are we so bad at explaininh facts sccience psychology and philosopjy that were unintrlligible or can be ignored? Why havent we worked on this as a community? I regularly post facebook discussions I have and transcripts of conversations when I can, but as a community we rarely learn from each other on how to overcome societys desire to shut us up.
Another example is how I dont see christian red pill blogs explore how it is God’s strengths he’s put in men and women that the evil of feminidm has co-opted. The feminine imperative explains it all, but not in great detail. The philosophy and pschology are long and hard – I myself have a lot of reading to do on it.
The same can be said for the biology. We know the details roughly, buy it usually is explained as faults of men and women
Afain, theyre explained but usually briefly, without question, and rarely explored.
The result is that we have a great deal of the community who knows the truth and understands the basic details but seems to be unable to grow at a significant rate.
“a good woman wants to wait”
the problem with that concept is that it implies that
1) there is such a thing and
2) that any woman who demands ‘waiting’ is a good woman because of it, its how you can tell a good woman (also setting the frame of her as decision-maker)
not factoring at all the fact that all a woman has to do is demand they ‘wait’ and it covers up all of her sexual past and gets her classified as a ‘good girl’… but a girl wouldn’t lie about something such as her sexual past, would she?
@Leap
Which do you want, cutting edge or polished? While it could always be done better, exactly who is hashing out these ideas more thoroughly or quickly than is happening in real time on the manosphere? This is an informal group of bloggers and commenters kicking novel ideas around, not academia. Given the nature of the structure I would say we are doing just fine.
Edit: This came out harsher than I intended.
I would agree with Dalrock here. The ideas are at the beginning. Yes, there is a lot of fleshing out to be done, and a lot of definition, polishing, back-up and so-on. But it is a beginning. I understand that one perspective — an academic one — is that ideas shouldn’t really be aired until they can be very fully supported. But that isn’t this space, really.
The commenter from Dr. Helen’s blog doesn’t claim to be a Christian so far as I can tell by looking through the thread, so I’m not sure why her comment should be understood as a twisting of Christian sexual morality.
That said, I find her comment a little hard to follow. Is she saying that if a man seduces a woman and beds her, she won’t like him anymore and the woman will leave him? I don’t think I have noticed that dynamic, frankly.
@sunshinemary
What she is describing is the script 90%+ of Christians have today. The path for a Christian woman to marriage is to practice serial monogamy until she finds “the one”, at which time she hands him an official man up card. Generally there is a wink and a nod pretending that this series of premarital boyfriends are chaste relationships, but 1) There is no biblical model of non sexual romantic relationships. This is a thoroughly modern invention. and 2) The vast majority of the time sex is involved and is merely overlooked.
How many of the young women in your church will marry as virgins and without first having a series of boyfriends?
A good woman wants him bad, but doesn’t get pissed off when he draws a line. That is how you’ll find a good woman – by being a master of yourself and being sexually continent yourself, not by expecting her to control the sexuality by drawing boundaries. That is how you will find one that won’t refuse you at some point. Does a good wife refuse sex? How can you find a woman like that? Hmm… A good woman who finds a good man will want to be fucked and claimed by him sooner rather than later.
A good choice is a peasant wench that tingles for him and gets wet. If she has other worthwhile attirbutes, she will be a good choice as a wife (his slut) and will not want to wait very long to be fucked and claimed. Historically, engagements were not very long before marriage. Does she want the fairy tale fantasy wedding or does she want that man?
The problem ultimately belongs to men for letting women get away with these things. Since men created civilization they civilize women, not the other way around (the one who popularized that meme was George “Daffy Duck” Gilder).
Letting women get away with wrong things I’ve heard referred to a “pussy pass.” I ceased doing it a long time ago.
Yes, of course I agree with your comment above. But the woman who made the comment isn’t Christian. What would be interesting would be to show that comment to a bunch of Christian women who have never heard of the manosphere and ask them what they think about this woman’s comment and see if they point out the obvious problem, which is that the woman is suggesting serial polygamy. I think I’ll go try it on a Her-me-neutics thread at Christianity Today right now.
@sunshinemary
Here is the question you should ask them: What is the moral difference between this woman’s sexual choices and those of Roissy? How many would notice that they are doing the same thing?
It’s like God knew I would need a relevant thread at CT today or something.
Hold Baby Showers, Not Political Debates: How to approach unplanned pregnancies with Christian grace and acceptance
The premise of the article is basically this: she’s a woman, she knocked up, she has no man, stop judging her and give her stuff!
These women have no clue who Roissy is and I doubt they think a woman “makes sexual choices.” She just, you know, follows her heart. Anyway, I had to be careful on how I worded it so I wouldn’t give myself away as an obvious troll. Here’s how I put it:
Remember, friends, that CT is the considered the mouthpiece of American Evangelicalism. I literally cannot wait to see what the response will be.
I am really confused by CL’s comment. How does one keep themselves from becoming a slut if it isn’t by drawing sexual boundaries?
CT commenter Kathy writes:
Hear that Christians? Kathy says it is twisted and mean to point out to a pregnant girl the (frankly rather obvious) fact that she has fornicated and that this is a sin. lulz. I don’t know if it’s an imperative, but it sure is twisted logic.
I’m not a slut if I was really in love…
I’m not a slut if I was drunk….
I’m not a slut if I was on spring break…
I’m not a slut if my parents don’t know about it…
I’m not a slut if my pastor doesn’t know about it…
I’m not a slut if my fiancee/husband doesn’t know about it…
I’m not a slut if I still get to have a baby shower…
There is no such thing as the “female imperative.”
There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home.
SSM…
Read that article at CT. Funny thing, nowhere in it did I see any mention of adoption. Considering the poverty rates for single mothers, and the statistical outcomes of children raised by single mothers, adoption is the ONLY humane or loving choice if the father is not going to marry her. What’s truly heart-rending is to see so many couples in churches today who are willing and eager to adopt, and who could provide safe, stable, nurturing homes, but who remain childless while “godly unwed mothers” with multiple fatherless children in tow suck up state and church resources. The sin these womyn commit by their treatment of the children they bring into the world merely compounds their earlier sin in which they conceived the children.
I’m not a slut if I say I’m not a slut, unless I embrace my slutiness and claim the term ‘slut’ as a label of pride, in which case you will find me marching down the street in my bra and knickers with other proud sluts(TM). In which case you aren’t allowed to judge me either.
@Gabriella
I am really confused by CL’s comment. How does one keep themselves from becoming a slut if it isn’t by drawing sexual boundaries?
It is a matter of being ‘his slut’ rather than a whore that give it away for free. A woman wants to be claimed and then has the freedom to be ‘his slut’ because she is committed to him and the boundaries are around them rather than around her and between them.
@ Dalrock
Nah. Didnr come out too harsh. If anything I think my own cam out harsher than I intended as well.
Like I said, I myself find the term useful. I use it too. As per my usual comments I just went through my whole thought process to explain where I’m coming from; especially because I still enjoy and gain from everyones writings.
It was just that we as a community seem to enjoy creating terms before we know what they mean or explore their meanings thoroughly; and I think we should execute caution because I worry it will lead to some of the issues I brought up or another issue unforeseen. The truth is important and deserves the utmost care and quality of thought
I don’t know if it’s an imperative, but it sure is twisted logic.
The imperative is that it should be embraced without critique. That’s the imperative in action, in one of its guises. True, this is similar to the “no moral accountability” aspect that Slumlord referred to in the post cited in the OP, but the reality is that this is only one of many open manifestations of a deeper thing.
This phrase is an instant classic:
“this parasitic imposter as the feminine imperative masquerading as sexual morality”
Poetry.
BC declared:
Examples or GTFO. Because you just committed the crime you accuse others of committing. “It seems that…”
Weak.
I for one disagree with “the concept of the Feminine Imperative” and find the hand wringing over it unproductive and wasteful. No, charlatan, I don’t “argue against it because [I] don’t like it” or because I “don’t want to believe it.” I argue against it because it is intellectual masturbation, naming a phenomenon that already has a name — feminism — for no reason other than vainglory. You are collectively spinning your wheels, and as on an exercise bike, the process feels cathartic, works out your muscles, but gets you nowhere. I argue against it because I want your discussions to be productive and your disagreements to bear fruit.
Dalrock harrumphed:
The ideas need no definition or refinement. They need application. You make a critical error assuming they are “novel ideas.” Who has hashed them out “more thoroughly or quickly than is happening” here? Every single generation of men before the dawn of feminism, whose work is in the public domain and waits to be translated.
Your work is therefore translation and application, using old and proven venerable terms, not “novel” ones. I say you already do this very well with regard to St. Paul’s epistles, and scripture in general. But your approach has set you up to reinvent the mousetrap rather than walk down to the giant warehouse of mousetraps (the great works of western civ) and figure out how to use them on today’s mice.
So you are casual “bloggers and commenters.” Not good enough. Your investigation has to be more systematic, or else it will devolve into the frustrations and repetitions of trial and error from atomized, disparate sources. No, this isn’t academia, and thank God for that. But there is no reason not to be more formal about your explorations. Again, you do this very well with your charts and graphs and hard data.
We have lost the academic ability to translate “the best that has been thought and said” into a modern idiom. So we rely on “novel” sounding ideas and shoddy sociological surveys that are rewarmed leftovers presented in new arrangements and called “science.” The more formal inquiry takes more work, sure, but the payoff is much greater. It doesn’t require superlative scholarship, it only requires the consistent humility to ask, “Is this idea indeed novel, and if not, who (with the authority that attends venerability) might have said it better?” In this day of Google and Wikipedia and electronic books, access is no longer a problem. Scholarship is mostly legwork, not brilliant insight or articulation.
Save your apologetic vapors. You could stand to mix more moxie into your confrontations. Harshness is a tool, a mighty cleaver for this world of somnambulant Last Men and uninspired drones. Steel sharpens steel. Start chopping some heads off, whip around the money-changers. This ain’t bean bag. It is war by other means.
Matt
Observes Matt being a prick as usual.
I enjoy Matthew’s comments.
Of course you do.
Dalrock harrumphed
Great word, this “harrumphed.” Seems to describe nearly every post I’ve ever seen Matt make around the manosphere.
@Matthew
“I for one disagree with “the concept of the Feminine Imperative” … because it is intellectual masturbation, naming a phenomenon that already has a name — feminism…”
I agree with you and have been mostly silent during the discussion of FI in the hope that this shallow concept would fade away. I have many reasons why I disagree with the FI rationale.
Women act as they do and men act as they do. This is merely the human nature of the sexes and the biological imperative. Women exhibit no overriding collusion and conniving about the future. They are usually herd creatures that act and feel in the present.
“So you are casual “bloggers and commenters.” Not good enough. Your investigation has to be more systematic”
And I want the manosphere to get me laid with 9s, minimum, every day! Also, my pot currently lacks a chicken. You talk a big game, Matt, but…no chicken!!!!
<Queen A: "Weak"
Well, go f*ck yourself, too, queen.
Your repetitive holier/alpha-er than thou is nothing I need to listen too, either. It’s just boring.
Matthew King (King A) says:
Harshness is a tool, a mighty cleaver for this world of somnambulant Last Men and uninspired drones. Steel sharpens steel. Start chopping some heads off, whip around the money-changers. This ain’t bean bag. It is war by other means.
Wow. You’re my hero. You just came right out and laid it down on the Internets and everything…like steel man! I ain’t never seen that before!! It’s like you’re a commando of words, taking on those uninspired drones behind your keyboard. Chopping heads with your mighty cleaver of sharp steel. Badass, absolutely badass!
If one bothers to read slumlord’s post, one sees that in the end he actually provides proof of the feminine imperative, obviously without realizing it. He talks of cultural loopholes and historical influences…which all just happen to benefit women only. Who’d have thought? He also notes that men, by and large, cannot use any of these to their advantage. Wow, what could possibly be the reason? Oh wait…
“The problem ultimately belongs to men for letting women get away with these things.”
The only alternative to that is Sharia, or at least a legal code that is very similar to it without being specifically Muslim or even religious. Something that specifically denies the silly idea that women are the better half of the species or that they’re somehow more moral than men.
Then again, I wonder what percent of even self-proclaimed tradcons’d be willing to put up with something like that.
Women act as they do and men act as they do. This is merely the human nature of the sexes and the biological imperative. Women exhibit no overriding collusion and conniving about the future. They are usually herd creatures that act and feel in the present.
7man
what makes it the feminie imperative what women think and do is the foundation of civilized western society now backed up by law. When enough people figure this out there is going to be blood middle east style.
I fear I might get run off for this comment, but I think it ought to be made…
I read the comment of the woman over at Dr. Helen’s blog, over and over again.
And all I can infer is, these are probably the words of a virgin, or at the very least a very low n woman.
I have 2 questions:
1. Is this conclusion (that I came to) impossible to imagine? If so, why?
2. What exactly is the evidence, from what says, that she herself is a serial monogamist or is advocating it?
Having said that, I agree with everyone here that the idea that it is the WOMAN who will leave after a regretable sexual encounter is indeed false.
But aside from this faux-pas, what else suggests that this woman is nothing other than virginal herself?
In other words, based on what she has said, can we honestly make the assumption that she is engaging in ‘serial monogamy’ or indeed advocating it? Are there pointers to this in her comment that I missed?
From what I can make out, IF one has already made the assumption that she is like many women who *are* engaging in serial monogamy, then her words are just more of the ‘white noise’ you hear from such women.
But what happens if you make the assumption, or conclude yourself that she is actually chaste? In this case, don’t her words take on a different meaning?
What I am getting at is, one’s perception of the speaker already prejudges what they are going to say to one…no?
Is this a fair point? If not, why not?
Here is my difficulty with all this:
She is advocating chastity in relationships. She specifically states this.
But her words can mean different things depending on what you believe to be her own past history:
Iif she is a slut, her words will mean to everyone that she has been on the carousel for a number of years and is now wanting some beta chump to ‘man up’ and wait.
If she is a lifelong chaste woman, then her advice is good.
My question is: *why* do we assume she is the former and not the latter?
Is this purely based on statistics, i.e. the majority of women are indeed in the former category and not the latter?
Or, is there a clear indicator in her words that only really clever people (clearly excluding me!) will see?
Again, I am indebted to you guys for educating me on this.
“Warbler tricked into feeding Cuckoo chick”
aint that the truth
and lookit the SIZE of the Cuckoo Chick . . . already!
its like Walmart for birds!
What % of Western women are actually NOT practising serial monogamy, which is the form of promiscuity preferred by women? 0.0001? How are they relevant to this discussion?
A society where the responsibility to resist sex lies with the man is a society where all the children will be fathered by the cads who refuse to live up to that moral norm, or men from outside the group who have no need to abide by this groups moral norm as they are not of that group and can easily avoid punishment by them (i.e. foreign tourists).
Hence such a norm is unsustainable, and righteous in-group men should revolt against it, lest they wind up reproductively annihilated.
To suggest such a norm is to suggest the reproductive annihilation of good men. By their fruit you shall know them
Related to this statement above;
“To suggest such a norm is to suggest the reproductive annihilation of good men.”
Agenda Insight: Goodbye to Good Men
Of relevance to the statement above is 3:25 onwards.
The question that leads to men abandoning the female imperative.
@ Dalrock
Man. I was kicking around the conversations and the ideas here all night during a play, drinks, and conversations I was having with some friends. I think I have some issues with this statement you made:
“This is an informal group of bloggers and commenters kicking novel ideas around, not academia. Given the nature of the structure I would say we are doing just fine.”
Two things, that I think are important to take together.
1. The evidence I’ve seen from commenters in how they treat the subjects at hand is that we treat it as if the concepts and terms we throw around informally have, indeed, been proven academically.
and
2. I think that we treat the proving of these ideas as casually as you suggest.
I think these are a very deadly combination, which is what led to my original comment. I’m not
In relation to these, it means that we don’t fully explore the terms themselves nor what they represent. The terms stay vague and clunky in terms of how they’re intellectually handled for far longer than they should. We treat them as truths and they lead the community to false ideas and beliefs more easily than if we explored the concepts before trying to label a term to them.
Yet we talk about them and use them like they’re refined.
If society ever turns its gaze upon this part of the internet to see what truth’s we’ve found, it will take what it sees as seriously or “informally” as we have taken it.
It would seem to me that the Feminine Imperative is simply the sum of a woman’s frailties and appetites. Basic fears and greeds, through the female biological lens.
I’ve always interpreted the feminine imperative to mean the emergent behaviour* to structurally** advantage women in the domain of sexual selection.***
*emergennt behaviour = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence
** structurally = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_structure
***domain of sexual selection = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_conflict
Leap of beta
terrifying shit being a cultural leader of western civilization. We’ll do fine have faith in the beta male the feminist do.
The female imperative seeks female facilitation whilst being myopic towards their own actions; this is then amplified by male white-knighting.
Consider this anecdote, the details I learned of as recently as Thursday. My friend invited me for a coffee being back just a day from a couple of weeks in a certain asian country. His three sisters, (now there’s a cue for a play) all aged around fifty had flown out to said country but one day earlier and thus on a different flight – a flight by this countries national carrier. Also on the flight (in one of your large Boeing planes) were three English dudes, in holiday spirits and doubtless slightly the worse for wear from alcohol. They seem to have attempted to get into conversation with the three middle aged women, and one of them had even – you’ll need the smelling salts to read the next phrase – grabbed the arm of one of the women. My friend – foaming at the mouth- was saying that this would never have been allowed to happen had the carrier been British Airways who would have diverted the plane to the nearest airport to disembark the three men (think of the cost of that).
A few days later the three men – doubtless staying at the same ***** hotel were pointed out to my friend and he described them as looking perfectly ordinary and acting unobtrusively. I saw my friend again last night and I suggested that he was simply white-knighting his sisters, and taking at face-value what at worse was lively and good-natured horse play for an attempt at rape at 36,000 feet. These guys are heading to a country teeming with young hot pussy and he wants me to understand they can’t wait the duration of the flight (eight hours) but are hitting on his menopausal sisters. Give me a break, I said. He had to think for a bit.
Oh goodie. We get to talk about the lack of reference to classic works of lit-rah-chuh ah-gayn.
Im not sure that saying the feminine imperative isn’t real because its actually just how women are is really a rebuke like
Women act as they do and men act as they do. This is merely the human nature of the sexes and the biological imperative.
I’m still trying to figure that one out. Though this rings true, are we fussing then about nomenclature and not the THING we are naming?
And one thing I am certain of, it is not feminism. I may miss (per those who fancy themselves having coined the word) if I strike out at some definition but Im pretty sure they agree it is not simply feminism.
Of course I believe it has a great deal to do with the emotional drive of women, an actual drive to experience certain feelings in the form of empathy. The dynamic of the drive is not some strategic thought out thing, as is alleged in certain objections above(Women exhibit no overriding collusion and conniving about the future. They are usually herd creatures that act and feel in the present)., rather, yes, it is just naturally occurring. I don’t think the creator(s) have asserted it is some strategic cunning thing , instead better to see it as in innate panther like instinctive type of cunning.
Finally, the existence of some innate thing in men too has nothing to do with it, that objection is an inside out backwards type of NAWALT.
If there are folks attempting to coin terms and use them to describe behavior, and if the group mainly using them more/less understand whats being said when the term is referred to, whats the problem?
Women want to experience empathy. Women love to reach a point in a conversation when it is stated, “I know exactly how you FEEEEEELLLLLL” The ones with the most compelling urges live for finding victims of any stripe in order to vicariously experience the pain and then experience empathy. There is a reward system for empathy, internal and external rewards.
@ Hollenhund
“The problem ultimately belongs to men for letting women get away with these things.”
The only alternative to that is Sharia, or at least a legal code that is very similar to it without being specifically Muslim or even religious. Something that specifically denies the silly idea that women are the better half of the species or that they’re somehow more moral than men.
Until the early 20th century in a divorce children were almost always given to the father. People have claimed it was because the fathers had the jobs and money and women in those days did not. Perhaps, but I think it was more than that.
Women can’t raise children by themselves, contrary to their delusions. Men can. Children raised by women can end up with horrendous psychological problems. Look around and you’ll see proof of that. (The word “bastard” means a cruel heartless man and a child with no father.)
Now imagine if today in a divorce the kids went to the father. Imagine if when a single mother gave birth she always had the child taken away. In other words, imagine if no woman was ever allowed to raise a child by herself.
Would or would it not be a much better country?
This is one reason, among many, why it is men’s fault for letting women get away with these things. And out of what? A misguided sense of fairness?
Again I’ll repeat: me created civilization and culture, not women. It is ultimately men’s fault for letting women destroy both.
@Empath
Because I refuse to acquiesce to every quack, school marm, and bureaucrat who says boys have “ADD”; badly-behaved women suffer from “BPD”; and that the gubmint buying car companies IS a free-market capitalist program.
I’m not a slut…it’s the man’s fault that he left after I sexed him up.
I’m not a slut…it’s the man’s fault that he won’t committ to this good girl.
I’m not a slut…it’s the man’s fault that I crave the memories of ex-boyfriends.
I’m not a slut…it’s the man’s fault that I don’t trust them and are quickly short with them.
I’m not a slut…it’s the man’s fault that I have to live with cats.
Opus:- ” .. this would never have been allowed to happen had the carrier been British Airways who would have diverted the plane to the nearest airport ..”
Your mate doesn’t fly BA then, I take it? If the carrier had been British Airways, the plane would never have left the snowbound airport, and the vast herd of passengers would still be moping around Terminal Five looking for their rejected luggage or some sign of BA staff or reps, hungry, thirsty, aching and near-hypothermic from having spent yet another night dossing on the concourse floor in their tropicals.
“No I don’t know when the next plane is, and I don’t care. And no bloody refunds neither, suckers! Build yerself an igloo, if you can’t afford a taxi and London hotel prices. Now sod off it’s me teabreak.”
British Midland were always very good for short hops over to Le Congtinong and domestic, until the BA/IAG buccaneer crowd got their hands on them. Lowest Common Denominator triumphs again, eh?
When the “does the Feminine Imperative exist?” comes up, here’s a fun little exercise:
What’s the “Economy”? I can point to a billion daily interactions that makes up our “Market Economy”. I can point to companies that are doing well; I can point to companies that are failing. I can point to the Amazon package that arrived yesterday.
But if you sat down to “prove” the existence of the Economy, you’d get laughed at. It’s right in front of you, but a strict explanation will never be more than “the sum of all interactions made that involves trade of some form”. The Economy, in fact, is so all-encompassing that the ability to “predict” the outcomes would result in an incorporation of that knowledge and change all of the predicted outcomes.
So, the “Economy”, in fact, doesn’t exist as more than a term: a title given to an unending arc of interactions. But it can chew you up and spit you out a thousand ways to Sunday. The Feminine Imperative is no different. We can point to as many parts of it as we want, but it exists, it’s active and it can chew you up and spit you out.
Long comment warning … you have been warned.
I think that there is a lot of misunderstanding going on about the FI. I’m going to try to explain what I think it is NOT, and then explain what I think it IS. I’m going about it this way because I think it is being misconstrued by many.
The FI is NOT “feminism”. Feminism is a social and political movement about liberating women from certain social, legal, cultural and economic “restrictions” that applied to women historically. The FI predates feminism by, oh, tens of thousands of years. It is related to feminism in this age, as I will elaborate further below, but it is not “simply feminism”.
The FI is not “what motivates woman X”. Woman X is, like all other individuals, motivated by a variety of specific things in her specific context. It isn’t “ah, she’s doing action Y because of the FI”. No. The FI is not about a specific woman’s motives or actions.
The FI is not about what women use to justify or rationalize their actions. It isn’t an excuse machine, as in “see, she’s got her hamster running – that’s the FI at work”.
The FI is not a conspiracy – it isn’t “all the wimminz are getting together in a smoky back room somewhere thinking about the next move for global woman, and how they can better set up things to screw men as a class”.
Okay, so what IS it then?
The FI is both the amalgam of social norms, practices, prejudices, mores, laws, customs and the like which are aligned to favor the interests of the female sex over those of the male sex and the underlying interest beneath all of these. It wasn’t consciously created or designed, at least not by individual women. Rather, it’s the outcome of inter-sexual competition between men and women in our species, something which has played itself out over a long period of time, and on a very collective, rather than individual, basis.
Popular science writer Matt Ridley in his book “The Red Queen” (http://www.amazon.com/Red-Queen-Evolution-Human-Nature/dp/0060556579) uses the Alice-in-Wonderland metaphor of the sexes evolving in tandem, with each trying to get the proverbial “leg up” on the other one, but not really moving forward – like the Red Queen from “Through The Looking Glass” – because they evolve in tandem. At every point along the way, one sex has an advantage over the other. One can say that each sex has its genetic/reproductive “imperative”, in this sense, which is in constant competition with the imperative of the other sex. The key point to recognize, however, is that these competing imperatives are not strictly the respective underlying SEXUAL interests – that is, they relate also to the panoply of laws, customs, social rules, conventions, mores, social organization and the like in which that SEXUAL activity takes place, all of which favors (or can favor) one sex’s imperative over the other at any point in time. The imperative is the amalgam of all of this, as it serves the sexual advantage of one sex, collectively, in its Red Queen race with the other sex.
Is there a masculine imperative? Sure. But it isn’t “seed as many women as you can”. That’s a sex drive, not an imperative. An imperative, again, is the set of social norms that advantages the sexual competition of one sex over and against the other in the totality – not to advantage specific members of that sex, but the sex as a whole. The masculine imperative almost certainly underlies classical hard monogamy, because hard monogamy primarily serves the interests of men as a class in providing the greatest assurance, historically (no paternity tests available), of paternity – something which is obviously a core male interest in sexual propagation terms. Therefore the imperative of men as a whole (not the alpha males hogging the women – remember, an imperative is a collective, evolved panoply of things that evolves in tandem with the opposite sex’s imperative, not the sex drive of specific individuals) was towards setting up social, legal, cultural, religious and other rules, norms, customs, laws to enforce hard monogamy so as to ensure paternity, which is the key to the propagation of more male genes than otherwise. Another example of something which rather obviously sprang from an ascendant MI was the rise of traditional monotheistic religion – remember that prior to the rise of monotheism, FI-oriented religions like goddess fertility cults were the norm – obviously an example of an ascendant FI, which used these cultural aspects to enforce its own norms prior to the rise of the MI’s monotheism. Now, of course both imperatives co-evolve, and while the MI was ascendant in setting up the structures of hard monogamy, the FI would eventually react to that, and of course that reaction came from within the structures established by the MI itself – as it would have to. This has come into full bloom more recently, due to technological changes for the most part which have allowed the FI to challenge and ultimately overcome – for now – the MI and supplant it as the dominant imperative in our culture.
Again, one must remember that this doesn’t mean “see, the women were biding their time and got back at the men”. It isn’t about the actions of specific women, or women acting together in a conspiracy, or even exclusive to women. There have been men who have furthered the FI rather than the MI. The FI and MI are simply sets of social norms, rules and the like which favor the sexual strategy of one sex – they are something that evolve over time, socio-culturally, and which are not necessarily furthered by specific individuals, or groups of them, and to the extent that they are, they may not be furthered by individuals or groups of the relevant sex. That is, they are the larger social conventions, the dominant sexual culture, the dominant culture which sets the paradigm and the frame for men, women, relations with each other, family life, sexuality and all of the related issues.
So, there have always been these competing strands – the FI and the MI – in human culture. They have grown up in tandem, and they bob and weave, with each one gaining the upper hand for a while (can be thousands of years) before the other supplanting it eventually, as it evolves and temporarily pulls ahead. The FI is nothing more than the female part of this dynamic.
Therefore, when we look at the culture today, we can safely say that it has largely been overrun by the FI. The old standards of the MI – monotheistic religion and hard monogamy family life – have been dashed to the ground and replaced with fertility and goddess worship (both in the form of Gaia, Mother Earth and the like, but also in the more insidious form of transforming MI-monotheism from within into a kind of goddess worship, as many of these threads here have discussed at length), and serial monogamy. This is the ascendant FI, this is how it looks.
Note that, again, it is NOT feminism. “Feminism” is simply one recent political and social tool that is a manifestation of the FI in this day and age – the FI underlies it, to be sure, but it is deeper, broader, older and more encompassing, and has no fundamental loyalty to specific ideologies espoused by feminism in this day and age beyond the usefulness of these in this specific era to usher in an age of the ascendant FI. Feminism is certainly a great tool of the FI, and a powerful one, but it is merely one tool. This is why we see the FI in non-feminist contexts as well. As it has been recognized on this fine blog and elsewhere, there appears often to be a curious alignment between feminists and some traditionalists or “socons” on a number of issues, which is surprising given their ideological enmity. The reason is that the FI underlies both, but is expressed in each in different ways. That is, the tool of the FI which is called feminism didn’t magically appear out of the blue one day – the ascension of an imperative, as noted above, is a process of social evolution that happens over a period of time, and in this case feminism as we know it sprang from 19th Century Victorian ideas about men and women, which were themselves largely influenced by what was by that time an already ascending, although not yet dominant, FI. These ideas are now the core of what many (not all, but many) traditionalists hold – they are FI-laced ideas from the period of when the FI was merely ascending, rather than the FI-laced ideas of feminism, which come from the current period in which the FI is totally ascendant. They are both, however, from the era of the rising FI (keeping in mind that there are trads who are MI-oriented, it’s just that they are outnumbered by trads who are more Victorian-FI and socons who are nearly all Victorian-FI oriented).
Okay, so why bother with any of this? Who cares? If feminism is the current tool that is most widely used, why do we need to care about this “FI” business? Isn’t this just a distraction?
No, it isn’t. The reason is that it is what underlies pretty much ALL of our social conventions currently, and what is going to underlie the rest of them soon enough. It is the reason why even non-feminists act and think in ways that are consonant with the interests of the female sex in this area without even giving any thought to how things could be constructed otherwise, even though things WERE constructed otherwise not so long ago. It is the reason why everyone and everything, again even those who are explicitly anti-feminism, march to basically the same drum. It is the underlying cultural substrate that is discussed in Steve Moxon’s “The Woman Racket”. And, it is important to remember, it has ALWAYS been with us, because it is one of the two imperatives in the midst of our species, just like the MI is. That is, even in a time of MI ascendancy, there are influences, ideas and norms that spring from the FI, it’s just that the MI has more of them in influence and therefore the system sways in favor of the MI. That is the case in reverse today – we are in a time of an ascendant FI, which means that more FI norms hold sway, but some MI norms are still represented in the culture to the extent they can squeeze their way in or have not yet been stamped out by the ascendant FI. But by identifying the situation for what it is, rather than treating a mere symptom of it – even a bad symptom like feminism – we can better understand the total dynamic and why seemingly contradictory things happening at the same time really do not contradict, but are explained by this paradigm.
In your remark “How many even inside of the manosphere can spot this for what it really is?”, I think I see what you’re getting at, by reading the page you’ve linked to.
The commenter at Dr Helen’s says “I guess I can only offer the ‘good-girl, looking for life-long partner’ perspective. They are out there, maybe fewer and fewer?”
You say this is not Christian morality but a parasitic imposter.
However, it seems to me that a believer in traditional Christian morality could say all the things that this commenter said. Re your reply to Jason, the commenter allowed for the possibility that the woman would say “no”, as Christian morality would require.
The difference between Christian morality and the parasitic imposter seems to be what is not said. If I understand correctly, the imposter thinks she believes in lifelong commitment to “the one”, but when she gets bored with hubby she will realise that he is not “the one” and will file for divorce.
I am sorry if I have labored the point, but you are right that not many of us will see it for what it really is. The woman who thinks she believes in lifelong marriage will instigate divorce when she gets bored, and will rationalize her decision in order to preserve her own sanctity and her continuing pretended belief in lifelong marriage.
@Spacetraveller
Fair question. She is ostensibly giving advice to men on how to find a good girl, just like her. So what does she suggest? Does she suggest they find a virgin? No. She suggests they find a woman who would put out if they escalated sexually, but to be sure to offer her emotional investment before escalating sexually in order to not cause her discomfort.
I say ostensibly because this is really all about her. This is why women give men such bad dating advice. They almost always think about how they would like the alpha they are attracted to to treat them, and then offer that as advice. This is what she is doing here. But even if you don’t accept this part, she still defines good girls as 1) Women like her. and 2) Women who give it up quickly and then regret it later. If she were a virgin or very low N count woman holding out for marriage, her advice would be to find a good girl like me, a virgin or a very low N count woman holding out for marriage. In that case while the advice would still be solipsistic, it would also be good advice.
@empath: ” Women want to experience empathy. Women love to reach a point in a conversation when it is stated, “I know exactly how you FEEEEEELLLLLL” The ones with the most compelling urges live for finding victims of any stripe in order to vicariously experience the pain and then experience empathy. “
This used to scare the absolute ess-aitch-one-tee out of me, until I kind of figured it out as a “normal” female trait, not that I was somehow cursed in that all the women I’ve ever known have been raving sadistic nutjobs lol.
There you’d be, strolling along in town, hullo clouds, hullos birds’n’bees, and say there was a traffic incident, like a jaywalker or a cyclist (same thing in my book), bang/thud all over the road. Me, and all chaps nearby (except the scum, who drool at such entertainment, all down their shell-suits) instantly look, assess, assistance possible?, oh great somebody else is there already, don’t stare, it’s rude, especially if they’re dying, and we’re cluttering up the street, walk on. NOW! All in about three seconds.
Girly, however … (gripping one’s inner elbow like a hyena’s bite and crowding up to the edge of the sidewalk) .. ohh the poor man, ohh somebody else do something ohh .. ohh. it’s just awful … ohh …ohh. ohhhh! .. is he dead ohhhh oh God what’s that ? ohh I can’t look … (all the way up to orgasm pitch).
And me on the receiving end of a vicious aside, when I point out that she is not only looking rather fixedly, but actively preventing us leaving the vicinity. And back to goggling at the mess and howling ostentatiously. Followed by hours of recriminations in the pub or whatever, about how it shouldn’t have been “allowed” to happen (in front of Her!) yeh like I’m Clark Kent or something. And endless rehashing of what she thought she saw, the gorier, the more glittery-eyed relish. All the while leaking obvious fake tears and sighs of distress, at odds with the manic, irrepressible, tiny grin revealing the edges of her incisors.
Different woman, apartment fire in neighboring block visible from my window (ringside seat, spread up the building eventually).
Me: don’t stare, there’s nothing we can do (3rd floor), shut the drapes and turn the telly up full chat or you’ll have nightmares. And shut the bloody window, the cat is scared, go and calm it down.
Her: no I can’t not while there’s people in trouble you monster how can you be like this you’re so cold oh my god somebody jumped oh my god that sound oh it’s just awful ohh ohh are they dead? ohh ohhhh (etc., all the while me looking at the back of her head, as she practically climbed out the window in her boundless “sympathy”).
Same thing when a woman (with a new baby herself!) heard of the death of her friend’s firstborn due to incompetence (filthy dirty british hospital. Avoid at all costs, unless unconscious (advice from op. theatre staff I lived with!)).
Endless wailing and loud expressions of how terrible the mother must feel, from her and her coven. And how much they all feel it themselves. If they’d been allowed, I’m sure they’d have gone round with cake and chardonnay to sit at the poor woman’s bedside, to share her “feelings” as much as possible. The underlying undercurrent of schadenfreude and demented (to a man) glee was as pervasive as the smell of gasoline. They couldn’t get enough of it.
And don’t get me started on the almost sexual, but utterly repellent writhing and self-touching (hair, fingers in mouth, gripping various parts of their own and anyone nearby’s anatomy without a shred of embarrassment, stocking feet pulled up under arse on couch) that is triggered by for instance, footage of the aftermath of the latest suicide bombing in some hot faraway city, or a child-abduction.
It’s that kind of endless, fathomless “empathy” that eventually convinced me that women have about the same emotional range as a seagull, or a monitor lizard. Without exception, in my experience. Imagine my relief then, when I found these sites, and discovered that I wasn’t going mad (yet). Thankyou, all.
tldr:
women be co-o-oollld as ice, and are never happier than when somebody else (or better still, their baby) is dying … cuz it ain’t them. And they’re dim enough to think the ghastly noises they make can disguise it.
Hey, guys! How’s things?
You know the feeling you get when dealing with the moobs at your church? How they band together in their weakness and hiss sarcasm at you for coming at them from a different angle?
Yeah.
Anyway, empathologism writes:
We aren’t “fussing about nomenclature,” we are detecting conversational circularity and warning of its uselessness. What value do you think you are adding by openly musing about “the THING we are naming,” particularly in comparison with the “lit-rah-chuh” you mock? What use are these kibbitzing klubs, beyond a crude learning by talking exercise?
The conversation has been going on long before you or anyone here became aware of it, indeed long before any of us were born. Though it requires learning new languages and idioms, “the best that has been thought and said” is statistically unlikely to occur in blog comboxes and by its nature suffers from the unproven worth of novelties. Longevity is how we can be more certain some works are more likely to pay off than others.
“Of course” what Empathologism “believe[s] … has a great deal to do with” nothing. This is not a dig at you but at the idea that anyone’s unstudied, unsupported opinion is worth a damn, including my own. Bring heft to your utterances.
Are you familiar with your enemy? Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, The Frankfurt School, existentialism, materialism, cultural Marxism, or for that matter, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Nietzsche? You rail about “churchianity” and constantly cite modern contradictions between behavior and scripture for us to be scandalized by, but where is your explanation of how this environment came to pass? Where is your reference to others who explain how it came to pass? Is there something vulnerable in Christianity that invites feminism to hollow it out? How have Christianity’s enemies so thoroughly taken over the Christian “nomenclature”?
You have to know the size and shape of the enormities with which you choose to do battle.
On the contrary, it isn’t “inside out” or “backwards … NAWALT,” it is a straight up NAWALT insofar as a judgment of the general is confused for a judgment of the particular. In this case, the particular puts the lie to the general assertion, exposing its flimsiness. Forget “Not All Women…”: Most Women Are Not Like That. You have identified a quality that is only present in the Jungian collective unconscious and reversed engineered it to explain away the modern woman’s transgressions — even in the midst of regular female commenters/bloggesses who are not just exceptions to the rule, but positive champions of an alternative behavior for women.
To go about your analysis so haphazardly is to indulge intellectual games that seem like investigation but in fact stymie the effort. Again, this is in direct contrast to Dalrock’s usual efforts. This site is popular precisely because he brings supporting material to his observations and assertions, in the form of scriptural exegesis and census statistics.
The problem is that false intellectual accomplishments sate the very drive that has us attempting to understand in the first place. By inventing a lexicon that satisfies only insiders — rather than seeking terms that could unite it to the general store of knowledge — the project limits itself to the few people who are exercised by the controversy in the first place.
I am one of those few exercised by the controversy, that’s why I’m here, and even I have no patience for tracing the provenance of your provincial terms. It doesn’t seem worth the effort, your project does not appear intellectually rigorous enough to deliver a payoff. This is especially true in the insecure manner with which you handle contrary statements. You have to make it worth a person’s while to begin the effort to understand your language, rather than just mocking him for his ignorance of arcana. You do this by relating “the THING we are naming” to common experiences, via metaphor, artistry, or like Dalrock, appeal to a broadly acknowledged authority such as scripture.
Matt
I agree with Sunshine Mary that there is a Feminine and a Feminist imperative. I also think there is a Masculine Imperative, and a Masculinist Imperative.
I want to expand on this idea using ecomomics as an analogy.
Women are a product. The “imperative” is to up their value. They do this by increasing their individual value, and cooperating with others to improve the value of people like them. Women want the collective value of women to improve so that they can attract the best buyers (men..many of whom would rather rent). Some women think it would be much better to not be a seller at all, and to instead be a buyer who can choose whether to buy or rent. So instead of upping their own personal value, they try and devalue the men.
So the imperative is to increase value, but the strategy can be either to improve on ones own product value, or to devalue the buyers.
In times past women could not be the buyers because the consequence of easy sex was too steep. If they were saddled with a baby from a cad they could be a permanently valueless product.
That is not the case today. You have a certain percentage of men who are still buyers (the Alpha’s) and the rest are sellers..trying to sell their product to women. Any woman..even the ones that in times past would be valueless.
The unfortunate side-effect is that women may have the options and value of a buyer, but they have the self-worth of a person of low value..because nobody bought them. They were created to be sellers..not buyers (or renters)… so the “buyer/renter” position makes them miserable. The lower their self-worth plummets, the more they compensate by trying to imitate the Alpha males.
Then they end-up in that quandary where the very people they are trying to devalue are the same people they want to “man up” and marry them. They don’t generally realize they are in a quandary til their Baby Clocks are ticking loudly in their ears or they have reached the top of the social hierarchy and realize it is lonely and sexually frustrating.
The Feminist Imperative is to turn sellers into buyers. The Feminine imperative is to improve the value of the product.
Speaking of Sharia law..it is one manifestation of the Feminine Imperative. While it lowers the value of the collective of women, it also equalizes the playing field for women. For instance- the Burqa covers the face of attractive and unattractive women. This is why you will see that some of the biggest advocates of Sharia are muslim women.
The makeup and fashion industry is another equalizer…with the right decor a less attractive woman can make herself more competitive. This is why you see some feminists so angry at feminine beauty..they see the feminine imperative as being directly at odds with the feminist imperative. Because it is.
The feminine and masculine imperatives are compatible, because her value is improved when her mans value is improved. What hurts the feminine imperative is the masculinist imperative- when men have harems (so that the women have to compete with those other women in the harem), or the men prefer to rent rather than buy.
I think the feminine imperative and the masculine imperatives are God’s designs…they are virtually the same but with different emphasis depending on which side. The Masculinist and Feminist imperatives are subversive.
7man writes:
This strikes at the heart of it. This must be the first area of inquiry. Are women subject to a collective “imperative,” or is our modern condition the result of an artificial imperative enforced by the culture? The answer to that question is all-important, and the blog discussion of the “feminine imperative” presumes the former to be the case.
Why is this the all-important question? Because it will tell us what limits there are to reform. If we are dealing with a “biological” imperative, then we must seek ways to live with and conform to it. If it is rather a merely modern phenomenon artificially imposed by a culture seeking to twist a woman’s nature, then we have diagnosed the ongoing cause of the disease and can take steps to cure it. You can manipulate nature but you cannot completely deny its influence. On the other hand, social “constructs” are a dime a dozen, and with a conscious effort they can be eliminated within the space of a generation.
All evidence points to the artifice of feminism. Not just because its founders wrote about it at the time, but because it does not comport with our personal experience. Hence the crucial contribution of the PUA community, which vividly reminds us that female nature is what we already intuit but are too fearful of the culture to affirm explicitly.
Matt
“Again I’ll repeat: me created civilization and culture, not women. It is ultimately men’s fault for letting women destroy both.”
Bob Bob Bob Bob, you’re forgetting, women marginally outnumber men, so are you quite sure you’re ready to do away with “democracy” yet, if you want it all fixed back up like it used ta be?
“Men” didn’t suddenly have a collective brainfart, and decide to vote themselves into irrelevance and helotry. Correlation is not causation and all that, but the congruence of the developmental timescales of the franchise, and of feminism and other forms of totalitarianism is compelling.
And again, I don’t think I’ll be missing either Civilization, or Culture much. I guess the loss of, say, the world’s distilleries and libraries is a small price to pay. I can do all that “culture” crap for myself, if I have to, anyway. I’m actually rather good at it. Although I’m very impressed by the swedish firesteel and shapka ushanka the kids got me last Christmas. I’ve always found flint&fungus a right fiddle. It’ll be a lot of fun (as long as I remember to get any bad, and even suspect teeth pulled first lol). It all ends the same way anyhow, don’t it?
Brendan wrote:
… which just so happened to blink into existence in the late 19th century and not at any point in history prior — the cultural Marxism of this community’s sloppy, attempted deconstruction of “chivalry” notwithstanding.
… which only effects the late-decadent West and shows no signs of naturally evolving anywhere else, outside of Western cajoling. Do you not understand how your leftist reinterpretation of history is similar to the rationalization for the feminist project?
No “set of social norms” is imperative. There were very specific reasons why very peculiar people succeeded in adopting a very certain agenda in a very particular time and place. The fact that we happen to be living at that time and in that place does not indicate its origins are natural or biological, much less universal, much less the inexorable as denoted by the word “imperative.”
But before you see my reference to denotation and cry “semantics,” note that we are not talking about word choices. We are talking about the assumptions which encourage those word choices, assumptions similar if not identical to the feminists’. Which is a deep problem.
Matt
@Matthew
We are talking about the assumptions which encourage those word choices, assumptions similar if not identical to the feminists’. Which is a deep problem.
I fear this will go over the heads of most people, but this is exactly what I’ve begun to see as a glaring problem lately. Of course, if I say anything, it’s ‘evidence’ of the ‘feminine imperative’. It’s confirmation bias for sophistry.
Dalrock,
OK. I see where you are coming from. I really wouldn’t have seen it the way you do (not in a million years, lol) but once pointed out, it does make sense.
Thanks.
I simply disagree with you, Matt, about this.
Of course there are specific circumstances, people and interests which usher in the dominant imperative in any age. I said in my comment specifically that technological developments ushered in the current imperative, and it goes without saying that specific individuals played their roles, had their agendas and so on. It didn’t “blink into existence” in the 19th Century — both have evolved over time. Prior to MI monotheism, there was a transition period of various different religious systems, for example, among which FI fertility cults were commonplace, alongside emergent more MI pagan systems which were eventually supplanted by MI monotheism — God’s will, no doubt, to reveal himself in His fullness during a period of high MI ascendancy, and drive that, since His paradigm is MI, and not FI (quite explicit in Genesis, really).
One other point — social analysis isn’t invalidated simply because it reflects a similar method used by a competing ideology. The results are quite different, and in my opinion, quite consonant with a proper understanding of scripture, as long as we don’t misconstrue what the FI is.
I also want to suggest that the feminine imperative as I defined it (improving ones value) is encouraged in Scripture. The Proverbs 31 woman is “above rubies” in value. This suggests that it isn’t a bad thing to want to be respected and honored.
Putting a fine point on it: Back to the OP.
The point is that the FI causes hypergamy and/or the woman’s interests to literally BECOME Christian sexual “morality”.
Thus the FI says: Hypergamy is moral. I am God’s daughter. God wants the best for his special princess. God is not a man that He should lie. God knew me before I was formed in my mother’s womb. God will provide. Therefore, God will give me the best.
Premarital sex is moral as long as he and I do not have sex with anyone else. If he is only having sex with me, then he is “invested” in me and “committed” to me, because if he wasn’t invested and committed, he could have sex with me and with other women. And if he is invested and committed, then that means he loves me. And I would not have sex with him if I did not love him. And if he loves me and I love him, then it is of God and therefore is moral, because God is love.
Serial monogamy is moral. I can marry the “best” man, and I can stay married to him, until he is not “the best” man. If a man is not “the best”, then I should not marry him. And if I do marry him and he is not perfect or “the best”, then God will release me from that marriage and free me to find “the best” and “the One”.
Divorce is moral. God provides “peace that surpasses all understanding” and “joy unspeakable”. Therefore, God wants me to be happy. Anything that makes me unhappy, or that does not make me happy, is not ordained of God. I am unhaaaaaappy in my marriage. Therefore, anything that alleviates that unhaaaaaappiness is moral. Therefore, at least under these (my) circumstances, divorce is moral.
I think that divorce is part of the feminist imperative because it makes women “renters” rather than sellers.
The feminine imperative is to increase the value of one’s husband. “Her husband is respected at the city gate”
@Brendan
I disagree with you, but I have to think about some of the things you’ve written (thanks, btw), but can you address this:
Then, from whose paradigm does the FI advance?
“God’s will, no doubt, to reveal himself in His fullness during a period of high MI ascendancy, and drive that, since His paradigm is MI, and not FI (quite explicit in Genesis, really).”
Christ’s birth and ministry, and subsequent NT writings circulating among the early Church, during the time of the Roman Empire’s greatest advancement, global reach and cultural/economic/political/military influence.
God’s will, no doubt, to reveal himself in His fullness during a period of high MI ascendancy, and drive that, since His paradigm is MI, and not FI (quite explicit in Genesis, really).
That’s easy. The other one. Genesis, in this paradigm (and I’m not suggesting that this is the only hermeneutic, merely that it is a valid one) is the story of how God created male man, then provided him with a helpmeet, and then how the woman asserted her FI, and then how man subjected himself to the FI, and then how both were punished for it, and the curse was that no longer would be it be a collaborative MI/FI with the MI in the lead, but it would be a subjection with the MI on the “top” in a subjection sense (i.e., classical “Patriarchy”). This came about because the evil one instigated the FI to rebel against the MI. The FI in its God-created state is helpmeet — not competitor. In its sinful state, it seeks to compete with and overcome the MI — hence human history. In the restoration which is made possible by Christ, MI and FI are restored to their proper place, with the MI on “top” but not in a subjection sense, but rather in a collaborative, yet hierarchical, sense, as was the case in the Garden.
Christ’s birth and ministry, and subsequent NT writings circulating among the early Church, during the time of the Roman Empire’s greatest advancement, global reach and cultural/economic/political/military influence.
Right, and previously prepared by the OT revelation, which was leading the transition from “Oh Mighty Isis” to a patriarchal/MI monotheism. Timing is everything, and it’s easy as pie given that you are standing outside time looking in.
@Brendan
I hadn’t considered this before, but I think you are right. Interestingly hard monogamy also serves the best interest of women as individuals, especially if we are referring to biblical marriage. There are those who feel I’m cruel for advising women to avoid the carousel before marriage, to pick a man the can truly fall in love with and they trust enough to follow, and then to stay married. However, while that is the moral answer I also don’t see that as anything but in the best interest of the woman herself. But either way I think you are right. The MI is hard monogamy, and the FI is morally sanctioned promiscuity so long as it is done on the woman’s terms.
This is the part I was driving at with the OP. It is uncanny, and perhaps I’m misusing the term FI, but if FI isn’t the term for the phenomenon itself (and is solely the explanation for it) then we need to coin one. Assuming the term FI refers to both, this is an understandable source of confusion, which is what I was trying to get at with this post. If it only refers to the explanation for the phenomenon, then I am misusing it and am guilty of causing confusion or at the very least expanding the meaning of the term in a way which will ultimately cause confusion.
I hadn’t considered this before, but I think you are right. Interestingly hard monogamy also serves the best interest of women as individuals, especially if we are referring to biblical marriage. There are those who feel I’m cruel for advising women to avoid the carousel before marriage, to pick a man the can truly fall in love with and they trust enough to follow, and then to stay married. However, while that is the moral answer I also don’t see that as anything but in the best interest of the woman herself. But either way I think you are right. The MI is hard monogamy, and the FI is morally sanctioned promiscuity so long as it is done on the woman’s terms.
It DOES serve the women’s best interests as well. The reason for that is that the God-given paradigm is that the FI should submit itself as helpmeet in a collaborative venture with the MI. That is, not be obliterated by the MI, but collaborate as the helpmeet, in a submissive role, so that the MI is dominant. This is in the best interests of women by design. Original Sin was, in this view, overturning that apple-cart and Adam submitting himself to the FI, which resulted in expulsion from paradise because it totally screwed up relations between men and women (in addition to being outright disobedience, of course — but the nature and context of that disobedience, as it is told by God to us in the Genesis account, is far from happenstance, and has a core meaning to our humanity, really).
@Spacetraveller
It is an amazing sleight of hand, and something I only noticed about a year into blogging. You really have to be looking for it in order to spot it, because as Brendan points out it is the dominant moral frame of our day. However, once you know how to spot it you will notice it everywhere. Note also that no one on Dr. Helen’s blog called this out. Some probably noticed it an figured it wasn’t worth the effort of trying to explain, but most probably thought wow, there is one of the good ones!
The masculine and feminine imperatives come from the reptilian hindbrain, and are the same in all places and all times. Matthew is right to suggest we distinguish this from “imperatives” that are specific to our place, time, and culture.
For some reason, our culture wants to pedestalize women, and we are shocked to discover that female sexuality is not sugar and spice and everything nice. This shock is not unique to our age. The novels of Thomas Hardy tell it like it is, and were considered so shocking in Victorian England that Hardy felt compelled to stop writing novels and turned to poetry instead.
The thing that feminism has changed since Hardy’s time is that, instead of shunning wayward women, we celebrate them, and we actually reward them, at the expense of either their ex-husbands or the taxpayer.
Our idea of “shock” has moved towards increasingly graphic portrayals of the sex act, often combined with degradation or violence. Yet, paradoxically, a realistic portrayal of sexual norms is still taboo.
Perhaps this is because we cannot believe that our beloved mothers are cut from the same cloth as Hardy’s heroines. Feminists would call this the “Madonna-Whore Syndrome”; but while they wag their fingers at us, the syndrome afflicts them equally, and their coping mechanism is to declare all feminine behavior Madonna-like, and reject the use of terms such as “whore” or “slut”.
We’re in too deep – all of us.
The 8 Presidential Councils for Women make law and pass it through the lickspittle lackies
at DOJ,which hands it down to the States,then yo your local constable.
It sets the terms of your enslavement,to the FI.
Those hop question the existence of the FI are only 1 misstep away from losing liberty,and then awakening.
In the meantime,sleepers will sleep.
What the feminists have done is not only kicking the sleeping dog,they are preventing him from sleeping ever again.
All the while the soundtrack is of lullabyes.
(and skittles)
particularly in comparison with the “lit-rah-chuh” you mock?
You really are pompous. See, your immediate assumption is that I mock the works, I mean what else would a pedestrian do? If I mock anything at all, its YOU. And you’ve just demonstrated why, along with your this added feature to your bespoke suit of flaming arrogance.
Bring heft to your utterances.
Then you ask, incredulous,Are you familiar with your enemy? Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, The Frankfurt School, existentialism, materialism, cultural Marxism, or for that matter, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Nietzsche?
Why? You assume so incredibly much. And you have no idea.
Then, when some ignorant peasant like me writes something about inside out NAWALT, you cannot even understand what I said, and contradict something you’ve created in your own vast mind.
I don’t “follow your work”, and I suppose that would also mean I’m missing my chance for enlightenment.
Please do me the courtesy of not disturbing my blissful ignorance.
Now carry on with your haughty self important bullshit.
We must apologize to all the people who actually may not be familiar with Matt Kings reference library, because if we were to try to help “everyman” we’d have to lower ourselves to their place.
I’m the first to agree that the insider terminology can get tedious and turn men away. replacing it with things that some large percentage of men reading (and not commenting) would have no clue about, would be intimidated by, or would grow angry at what they perceived as pretentiousness (hmmmm) is the worst type of elitism because it is being masked as actually buttressing the appeal of the message while its actually serving as intellectual pornography and self aggrandizement.
Ok Im done
At the very root of the feminine imperative is Satan, the father of lies, the great deceiver, the accuser. I think it is true, that many women don’t realize that they have fallen into this false imperative, due to the fact that Satan has blinded them to the truth. A very clever weapon used to prevent as many people as possible from spending eternity with God, by using this false imperative to tear down the foundation of civilization, the family.
@ BRendan, Dalrock:
Brendan: “The reason is that it is what underlies pretty much ALL of our social conventions currently, and what is going to underlie the rest of them soon enough.”
Dalrock: “This is the part I was driving at with the OP. It is uncanny, and perhaps I’m misusing the term FI, but if FI isn’t the term for the phenomenon itself (and is solely the explanation for it) then we need to coin one.”
Brendan again: “The FI is both the amalgam of social norms, practices, prejudices, mores, laws, customs and the like which are aligned to favor the interests of the female sex over those of the male sex and the underlying interest beneath all of these.”
This was my understanding of the FI as well. The underlying female interests, at least to me, are:
1. Economic independence (so a woman does not have to submit to betas or unattractive men). To me this is manifest in the complete structuring and restructuring of society in:
— Female suffrage
— antidiscrimination legislation on basis of gender, which has completely restructured the work environment to make it more friendly to women and less so to men.
— work laws making it easier for women to get and keep jobs (particularly FMLA)
— antidiscrimination leglslation in education, particularly higher education
–technological advances making work and life cheaper, safer, easier, and requiring far less physically demanding labor
–the day care industry
2. Sexual freedom (liberating women from having to have sex with or marry betas or unattractive men)
— cheap, safe, effective and widely available birth control
— liberalized divorce law allowing “no fault” divorce and flat-tax child support
— rape shield laws
— domestic violence laws/VAWA/ “must arrest” laws
— widespread use of orders of protection
— the rise of femcentric legislation in general, to protect women against any and every form of problem and inconvenience, permitting women preferential treatment
— increasing use of marital annulment in the Roman Catholic Church
— sexual harassment laws, further insulating women from dealing with unattractive or beta men in the workplace
— the expanding definition of the term “harassment” to including a man looking at a woman, a man ignoring a woman, a man refusing to help a woman, or a man simply being in a place frequented by women or children
— the obvious exemption of attractive men from all such laws and mores
Dalrock, you weren’t too harsh at all. You just made the necessary point: we’re still kicking these ideas around; we don’t claim to have all the I’s dotted yet. Hence words like “revisited.” It’s a common fallacy to claim that people shouldn’t be allowed to discuss something until they’ve defined it fully (as if that will ever be true of any study of humanity). Another common tack is to ridicule the people involved for exposing that they don’t know it all. Good job of not falling for either.
The feminine imperative is to increase the value of one’s husband. “Her husband is respected at the city gate”
THAT feminine imperative can only be accomplished with deference.
Feminists of today are NOT moving towards that goal.
Pingback: The Female Imperative | Cail Corishev
Brendan wrote:
There is no such thing as a “current imperative.” Either it “impelled” women since there have been women, or else it is a transient phenomenon based on one deliberate application of technology among many. Which means we should scrutinize the application of that technology (and the technology itself) rather than confusing it for a collective biological impulse.
“People and interests” cannot “usher in the dominant imperative in any age” any more than man can usher in new instincts. The “dominan[ce]” of a phenomenon is artificial and therefore changeable.
You are positing an eternal sex struggle (like Marx’s class struggle) where one side waxes while the other wanes, which can only end at the “MI” eschaton (or dictatorship of the proletariat) where “God[] … no doubt [?] … [will] reveal himself in His fullness.” Worse, in sketching out this cartoon, you presume a peculiar character of the feminine side — indeed, to the extent that you above imply theirs is the work of the devil.
Except that the full spectrum of female nature — from submissiveness to mothering to softness to nurturing, and from selfishness to hypergamy to deception to Original Concupiscence — are all in the service of creating and raising new life. Now, if you think there is an additional, “novel” or ancient “imperative” at odds with that goal of creating new life, you at least have to explain a theory of its teleological purpose. The good, the bad, and the ugly of women can be seen in the context of their role in reproduction, whereas you posit a natural influence which militates against reproduction by putting the sexes in a state of permanent competition if not outright enmity.
Nature commands cooperation of the sexes to reproduce, not enmity. (Unless you mean to take your unintentional alliance with feminism still further by saying with them that “All Sex Is Rape.”)
Your theory has to describe how a natural “imperative” created an inversion of nature only ever in the 20th century west, where we witness barren women scrambling to sate their instinct in the attempt to fatherlessly produce a single designer baby in their late 30s and 40s.
But you see, this will not do. We can’t wave a hand with generalities at all that (“and so on”) while establishing new generalities. You have to identify what those agendas were, how they were different from our nature, and how they did violence to the qualities we should properly regard as “imperative,” such as the mothering instinct, an instinct feminism attempted to not simply control but eradicate via technology. You have to specifically identify which “various different religious systems” and “FI fertility cults” did what to manifest this war of the imperatives. Your theory has nature in conflict with itself, which, once the variables are all plugged in, would have a collective female instinct (“feminine imperative”) seeking to eradicate the personal one (“mothering imperative”).
It sure did blink into existence. And only here. Not as a subterranean notion; that goes back to at least the Enlightenment and in some ways to Christianity itself. It suddenly appeared as formal policy and a cultural standard in less than a hundred years — a blink in the span of history. Women’s suffrage is barely a century-old anywhere (1893), and as a directive to Western culture, barely half-a-century (second-wave feminism of the mid-20th).
You want to talk about “MI monotheism” when you should be looking for the seeds of female equality there instead. The individual’s equality in the eyes of God is at the root of modern feminism, but what enabled it to emerge as a cultural force was not technology but rather the secularization of the public square (which only partially owes to technology). “Christianity without the Christ” devolves into all manner of perverse systems, Marxism chief among them.
By all means, continue the kibbitzing, if only to reinforce the contours of an important community. But don’t mistake your chatter for the process of inventing new modes and means of expression, as you are now doing, because that arrogance stifles the emergence of better, sturdier expressions and marginalizes the effort of everyone here.
Matt
deti writes:
Also known as feminism.
Or in what other historical era was this natural, collective, biological “imperative” also compelling women to stump for “economic independence” and “sexual freedom”? Ancient Israel? China during the period of the warring states? Contemporary Islam? Medieval Europe?
Matt
Cail Corashev wrote:
Who said that?
Your straw men deserve better disguises. At least make an effort.
Matt
We have lost the academic ability to translate “the best that has been thought and said” into a modern idiom. So we rely on “novel” sounding ideas and shoddy sociological surveys that are rewarmed leftovers presented in new arrangements and called “science.” The more formal inquiry takes more work, sure, but the payoff is much greater. It doesn’t require superlative scholarship, it only requires the consistent humility to ask, “Is this idea indeed novel, and if not, who (with the authority that attends venerability) might have said it better?” In this day of Google and Wikipedia and electronic books, access is no longer a problem. Scholarship is mostly legwork, not brilliant insight or articulation.
Man, I’m sorry I didn’t read Matt’s post until just now. I really would’ve enjoyed meting out some abuse, but now it would just be redundant.
Oh well, can’t be on the Internets all the time.
Ok, one thing:
Dear Matt,
So, you don’t like the way some people on the Internet talk about some things. You don’t approve. You think they should discuss them from another point of view. Fine. How about you do that yourself, or STFU? Bloviating about “formal inquiry” and “scholarship” is just so much hot air unless you’re doing it yourself. It’s concern trolling. Get stuffed.
I did some musing about this at my own blog, so I won’t repeat it all here. But I think it would be a mistake to think that the female imperative has anything to do with serving the best interests of women. Abortion, hormonal birth control, and working a 9-5 desk job aren’t in the best interests of women, but they do serve the desires of women (and of men who think themselves champions of women). That’s really what’s being served here — women’s whims — which makes it very different from some historical notion of men sensibly putting women first to protect them for producing the next generation.
Being much impressed with Dalrock’s reasoning I looked again at the offending paragraph – the one where he explained it fully to Space Traveller – and I see something else, namely, a certain disingeniousness. The paragraph begins: “I have found that when men go there too soon”. We are in the first person singular and thus she is talking about herself. She is thus saying that she allows herself to get into a situation where she allows men to make a pass at her. In the next part of the sentence however, she promptly switches to the passive where she is no longer talking about herself but now talking of some other woman or women in general “a woman feels regretful or sometimes objectified”. She is now (by reason of being a woman) an expert on other women, yet she can only be talking about herself though she feigns that she is talking of other women. We must therefore conclude that not only on occsion has she felt regretful (i.e. she gave it up too easily) but – as women are never responsible for anything – she is now merely an opbject. Whether the other men saw her as an object is immaterial to her for it is how she rationalises her slutty behaviour, shiftin gthe blame to objectifying men. Then she moves into the third person plural,with “whether or not they said no”. She is thus further distancing herself, for now it is not merely some other woman, but a mass of other women.
Having shifted that far from herself she is now confident to act the ‘agony aunt’ and give adviceto men, with ‘”so if you are looking for the one” she recommends patience and then follows that up with the what looks like a thinly disguised phrase of regret with ” getting a woman into bed is the fastest way to get a woman out of your life”. That of course depends as much on the woman as the man, but the implication is that women ditch the guys they sleep with, but we know that the Alphas they crave and for whom they give it up so readily, are the ones who leave and those women are the ones keen to gain Alpha commitment.
We are told that further if the man wants a woman for the long haul we are also told the good woman will want you to wait, which sounds very much like a recommendation for being prick-teased.
She concludes, by suggesting (and merely as a guess) that she can only offer the “good woman for life perspective” yet we already have reason to suppose that she is anything but and says that such women are out there but fewer and fewer of them rather suggesting again that she speaks for all women as sluts. Fascinating.
@empath (all others: TL;DR)
“We must apologize to all the people who actually may not be familiar with Matt Kings reference library, because if we were to try to help “everyman” we’d have to lower ourselves to their place.”
As a charter-member lurker at Dalrock’s site, please don’t apologize for venting some of your frustrations. I make it a point to try to be fair in my readings and analysis of everyone who posts here, whether those in agreement, those in opposition, or those in query-and-learn mode. I also try not to read too much into any statement *typed* by an individual; this is a third-order communication medium at best–we can’t see body language or hear vocal inflections. I do my best not to pigeon-hole people, even those whose statements are consistent over posts–people of Reality usually aren’t 2-dimensional.
On the other hand, since this is a reduced-information medium, posters need to be aware of how they are perceived, and that perception by others is what will allow their thoughts to be accepted as part of the larger discussion in the agora we inhabit here.
For me, Mr King (and a *very* small number of others here) commit the same cardinal sin of many arrogant pseudo-intellectuals: they are boring.
I have worked for several months to sift value from Mr King’s posts here and at other sites. I have concluded that if he has anything of value to offer, I will look to others who share, or at least occasionally agree with his points (such as CL and 7man) to understand his arguments. 7man and CL are anything but boring and I look forward to their views (along with many others across the spectrum) within Dalrock’s posts.
Short to long, empath: Don’t apologise for what your wrote. My time on this earth is too short for Mr King and his style of argument–he is one of the reasons my mouse has a scroll wheel.
@Brendan
GregC said plainly what I think you are implying with the idea that the MI is from God, but the FI is from “the other one”.
Is this what you meant, or is this just the most common misrepsesentation that is bound to occur when you write that the MI comes from God’s paradigm, but distinguish the FI?
On the other hand: You seem to be implying that the FI was, indeed, put there from God’s paradigm. He made them, and they are supposed to be in tandem, not competition, but that the fall corrupted this.
Which do you support?
Matt, I wrote that before I read your comment, so relax, it wasn’t about you. I actually agree with your point that this isn’t just the mothering instinct going off the rails for the first time in history, and it needed a bedrock of secularism before it could take hold. (On my own blog I give part of the credit to the Reformation.) I agree with you that this is something different, something malign, not a misapplication or exaggeration of benign forces.
I might agree with you more, if I could make sense of more of what you say. I’m probably not smart enough, though, so I’ll stick to kibitzing.
Fine, Matt, I totally disagree with what you have written, and have always disagreed with pretty much everything I have seen you write. If there is an enmity, it is between you and me, and frankly you are not worth responding to more than the time it has taken me, regrettably, to type these characters.
Is this what you meant, or is this just the most common misrepsesentation that is bound to occur when you write that the MI comes from God’s paradigm, but distinguish the FI?
On the other hand: You seem to be implying that the FI was, indeed, put there from God’s paradigm. He made them, and they are supposed to be in tandem, not competition, but that the fall corrupted this.
Which do you support?
The FI is inherent to women and is of God, but is planned and made by God to be subordinate to the MI. Because it is weaker and subordinate it is subject to greater attack by the evil one. The God-given way is for the MI and FI to collaborate in a hierarchy MI/FI, as I wrote above.
“This came about because the evil one instigated the FI to rebel against the MI. The FI in its God-created state is helpmeet — not competitor. In its sinful state, it seeks to compete with and overcome the MI — hence human history. In the restoration which is made possible by Christ, MI and FI are restored to their proper place, with the MI on “top” but not in a subjection sense, but rather in a collaborative, yet hierarchical, sense, as was the case in the Garden.”
yep thats whats gonna happen (generally)
the assertion of equivalence between MI and FI is false — it assumes the ideological ruse of moderns, that male and female are “equal” (and by extension their general imperatives are equal, which they are NOT, b/c God breathed HIMSELF into the human male, then fashioned the human female FROM the male)
once folks start in with the “MI and FI are just trying to balance the pendulum across history” you are lost, having accepted the essential satanic deceit along with the World
Keep working on it, toiler. Just spitballing here, but what could be an alternative reason the mouse-wheel maven is forced to “look to others who share, or at least occasionally agree with his points (such as CL and 7man) to understand his arguments”?
Math is hard.
The parting snark doth protest too much, methinks. But let’s not pat ourselves on the back here. There is no “enmity” between us. For that you would have to rise to the level of my respect and serious consideration. Your propensity to dissolve into hissy fits when tested is hard to overlook.
Matt
And your parting snark is as pathetic and supercilious as pretty much everything I have seen you write on the internet. You are a snarky, condescending, supercilious prick, full stop. And I am done with you, motherfucker.
Yes, Matt, “math *is* hard”. Having a doctorate in physics and degrees in mathematics and chemistry, I understand that math is hard.
You need to come to grips with “communication is hard”.
I have nothing much to say about the FI as such, but the line of argument above that the subject needs academic studies to be worthwhile is laughable. Apparently the proponent of that theory has managed to dig into academic studies and preserve the notion that they are somehow related to science, truth or even a half-way reasonable facsimile of the the world. I find the lack an observation to the contrary on the part of someone who purports to have availed himself to a vast body of academic literature… curious. Or perhaps better: willfully obtuse.
Matt- when I first saw your comments around here, I really liked them. Then they took some strange turns.
Now, its become one of those things where you are guilty of everything you accuse the commenters of, but are too full of yourself to see it, and lack the humility to see it.
You are obviously a smart dude but your attitude stinks of hubris and that’s why it becomes contentious and rubs so many people the wrong way. I appreciate you playing devil’s advocate or offering different points of view, but your approach is insufferable.
You’re so hellbent on offering everyone a verbal comeuppance, that it becomes the only thing you accomplish here. I do wish we could get your contributions in the form of wisdom without all the pretense and vanity (or attempts at dominance) your comments reek of. You’d likely accomplish more that way, since you currently put everyone in a defensive position- not as a friend with a reasonable challenge, but more like some asshole whom we all wish would go the hell away.
I regard your conduct unbecoming of any sort of wise king. Maybe you could try to be friendly as well as intelligent, since you rule no one around these parts. Maybe some diplomacy, man.
Wouldn’t that help your cause? (whatever cause you might have beyond internet arguments)
I agree with Solomon, I once found some things in Matts posts that had value. Now I cant see through the smeared horse shit.
I have downgraded the intelligence level I perceived in him. he says the same things over and over using what starts to look like those random jargon generators.
Its not my blog and therefore its a powerless comment, but Id see folks like Matt banned even before the ones that get complaints about coarse language and such. Matt is simply not nice, which speaks far more to his person-hood than any references he makes.
Who benefits from Matt’s meanderings?
Matt.
I for one actually do things outside the sphere to try and make a tiny difference. I think several do. If Matt tried his schtick on someone they would promptly massacre his ass.
Regarding the lack of scholarly backing for the discussions of emotional drivers and the terms used, true, the are opinions and one man observations. So? They are interesting to me when i read them written by others….often thinking yea, that looks about right….its a shared experience, not the f-ing physicians desk reference we are sometimes writing here.
@ Tam the Bam,
“you quite sure you’re ready to do away with “democracy” yet, ”
The Founding Fathers despised democracy, except for corporate fascists such as Alexander Hamilton (Aaron Burr killed him 20 years too late).
The reason they despised it is because they saw what it led to – what we have today.
The bloggers in the Manosphere are pretty good at diagnosing things but I don’t see that much understanding that none of these problems would exist without democracy. Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem would be nothing but crackpots except their beliefs have been forced on people through the power of the State, i.e., the point of a gun.
Democracy is leftist, feminism is leftist, and men have allowed women to impose the evil of feminism on society out of a misguided sense of fairness. That appears to be a particularly Western flaw.
I’ve been willing to get rid of democracy for long time. This country was founded as a republic, and as Franklin said, “If you can keep it.”
By the way, you might want to look up just how feminist (and vegetarian – more female nonsense) Hitler was. And he was, contrary to the myth, democratically voted into office.
Eve was not created with a corrupt nature. She was tempted by the Devil. If her nature was already corrupt then she would not have needed a tempter.
Eve was not created with a corrupt nature. She was tempted by the Devil. If her nature was already corrupt then she would not have needed a tempter.
Agree, but she was created with a weaker, susceptible nature that was created to submit to the stronger, MI. She failed, and Adam failed, too. Joint failure, but different in each case. She succumbed to the tempter, and he succumbed to her will. In total that’s what it was. We are reliving this sin in our contemporary culture every second of every day.
the assertion of equivalence between MI and FI is false — it assumes the ideological ruse of moderns, that male and female are “equal” (and by extension their general imperatives are equal, which they are NOT, b/c God breathed HIMSELF into the human male, then fashioned the human female FROM the male)
I agree. The feminine does not originate with itself. The driving force of feminism is the fear of masculinism. Even the Devil operates from a masculine paradigm (spreading his influence). The feminine imperative is to be cherished, protected, and provided for by a man. It mimics the role of the The Church… The feminist imperative is to protect themselves FROM male leadership by imitating male strength and power. Both the feminine imperatives (created and corrupted versions) are REACTIONARY.
@Brendan
That makes sense to me. It also makes sense to me that what you’re calling the MI and FI, it turns out, is what all along we’ve been calling the nature of men and the nature of women–much like what 7man said above. Though, I am not satisfied leaving it there. I’ll have to think about it some more.
———–
Whatever good Matt might have to say is lost in his self-parody.
There is a difference between (1) ideal FI/MI and (2) fallen FI/MI. Observing the latter in practice, as it plays itself out today, does not in any way negate the former.
I have noticed a change in the way Matthew comments. He was the king of quips and short comments. I saw how effective that was and then learned to pare my comments down to the essense, which is a useful skill. Lately Matthew’s comments have be somewhat TL;DR (and abrasive). Brendan has also resorted to longer and less focused comments.
I understand that people act differently according to what is going on in their lives and whatever is troubling them. This affects their opinions, and sometimes clouds their thinking. The unconscious worries of the world are present within each of us; we are exhibiting this in our blog comments which results in discord.
Has anyone else noticed that Rollo never comments on the weekends? I wonder if blogging and commenting is his day job and he is off the clock on the weekends and evenings.
We can call it the “male nature” and the “female nature”. I am not wedded to a term, and the term “imperative” seems to rankle because of what some read as its implications.
Sad trombone. I was just beginning to feel a real connection to you guys here. I will work on reforming my personality to better communicate so that all may benefit from my invaluable words of wisdom.
Either that or wait until I am banned from yet another site for keeping it so real wif a buncha beta bois.
In the meantime, consider (if you can indulge one last recommendation):
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2012/12/intellectual-discourse-taking.html
Brendan has also resorted to longer and less focused comments.
It’s not “resorting”, it was designed to be a comprehensive discussion of my ideas about this — something I only have time to do on the weekends, really.
Has anyone else noticed that Rollo never comments on the weekends? I wonder if blogging and commenting is his day job and he is off the clock on the weekends and evenings.
And what are you doing here, then?
Look, there is a LOT of AMOGing going on right now in this corner of the internet. A LOT of it. I am spotting it, and I see what you are doing. I am not really doing anything differently from what I have ever done, nor is Matt (who has been a prick since always). What is your schtick? Since you cratered your blog, it seems like you and CL both are now snipers. Anything better to contribute than being a sniper, 7? Because to be honest it you are just going to snipe, you’re a pest more than a value.
@Matthew
I admire the way British politicians in the House of Commens are so articulate and artful in their verbal take downs. It is great fun to befuddle people and insult them when they have not a clue and no idea how to respond. It takes skill.
From the Steve Sailer that Matt linked:
It’s funny because I was thinking something along these lines as to why Matt’s apparent abrasiveness doesn’t bother me. I have been accused at times of being pompous and abrasive simply for using proper English, and people have reacted badly to the way I’ve worded things and taken things too personally. empath’s comment that Matt is “not nice” is absolutely pathetic, and Brendan’s catty response to my saying I enjoyed Matt’s comments equally so. This is not rigorous debate and it’s no wonder so many have been so easily misled by this ‘feminine imperative’ nonsense.
As a long time lurker, I finally feel compelled to enter this argument to point out a mistake that both Dalrock and Brendan are making. And Matt, if you read this, I’m afraid that my classical philosophy is a little rusty, so if you feel like doing more than just complaining about our lexicology, please feel free to dispense some of your obvious knowledge of the greats and supply the correct terminology.
To start with, I believe that Brendan’s original point about the nature of the Female Imperative is fairly accurate:
“The FI is both the amalgam of social norms, practices, prejudices, mores, laws, customs and the like which are aligned to favor the interests of the female sex over those of the male sex and the underlying interest beneath all of these.”
My own take is this:
The Female Imperative is the natural and subconscious inclination of women to advance and aid the natural impulses and drives of women by means of creating and adapting social norms, practices, prejudices, mores, laws, and customs to fit that objective, while at the same time unconsciously believing and asserting that this organization of society is not simply right and just, but in keeping with the natural order of things.
My disagreement, however, derives from your assessment of the Male Imperative. I believe that that at its base the Male Imperative can be defined exactly the same as the Female Imperative, only with the word Female being replaced by Male and women by men:
The Male Imperative is the natural and subconscious inclination of men to advance and aid the natural impulses and drives of men by means of creating and adapting social norms, practices, prejudices, mores, laws, and customs to fit that objective, while at the same time unconsciously believing and asserting that this organization of society is not simply right and just, but in keeping with the natural order of things.
Your true error lies, however, in coming to the conclusion that monogamy is the natural outgrowth of the MI. This is not the case. To understand why the FI and MI are different, you must understand the Impulses which drive men and women; impulses which have stayed constant throughout human history, and which result in the respective reproductive strategies of the two sexes. I begin with women.
Women have as their sexual strategy that which we have come to know and love as Hypergamy. Stated simply, the desire to “mate up” or engage in a monogamous sexual relationship with the best available male. There are three main Impulses which drive this:
Access to Superior Genetic Material- Simply put, women want to have children by the best men possible, as those children will have the greatest chance of surviving and carrying on the woman’s genetic code.
Protection- Women, as the physically weaker sex, are driven to seek out strong men to protect them from the dangers of the world.
Provision- As the physically less capable sex, and one whose physical pursuits are restricted by motherhood, women rely on men to provide the resources necessary keep both her and her children alive.
Now, what women want to achieve these impulses is serial monogamy, where a woman takes a man as her mate and has him all to herself. That way, she and her children alone benefit from his genetic material, protective qualities and ability to provide for her and her children. However, this is serial monogamy. That means that once a better man comes along, if she can attract his attention, she will drop her old mate and “mate up” to the new “best” man.
However, the state of nature generally has not allowed this. Because women had to rely on men for all three impulses, they were in a less powerful position that the men were. This meant that they were forced to live by the rules as set by men, which I turn to next.
Men have as their sexual strategy polygamy or polygny, which broadly stated is the desire to have as many mates as possible. Interestingly enough, men have two impulses, which are somewhat at odds with one another.
Polygny- Men have a base drive to mate with as many women as possible, starting with the most attractive woman first, and then moving down. This is to ensure that the man has as many progeny as possible, by as many women as possible, to ensure the survival of his genetic line.
Paternity- The second impulse that men have is the desire to father children which the man knows to be his, and which he will raise as his own. This impulse drives a man to build a family, and to leave what can be defined best as a lineage or dynasty. This is more than to simply have children and have them survive, but to have children, especially sons, who take your place and continue in your stead.
(As an aside, from a Evolutionary Biology perspective, the last impulse is probably a much more recent development in human history, given that it and the first impulse are at odds with one another. After all, if all the men in a group are mating all the time with all of the women, then it is awfully hard to be assured of paternity.)
Men’s preferred strategy is polygamy, where a man will enjoy the attention of as many women as possible. For much of human history this was the norm, because it was men who were able to provide for women and protect them from harm. Women were forced to accept the terms as set down by men if they wanted to achieve their desires.
Now we come to monogamy and men. Where Dalrock and Brendan have erred is assuming that men naturally revert or are compelled to monogamy. This is not so. Men are still driven by these base impulses. If a man with sufficient power was allowed to seek his desires without check, polygamy is what would result.
The reason why monogamy (as men would understand it) developed is because of hypergamy, of all things. You see, looking back to that state of nature where polygamy was the norm, what we would find is that a small percentage of the men, say 10% to 20%, would enjoy the majority of the attention of the women, especially that of the best women. For the sake of this discussion, lets call them Alpha Males. A woman’s hypergamous instincts would lead her to mate with the best man possible, in search of the best genetic material. Of course, other women would be seeking the same thing. What we would find is that women would be willing to accept being part of the “best” man’s harem, so long as she had access to that man. Even if she had to share resources with the other women, as long as she would bear his children, her impulses would be satisfied.
The end result of this is that a small minority of men would mate with most of the women, and the great majority would have to fight over the scraps. Women didn’t mind this system, so long as most of them could enjoy access to the best men. However, those men in the majority, whom I will call Beta Males, would find this system unjust and undesirable. Eventually, one or more of them realizes that if they were to leverage their collective power, they could force their community (a tribe, perhaps?) to accept a new paradigm. A new social-construct was adapted, wherein a single man could have but a single woman, what we know as monogamy. This social-construct is one where a man would give up on his impulse to mate with as many women as possible, but that would be balanced by the fact that he could ensure the second impulse, Paternity, would be satisfied. It was, by its very nature, a compromise of the two impulses which drive men.
The Alpha Males would not like this, but because they were a small minority of men they couldn’t win an outright fight. They went along with it, content in part because they could at least be assured of holding onto the best women. Most women, on the other hand, would also have problems with this. While a monogamous relationship would provide them protection and provision, they no longer had access to superior genetic material, as they were forced into mating with Beta Males (the exception to the women not liking this would be the best or top tier females, who would now have all the best men to themselves). However, because men still had the majority of power, they had to go along with it.
In conclusion, monogamy is a compromise. It is a tradeoff between two masculine impulses, between the desire to mate with as many women as possible and the desire to be assured of paternity. The Male Imperative can advance it, yes, because it is a natural outgrowth of one of the male impulses. But it is NOT the Male Imperative. Monogamy, in the sense of a lifetime mating between a man and a woman, is a social construct. Objectively, we can easily see how it is advantageous to both the majority of women and the majority of men for this system to continue. But it is NOT what women want as a base drive. It prohibits them from fulfilling their hypergamous instincts. Nor is it the single impulse that men face either.
When we look at the current state of society now, what we are witnessing is an attempt to “dial back the clock”, and eliminate the male form of monogamy, lifetime monogamy, and replaces it with the female preferred form of monogamy, serial monogamy. This effort is aided by modern inventions and social institutions, which allow women to provide for themselves(changes in labor laws and Affirmative Action), and to receive the protection of society at large (the police power of the state). Because these two base drives can now be fulfilled without the woman having to place herself in a position of submission to a single man to satisfy them, the woman is able to focus all of her efforts on the remaining impulse, the acquisition of superior genetic material. Of course, that merely manifests itself in the overwhelming desire to have sex with the best available Alpha Male. However, thanks to birth control, what would have in ages past resulted in pregnancy most of the time, will now do so rarely. So women are free to be driven by their base instincts, without having to worry about the consequences of their actions.
It is only thanks to the Red Pill, or perhaps the analogy of those Special Sunglasses, that men (and some women) are able to see the truth: That recent developments in Western Civilization are merely an attempt to free women from any remaining restrictions upon their base hypergamous instincts, while at the same time keeping men oblivious to this tearing down of one of the cornerstones of Civilization.
I agree, but both are in effect, so it becomes really confusing sussing this out. Not to mention that these “imperatives” are FAR from bisected between the sexes.
It rankles me because renaming known things is the very essence of snake-oil. Not everyone selling snake-oil is looking for money. Some just want to be famous on the Internet for being known as Really Good With Chicks. It’s the Manosphere reversion to junior high; where the “cool guy” tells us all about women. I am not talking about you, Brendan. In fact, I expect you are sympathetic.
All of that isn’t to say that there isn’t some force out there that we need to capture, dissect, and codify–and perhaps it should rightly be called the FI–but I’m dubious.
@Brendan
It is often said, “If you’re taking flak, you’re over the target.”
I am feeling percussions around me.
Recommendation taken, Mr King.
I will speculate that you see yourself in the role of the “Debate as Sport” and not as the newer “Taking Everything Personally”. If so, I will beg to differ with you; you fall quickly into the personal with your defense, not the sport of arguing the point of contention.
Your method of discourse devolves almost immediately into the personal and rancorous. You overtly and covertly belittle and attack your opponent, rather than his ideas. As has been alluded to here and at other similar sites, this is an exceptionally “modern female” rhetorical style.
This is not about *you*, Mr. King, in the same way many of the arguments read here are not about a specific woman. The arrogant and self-satisfied attitude which you display far too often does *nothing* to win over minds … you appear in many cases to be working to close them and make “Internet Enemies” … another altogether modern feminine trait.
If you’d re-read many of the posts here about the disaffection many have with you, it’s about your style and your attitude, not as much about your ideas.
You have been asked to re-think your methods, but I detect little other than more snark in your posting of Steve Sailer’s article. I hope that I read your intent on this incorrectly. True introspection involves much more humility than snark.
CL’s comments are so much better when she’s on my jock, than 7man’s. I think it’s the jock.
Can I go England now? 😀
Solomon, I appreciate your attempt at a measured tone, if only because it demonstrates you aren’t so easily stirred into victimized outrage like so many complainers online.
But you lose me with the dimestore psychology and sensitivity policing. Take my words or leave them, but don’t personalize everything as a means of deconstruction: that is womanly. It is the “Feminine Rhetorical Imperative” if you will, steeped in “Female Solipsism,” if you still will. It rejects the question What is the nature of our disagreement? for the plaint Why is he so disagreeable with me?
And really, if you decide to “leave” my words as incoherent or irrelevant, then don’t make a big dyspeptic display of yourself for it. That’s what precipitates the “verbal comeuppance” which so many scandalized pansies have trouble processing or simply ignoring.
This patty-cake rhetoric you play around here is very welcoming and inclusive and non-judgmental and all that. (I think I see a bearded fellow floating toward the choir loft, strumming Kumbaya…) But it doesn’t yield truth very efficiently, particularly the harder truths.
Carry on.
Matt
@Cane Caldo
Try ice cubes.
@Cane:
It also makes sense to me that what you’re calling the MI and FI, it turns out, is what all along we’ve been calling the nature of men and the nature of women–much like what 7man said above. Though, I am not satisfied leaving it there. I’ll have to think about it some more.
I think there are two different things, and the use of the label “the Feminine Imperative” is flitting back and forth between meaning one and the other. Sometimes it means feminism (pace deti’s enumeration above). Sometimes it means the nature of women. I think we’d probably be better off just using the terms “feminism” and “female nature” when referring to these things, and – without necessarily supporting his rhetorical approach – I do think there is something to Matthew King’s notion that the term “Feminine Imperative” is being used to create an “invented in the manosphere” aura. By conflating feminism (a recent development and a form of liberalism) and the female nature (with us since the Garden), an illusion is created of some basic new insight.
It is of course entirely possible that I still just don’t “get it”. But it looks like a duck to me.
In the case of the woman in the OP this is pretty clearly just feminism: when she chooses to sleep with a man and regrets it she blames it on him. She really would prefer to wait, because she is a good girl; but those selfish dirty men made her do it. The poor sluts are being oppressed by those nasty men, and if only those nasty man had better self control, etc etc ad feminauseum.
Maybe this is a better way to put it. After the apple incident and sin entered the world, God confronted Adam and Eve and gave them the imperative, which, bottom line was that man WILL rule over woman. Follow Gods imperative and be blessed. That’s the last thing the enemy, Satan wants. So somewhere in history Satan crafts a new imperative, starts implementing it to a few of the ungodly, it slowly spreads, and here we are.
But it is NOT what women want as a base drive.
Agree, but you’re not really responding to what I wrote.
There is a difference between the “base drives”, on the one hand and the “set of norms that advances one sex’s strategy” on the other. The former is what it is. The latter is, by definition, a social thing — construct or evolved structure, and the terms matter I think. The FI and the MI are not about the “base drives” of individuals, they are about the overall institutional structures that underlie the sexual interactions between men and women. Women want hypergamy and men want polygyny, but those are the base drives, not the “construct” around them which has evolved in tandem with the other sex. Monogamy overwhelmingly benefitted the male sex, as a whole, against the interests of the female sex — it subordinates the female sex interests to the male sex interests. That matches the Bible as well. It isn’t an equality or a compromise, it’s the actual MI manifesting itself as God’s will — that is, not to the exclusion of the FI, but in collaboration with the FI where the MI is the leader.
But it doesn’t yield truth very efficiently, particularly the harder truths.
This is true and I liked the article a whole lot, but Matt, since its debate by sport, it helps others to know the rules ahead of time. Before you posted the article, you were the only one playing the sport.
Good grief.
Mr. King, based on your response to Solomon, please read this article (http://isteve.blogspot.com/2012/12/intellectual-discourse-taking.html) and contrast the two methods of rhetorical debate given therein with the following statements:
“… your attempt at a measured tone…”
“… you aren’t so easily stirred into victimized outrage like so many complainers online.”
“… you lose me with the dimestore psychology and sensitivity policing.”
“… don’t make a big dyspeptic display of yourself for it.”
“… which so many scandalized pansies have trouble processing or simply ignoring.”
“This patty-cake rhetoric you play around here…”
“I think I see a bearded fellow floating toward the choir loft, strumming Kumbaya…”
Mr. A is Mr. A wrote:
And yet … you have turned me and my methods into the subject under discussion rather than the content I presented in response to the original post.
Not at all. I won’t attempt to prove the existence of an absence, though you are free to provide the most egregious examples, and my comments and their responses remain above for all to scrutinize. Here is an alternative theory: some people who think highly of themselves do not like to be confronted with sharp disagreement presented unapologetically. But don’t quote me on that theory because I don’t care enough about what motivates the peanut gallery to defend it. (And my indifference adds to their consternation.)
“A gentleman will not insult me, and no man not a gentleman can insult me” (Douglass). Live it. I do.
Matt
Mr. A.
I have seen many lively debates done in the sporting way described in that article. This is key, I think:
Within this form of heterotopic discourse, one can play devil’s advocate, have one’s tongue in one’s cheek, purposefully overstate one’s case, or attack positions that one agrees with. The point of the discourse is to expose the strengths and weaknesses of various positions through rigorous challenge, not to provide a balanced position in a single monologue. Those familiar with such discourse will be accustomed to hyperbolic and unbalanced expressions. They will appreciate that such expressions are seldom intended as the sole and final word on the matter by those who utter them, but as a forceful presentation of one particular dimension of or perspective upon the truth, always presuming the existence of counterbalancing perspectives that have no less merit and veracity.
In contrast, a sensitivity-driven discourse lacks the playfulness of heterotopic discourse, taking every expression of difference very seriously.
Playfulness is key very often. Only it’s difficult to see the smirk and twinkle in the eye over the internet.
Mr King, all you have demonstrated is you are blind to what you do and confirmed my response to your postings is the correct one. Your signal-to-noise is far too low for my time. and I will continue to scroll down when I see your name in the future.
@Stingray
“Playfulness is key very often. Only it’s difficult to see the smirk and twinkle in the eye over the internet.”
Absolutely concur.
@Stingray
The fact that men don’t know the rules of a good sparring debate speaks to the failure of education and the Feminization of Rhetoric.
Stingray wrote:
Every man who has ever engaged in sport intuits “the rules,” which are largely ruleless by their nature and more of a contest of all against all. I won’t speculate whether the fellows here have ever been in a men’s locker room, but it’s not like I’m breaking new ground here. Challenge-and-response without taking it personally is one of the most important reasons to have sport. Thin-skinned public whiners have joined the feminists and the left who imagine trash-talking among the respected will bring down civilization, when any man who has ever experienced it understands that such talk is one of the more crucial elements of brotherhood which builds civilization.
If I am “the only one playing the sport,” then we are all fucked.
Matt
CL,
I couldn’t agree more. It’s another reason we home school. We debate with our kids like the article above so they become proficient at it as adults. The look on their faces when they *win* is priceless.
I do have to wonder though. It’s turned into politeness as it is assumed. If Matt had taken that assumption away from the get go, it would be a very different conversation. I have seen men itching to debate like this, but don’t out of courtesy. Take away the necessity for courtesy and everyone could learn a lot.
Stingray
Non-concur. Courtesy is always to be found in good debate, but politeness is optional.
Courtesy = Good; Polite = Nice.
Matt,
Then crush the door to the locker room upon your arrival, but give people a moment to get into uniform first. Feminism runs deep. We’ve been affected by it in ways that we cannot even conceive. If you wish to break through those barriers, you may need to give everyone a moment to take off their civilian clothes.
The other problem I see is all the defensiveness. If someone corrects you, it is good for you – who cares if it isn’t done as artfully as you’d like, or with as much padding with niceties; the point is to improve.
If you react to everything with defensiveness, you have an ego problem. I remember the first time I got my ego stomped on at university (in England, so yeah, jokes written in the margins to point out error and words like “abysmal” applied to all your hard work) – sure, it was deflating, but I learned from it. If the prof happens to be a bit of a prick, it doesn’t matter; just take the criticism and correct yourself.
” Monogamy overwhelmingly benefitted the male sex, as a whole, against the interests of the female sex — it subordinates the female sex interests to the male sex interests. That matches the Bible as well. It isn’t an equality or a compromise, it’s the actual MI manifesting itself as God’s will — that is, not to the exclusion of the FI, but in collaboration with the FI where the MI is the leader.”
But it is a compromise, a compromise between base drives. Between the drive to mate with as many women as possible, and the drive to be assured of paternity. That is not necessarily how a male-driven society would end up. It is also not a compromise between men and women, but rather a compromise made by men, for men. Nor is it the MI in action. The Male Imperative in action is better manifested in the the constructs which were built to support this compromise.
An example would be adultery laws. Female Adultery would destroy much of the purpose of lifetime monogamy, because it would make it impossible to guarantee paternity. Hence, in order to protect a male impulse, paternity, the Male Imperative would manifest itself in a desire for men to create social structures that would protect it. In this case, by creating laws which punish adultery.
Mr. A,
I would go with civility, but it is implied by the smirk and the twinkle in the eye, not in the words. It is in the handshake as one leaves the arena, but not the words themselves (though I myself do not deviate from the polite online as I’m not a fan of constant smiley’s and have always hated offending people. It is not an easy thing to let go off).
In person though, when I know it’s game on, it’s game on and it’s fun.
@GregC
So women’s motivations desires are manifestly satanic? And when men do something stupid or evil…what? Where do they originate?
@Brendan
This makes no sense whatsoever. Monogamy, rather frustrates the base desires of polygyny and hypergamy. I can’t see how either sex’s unrestrained preferences come out better, on the whole. Don’t misunderstand me: This is why I think monogamy is good. It harnesses them both. Someone quoted Proverbs 31 above, about how harnessed hypergamy can drive a women to increase her husband’s standing. (I can’t believe it myself, but it was Gabriella. Well…I am impressed!)
No, it does not. Eve was created in submission to Adam. She is from him, presented–given–to him, and called “woman” by him. Eve’s curses–consequences–are the natural fallout. She is was in submission to Adam before she ate the fruit, or gave it to Adam. The downer part comes first: “You shall want him”, i.e., you shall want to own or control him. The desire to control what she also desires to be master of her. The curse is the frustration of the incompatibility of those two goals. Again, “consequences” makes much better sense for understanding in our times. The word curse is loaded with ideas of hexing, or punishing.
So, if that is the FI, then is was wholly good, and created by God (Sorry, GregC). I know you said some of this, but then other parts of it just don’t jive. There is in all this talk of the FI (or MI) all this pre-Fall, post-Fall, evo-psych…on-and-on. I think Zippy is right about the “made in the manosphere”. Really it’s “made by a real playa”, I think. There’s an element of bed-chambers-eunuch fetish on some of the blogs, and in comments on lots of them; where some guys get aroused reading about the exploits of others as they stand around the blog-cum-bed-cum-coroner’s table. “Give it to her good!”, they mewl. “Aren’t there any other things you can do to her?” Rebranding concepts like “the Feminine Imperative” lets them re-live the magic.
Seriously, I do appreciate you taking the time to write that rather lengthy explanation above.
CL
Correction, jokes, less-than-artfull correction applied to the *actions* you take (homework, speech, performance, etc.) can be good and appropriate; applied to the *person* is the mark of a clod or a coward in a teacher.
That is the distinction: correction is applied to the action, not the actor.
In debate, spirited discourse and less than “polite” refutation of *ideas* is fair game … modern debate often sees the attack made on the individual to discredit the person, in order to do an end run around the idea in question.
@ Stingray
Consider This:
But it is a compromise, a compromise between base drives. Between the drive to mate with as many women as possible, and the drive to be assured of paternity. That is not necessarily how a male-driven society would end up. It is also not a compromise between men and women, but rather a compromise made by men, for men. Nor is it the MI in action. The Male Imperative in action is better manifested in the the constructs which were built to support this compromise.
An example would be adultery laws. Female Adultery would destroy much of the purpose of lifetime monogamy, because it would make it impossible to guarantee paternity. Hence, in order to protect a male impulse, paternity, the Male Imperative would manifest itself in a desire for men to create social structures that would protect it. In this case, by creating laws which punish adultery.
I don’t disagree, in that the MI is expressed in the social norms which support monogamy. I think I said as much above, but it could have been lost in the verbiage.
donalgraeme wrote:
If this enmity is “natural and subconscious” then what explains the cooperation naturally necessary for reproduction?
There is no broad based attempt for one sex to try to one-up the other. That is a wholly feminist construction concocted to explain the lack of female equality in the past, with the “Male Imperative” playing villain. Men aren’t trying to “subconscious[ly]” screw women over. They are rather consciously trying to screw them. No women — beyond the peculiarly feminist-trained generations known only in the West — want to triumph over men. Their instinct is for cooperation at very least, so that their children are protected and provided for. I would argue their instinct goes still further toward submission for this reason.
So what, pray tell, is the point of positing a natural enmity between the sexes? It seems like a badly formulated attempt to recruit a bad formulation of feminism to the side of men’s rights: men want to be preeminent just like women do! Except women emphatically do not, and the culture is turned inside-out for trying it.
The “battle of the sexes” is always precipitated for the purpose of resolving it in sweet consummation. Both sides win and everyone benefits when the man prevails and the woman surrenders. The idea that both sexes are attempting to prevail is the feminist artifice, and it is an experiment we have lived with our entire lives, giving solace only in private apart from official nostrums (such as when I am choke-fucking a girl), and sending civilization to the brink for having tinkered.
Matt
Stingray
Agree with you and will accept civility vice courtesy. But the goal of debate to to attack and defend on ideas … and that *can* be vicious, fun, and entertaining.
Where modern debate goes far wrong is when the attack devolves to attacking the one(s) making the argument…usually because the opponent is out of ammunition for real debate.
Well, if it’s any consolation, that’s my policy for the women’s locker room.
7man,
Yes, as it goes to an enemy, absolutely. Only, I see our enemy as feminism. We are attempting to become a united front here. One way to do that is heated debate regarding ideas, but we are not going to be able to destroy our enemy without teaching each other first. We have to learn to destroy our own ideas and then build them back up before we can destroy feminism.
I will absolutely concede that I could be way off base as I’m female and will never fully grasp locker room masculinity, but given the past 50 years I don’t know how many men are familiar with it any more either (do I need to duck now?).
Seriously, I do appreciate you taking the time to write that rather lengthy explanation above.
Fine, we also have to agree to disagree I think — I don’t honestly think I’ve ever agreed with anything you’ve written on the internet, either, but I could be misremembering.
Matt,
Heh, of course it is. But they want you to break down their door as well (to see the rippling of the muscles, mmmmmmmmmm).
“agree to disagree” is feminine. It is better for a man to say, “You go your way and I’ll go mine. I will ignore you in the future.”
“agree to disagree” is feminine. It is better for a man to say, “You go your way and I’ll go mine. I will ignore you in the future.”
More AMOGing.
Any more, 7?
usually because the opponent is out of ammunition for real debate.
Usually, yes. But between those who are used to the form of debate outlined in that article, is this really necessary? I don’t think so and would expect men to prefer it as it is no holds barred and understood by both sides that it would actually be uncivil to hold anything back. It would be considered disrespectful even.
Cane Caldo wrote:
Good questions. And this is where the man’s rightful attempt to take back the culture collapses into insensate, self-defeating chauvinism. The origin of a concept matters. A community’s broad assertions, abstract though they must be, have to be scrutinized. Or you are setting yourself up for defeat before you even get started. The idea of a “feminine imperative” apart from the well-understood ideas of Original Sin and La Différence collapses upon first serious inquiry.
So women have The Curse of Eve. But everyone has Original Sin and the concupiscent echoes in our soul which result from that foundation-cracking event. Women are sufficiently punished by that curse. There is no need to pile on. Our mission, rather, is to reverse the human error of denying the original curse (feminism) and pretending there was no sin (Rousseauism).
Matt
Matt, I never said that the MI and FI are matters of enmity. I do NOT believe that there is this hidden imperative by men to screw over women, and by women to screw over men. Rather, it is a natural inclination to protect one’s own interests, or to subconsciously align one’s thoughts to protect that interest.
The “War between the Sexes” is feminist construct, as you say. Indeed, the notion that men “oppressed” women for most of human history is a feminist construct. However, feminism has been pushed and aided in its efforts by this natural imperative to see things favorably in light of yourself and any group you belong to. Said group being women, of course. And I would argue that Feminism’s origin point is probably the imperative as well.
To me, the purpose of understanding the “Male Imperative” and the “Female Imperative” is to understand that women who benefit from the fruits of feminism are not likely to observe or notice the consequences to men. We
Sorry, lost the last two sentences there. What I was trying to say was that we both agree that the enemy is feminism. However, we need to understand that the FI exists, and it will be more difficult to defeat feminism thanks to it than we might believe otherwise.
@Brendan.
More AMOGing.
Any more, 7?
I thought AMOG only applied when two men were posturing about a woman. Maybe my definition is faulty.
I thought AMOG only applied when two men were posturing about a woman. Maybe my definition is faulty.
In a public environment, yep, your understanding is faulty.
Mr. A is Mr. A wrote:
This is a perfect defense for the idea of a sensitivity-driven discourse. Back to the drawing board, Mr. ABC’s:
If a sensitivity-driven discourse is the best you can do and is devoutly to be wished, then vaya con Dios, hermanos. But that means you have to bar me at the door. Or get yourself a John Wayne in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance type, an outlaw strong and hypocritical enough to enforce the law against interlopers.
Or relax and join the party.
Matt
@Stingray
” ‘usually because the opponent is out of ammunition for real debate.’
Usually, yes. But between those who are used to the form of debate outlined in that article, is this really necessary? I don’t think so and would expect men to prefer it as it is no holds barred and understood by both sides that it would actually be uncivil to hold anything back. It would be considered disrespectful even.”
But the focus is on the idea. If we discuss British Parliamentary style debate, the crux comes back to the idea, no matter how many times it diverges into distraction. If not, then the debate becomes a screaming match. If the goal is change from debate to screaming match and win the latter, then I concede your point. But if it is to win the debate over the idea, the challenge must continue to revolve around the concept rather than the distractions of what deodorant the debater neglected to apply this morning.
If you want a sport analogy, then I’ll try this one: a lot of invective (within reason) can fly during a baseball game to distract the opposing team during plays in order to help your side win, but the underlying skills should dominate the play in most cases. If a pitcher decides to start intentionally hitting the opposing team with pitches in order to injure them, then we’ve stopped playing baseball and we’re doing something else.
In the same way, if we devolve into the “frills” of debate as the focus and lose track of the idea that is its kernel, then we aren’t really debating any more.
Debate is about the triumph of ideas:
Debate is similar to war.
And that really is where the strength of feminism lies: to focus on the “frills”, attack the source rather than the idea, and ensure the kernel under debate is lost in the melee.
Matt, I’m not trying to argue your points, I’m pointing out that I want your wisdom, not your personal bullshit. Your condescending implications make it hard for me to learn from you.
I’m trying to help you, man- you need to work on your presentation. If you don’t have the common sense to consider the audience when making a presentation, your wisdom is lost.
It’s not womanly, in my opinion, to choose to learn from men whom I respect and admire, and skip on the ones whose position is poorly presented. Like I said, man, I used to love your stuff.
You are diminishing the discussion here, not enlightening it. Thus, you become ineffective, and I don’t want that. Given your tenacity, if you would also show the internal greatness I know you are capable of, we’ll all be better for it, and your energies will be better spent.
” .. getting a woman into bed is the fastest way to get a woman out of your life .. “
Peachy. If only I’d known.
Sounds ideal.
Must try harder.
@Mr. A
I played ball, and pitched for most of it. I smacked the crap out of some kids. It was baseball. There is a line (a hockey game broke out at a fight), but you're not feeling some of the rumblings of the substrata, I think. There is a fundamental divide among Man-Up folks (guilty) and MRAs (feminist reactionaries). PUAs, generally, fall on the Man-Up side; that there is something an individual man can do to improve his little corner of the world; especially as it applies to intersexual relations. And beyond.
1. You are overestimating folks here.
2. You are failing to calculate the effect women have in a debate, or any encounter. Matt makes a reference to choking a girl during fornication*, and 50-year old Stingray the Homeschooling Mom, retorts with a dare to Matt that he show his muscles.
And Brendan is right: There is AMOGing afoot…not that I’m innocent…not that I want to be.
Cane –
I’ll take correction for a poor analogy. If the goal of the pitcher switches from primarily striking out the batter to hitting everyone who comes to the plate with a pitch in order to cripple the other team, we are no longer playing baseball. But, whatever.
I’m also considering the remainder of your post on the debate. You are likely right in that there’s jockeying for position happening here as well, not merely “pure reason”.
And Brendan is right: There is AMOGing afoot…not that I’m innocent…not that I want to be.
Which is the fundamental problem men face when we try to come together on anything larger or more abstract than a tribal basis as *men*. There will be AMOGing. I will call it, spot it, and refuse it. As will many others. We defeat ourselves in this way, yet we cannot resist to try to be the AMOG (me too). It is who we are, and why there is no MRM, no MRAs, there are only solutions for individual men.
Bob W: ” By the way, you might want to look up just how feminist (and vegetarian – more female nonsense) Hitler was. “
Who?
50! Not yet, Cane. I’m not sure if it’s a good thing or a bad thing that I am coming across as being 50.
Of course there is AMOGing afoot. It’s ever present, is it not? Unless a man is alone, it is somewhat constant, I would think.
But the focus is on the idea. If we discuss British Parliamentary style debate, the crux comes back to the idea, no matter how many times it diverges into distraction.
I agree with this, but it can be either side that doesn’t bring it back. The side who is sensitive or the side who is not. As long as it comes back to the idea, all is well.
Random thought – I posted elsewhere my thoughts on the alleged “feminine imperative” (I’m not sure if I believe it exists or not yet), but since I’ve got about 5 minutes before heading out, the upshot was men get their masculine imperative beaten out of them, or at least channeled constructively, whereas women don’t, being shielded from consequences and all that.
So it occurred to me, maybe the masculine imperative is something beneficial, not destructive.
Then I saw where Brendan wrote that the masculine imperative is hard monogamy, not seeding as many women as possible. Sounds like a benefit to me. What if some or even most women are ignoring their imperative toward… whatever? Something that benefits their sex as a whole… and the rest of us are suffering for it?
Or it could be the crazy weather here that’s aggravating the #&%% out of my sinuses is keeping me from getting enough oxygen. Just writing down the thoughts above, I pretty much managed to talk myself out of buying into them
7man – I learned to pare my comments down to the essence, which is a useful skill
I’ve heard that described as “Economy of word.” I try to do it myself, but it’s hit and miss. Such as my above scribblings.
@Brendan.
Which is the fundamental problem men face when we try to come together on anything larger or more abstract than a tribal basis as *men*. There will be AMOGing. I will call it, spot it, and refuse it. As will many others. We defeat ourselves in this way, yet we cannot resist to try to be the AMOG (me too). It is who we are, and why there is no MRM, no MRAs, there are only solutions for individual men.
So how did the authors of the Declaration of Independence and the framers of the Constitution and Bill of Rights overcome this?
It’s usually Mr Speaker who stops the shrieking baboons in the Commons from howling the place down, defecating on the green morocco, and stabbing each other with their short-swords (that’s probably out of fashion now, but nothing would surprise me).
And keeps them rigidly to their booked question or statement. With the very real threat of the Serjeant-at-Arms, expulsion, and the lockup at the foot of “Big Ben”, in extremis.
Any volunteers for being dragged to the Chair?
@Brendan
Because what you’re describing is coming together, and coming together is something I do with my wife, my church, my family, and my friends. Not only is it hard not to do with others: I don’t even want to. It seems to me that my life is one big series of searches for authority, and submitting myself to them; just like in these comments. I know you lean MRA, but I genuinely respect your opinions. When you take the time to write a lengthy comment I’m going to read it, and ask questions, and try to filter it back with my own thinking.
Your response to all that was: “Fine. I don’t agree with anything you’ve ever written either.” What? Are you breaking up with me? I’m not trying to come together, man: I’m just trying to learn from you.
But, the great thing about not being bound together so fastidiously, is that we’ll all come back to Dalrock’s next week, read another excellent post, and nearly all will be forgotten. Except 7man. He really does just snipe these days.
@Tam
Haha!
@Cane Caldo
Can’t we just hug and kiss and then get along?
So how did the authors of the Declaration of Independence and the framers of the Constitution and Bill of Rights overcome this?
One team of men against another team of men. Not men as *men* aligned against interests against *men*. Tribalism/Teamism — works well. Men as men, not really. And even within the tribal group there is AMOGing, which, if there are too many leaders, as there are in this corner of the internet, leads to fissures. This is why I prefer the manosphere to be a clearinghouse. If it is to become a movement, look out, because I will be out to get all of you mofos so I can be the top man. Not kidding, really.
Your response to all that was: “Fine. I don’t agree with anything you’ve ever written either.” What? Are you breaking up with me? I’m not trying to come together, man: I’m just trying to learn from you.
I thought it was restating something I’d said some time ago. But nevertheless, I really can’t remember ever really agreeing with you. It isn’t “breaking up” as much as it is realizing that our mindsets are really very much at odds.
@Brendan
That makes sesnse and is the kind of insight I have appreciated from you.
Wow. I leave for a day, Matt takes up the topic I had brought up (not surprised), but then it becomes a debate against Matt instead of whether the ideas either of us presented are true – that the use of the label Feminine Imperative cripples some discussions and leaves it limping around.
For example, merely reread the comments here. We have a thread that limps from whether feminine imperative exists, to if it’s biological, to religious, to if Matt’s an arrogant bastard, to male imperative, to if Matt is correct and masculine while the others are feminine in their debate, to religious imperatives, god’s imperative, children’s imperative….
Ugh, and I think every time I read the word imperative I twitched and mentally had to interrupt my thoughts to try and decide what kind of meaning the author intended for the word.
We have words for these things. God doesn’t have an ‘Imperative’ – he has commands for us. He had a son who reinforced these commands while also showing the world how to love in a masculine, tough love way.
We don’t have a ‘Male Imperative’ we have a nature of men. We have different sides of that nature. We have that men are made in the image of God or that they’ve been bred to enjoy building civilization. They also enjoy sex, sports, violence, debate. They enjoy making families – and each man has different parts of his nature that make him more prone to do each of these activities differently. There are ways the ‘majority’ like to do each of these.
There is the same with women. You’re really trying to label the ‘Female Imperative’ as the corruption by evil!? Really…? Wow. I find the idea preposterous. God made woman from man to be a companion for man. They are not less than us, despite being weaker in many areas, but they are made for our satisfaction in every realm of life – physically, mentally, spiritually. Because they’re made as companions to ease Adam’s loneliness, they aren’t the same and have different flaws. These flaws, as well as women’s strengths, have been explored since the dawn of time.
Or to subscribe the ‘Feminine Imperative’ to society or civilization is also bastardizing all the relevant information. What’s more, it’s simply insulting to men and women each. It is men’s strengths that built society, and it is the deadly combination of men’s strengths combined with their flaws that has been co-opted by evil to put us on the path we’re on. It’s women’s strenghts and flaws that were used by evil to achieve this.
Anyone that is insistent on using the word “Imperative” in these discussions, or even just finds themselves using it regularly by pressure of the nature of the majority using it as such, give the word some thought. Re-read some of these comments. Look at how the word is used. if you go back and reread these comments by people you’ll find that, by using the words, they blithely pass over deep wells of information about how men and women interact on individual and group levels. It is not always necessarily wrong, but almost every time the thought process is shallow. Or, if it’s not, the use of the word and how the conversation reads presents the thought processes as shallow.
Merely taking the minute to think of a word that is not a “coined term” only people in the community would recognize (but still need to consider which way you’re using it), would help wonders. At minimum it will clarify your writing and assist in moving the discussion forward. Yet I suspect it will deepen the thought processes of yourself and others due to the nature of linguistics and how the brain will anchor to and draw connections with terms that have been built and found deep meaning over hundreds of generations.
If anyone has spare time on their hands, I suggest finding a copy of the little book “The Fate of Empires” by Sir John Glubb. I do not have time to post excerpts now, but will try to do so later. It may be available on the web in some corner or other.
Particular attention should be paid to his summary of extant writings from Baghdad circa the 10th century AD. Some of the complaints read very much like today, from the coarsening of the culture to the demands made by women; the 20th century is not the first time women have demanded the privilige to be teachers, preachers and judges.
It is possible that the feminine imperative operates differently depending on the wealth availble; the more resources available, the more extravagant the desires of men and women become.
Sure, Leap. GIve us a word.
Another book to read is “Sex and Culture” by JD Unwin. Of course hard to find because the powers that be don’t like it to be in print, but google is your friend.
Leap of a Beta says:
Wow. I leave for a day, Matt takes up the topic I had brought up (not surprised), but then it becomes a debate against Matt instead of whether the ideas either of us presented are true…
“Hey retard, pass the salt” is more likely to get a salt shaker bounced off your forehead than to actually have the salt passed to you. If you approach with hostility, you will be greeted with hostility.
@ Brendan
What I’m saying is that as a community we’re using one word to describe many different complex topics, yet when it is used it is almost always referring to one of those specific ideas in the plethora of options.
As such you’re asking for one answer to be a relevant and correct answer to multiple questions. It’s more complicated than that.
@ Sharrukin
I realize such. It is part of why I don’t operate the way Matt does, but merely a part. I don’t have the education he does, nor do I wholly agree with his beliefs, nor do I have his personality. Yet I value his words and have said as much to him here and elsewhere. I’ve learned how to communicate between each other as men and found I’ve learned a lot in doing so. Sometimes from him, sometimes from disagreeing with him as his debate style forces me to think through ideas and concepts much more thoroughly than I would otherwise, because he will both tear shit apart if I don’t and because sometimes the shit I say damn well deserves to be torn apart.
Which is part of why I made the latest comment when it had derailed into a discussion about Matt with no clear other thread through these comments. I obviously care about the topic, and I think it is relevant to this post, this discussion, and this community.
What I’m saying is that as a community we’re using one word to describe many different complex topics, yet when it is used it is almost always referring to one of those specific ideas in the plethora of options.
As such you’re asking for one answer to be a relevant and correct answer to multiple questions. It’s more complicated than that.
If that’s what you think, then contribute to the answer, rather than sniping that it isn’t satisfactory. Sorry, but this criticism without action is getting very, very, very tiresome.
@Matthew King (King A)
If you were the natural leader in real life that you imagine you are in your head, you wouldn’t need to send the rest of us to read directions on a new set of rules whereby it turns out you are secretly the winner. You would instead have won us all over and we would be eagerly following your lead.
-It is nice to not be the Bad Guy today. Thanks Matt.
-If you are going to throw salt shakers at peoples heads you should aim better. That was a lame verbal spar. I didn’t participate because Dalrock keeps yelling at me to play nice and I can’t get kicked off the blog til I have successfully converted him to the RC. Which was too bad..because I had so many awesome insults for Matt that nobody will ever hear.
-What I don’t like about the “imperative” word is it seems to imply biological determinism. I could say “highly motivated by X goals” but that seems long-winded. I suppose “nature” or “instincts” might work.
@ Brendan
Here’s some examples for you of what I’m saying.
From Nightsky:
“but since I’ve got about 5 minutes before heading out, the upshot was men get their masculine imperative beaten out of them, or at least channeled constructively, whereas women don’t, being shielded from consequences and all that.”
Is he talking about having masculinity beaten out of them? Or their sex drive? Or a specific part of their masculinity, seeing as society is more than happy to channel men’s natural desire to build things, but only in ways that serve society? Or maybe he’s saying that they’ve had that beaten out of them as well, which is why we have a generation of halo junkies. This whole statement isn’t clear, and the rest of his comment does nothing to clarify it. I can guess and assume at some of it, but it is woefully inspecific and just as shallow in terms of thought.
From Anon:
It is possible that the feminine imperative operates differently depending on the wealth availble; the more resources available, the more extravagant the desires of men and women become.
Are you discussing sexual desires? Or the desires of society? Possibly you’re discussing the trends of societies towards socialism in specific circumstances where women are given specific kinds of power, such as we’re seeing today in the united states. I suspect the latter is true, given your reference to bagdad’s society giving in to the demands by women, but again, the term is woefully unspecific. What makes you think that a part of femininity was driving that society vs the ours today? This is something that could be wonderfully useful, considering that the middle east could easily be considered one of the most masculine societies today; so it would be relevant to know how they recovered from the mistake and also what has led them to swing so far that it could be considered unhealthily masculine as opposed to our overly feminine society.
From Donal Graeme
“Matt, I never said that the MI and FI are matters of enmity. I do NOT believe that there is this hidden imperative by men to screw over women, and by women to screw over men. Rather, it is a natural inclination to protect one’s own interests, or to subconsciously align one’s thoughts to protect that interest.
The “War between the Sexes” is feminist construct, as you say. Indeed, the notion that men “oppressed” women for most of human history is a feminist construct. However, feminism has been pushed and aided in its efforts by this natural imperative to see things favorably in light of yourself and any group you belong to. ”
And here I believe it is talking about sex at first, due to his previous comment talking about the conflict between conflicting sexual strategies involved in biology. He also is referencing human’s tendency towards selfishness, and how it plays out in those sexual strategies. Yet as his comment and the conversation goes on the word Feminine Imperative morphs to represent society’s imperative, which either could be referring towards how women have set the frame for the national discussion at this point due to their tendency to debate emotionally instead of rationally (much as the debate over different debate styles has broken out here) or he could be referencing the tendency of society to favor women’s interests in general; avoiding discussing the specifics of modern western culture. But because he uses imperative without any sexual denotation, I can’t even tell if he’s referring to men, women, or both.
Brendan nailed it, Genisis angle is brilliant.
Is it any wonder evil is represented as the ‘whore’ of Babylon?
Not that the feminine is evil in itself (otherwise God would be guilty of creating carnality) rather it is a typological struggle of subverting hierarchies, the lower must accede to the higher.
The parallel would be the flesh governing the mind.
Those were just the three first times I saw the term used as I scrolled up through the comments from when I started writing the post – easily could have missed one though.
But each time the thoughts themselves could have gained from specific, deeper thought processes instead of relying on a term. Terms are great for technical specific types of discussions. They’re best used in technical manuals. Yet we’re debating various ideas of sexuality, morality, societal/group dynamics, biology, and religion. We bounce around from each of these subjects because they’re intertwined in the issues and problems we’re discussion – but we’re trying to use one term to represent how society is currently working in each of these areas, and we’re deluding ourselves to think we’re being specific when we’re not.
Feminine imperative is useful only to set the general subject of the discussion, if that. In nearly every case I’ve seen it used in this thread though, the discussion would be better served by a specifically chosen word to be found instead of the word “Imperative.”
I agree that it needs more definition, which is what I tried to do, and I think I did do. Doubtless what I wrote requires more definition. But you could contribute to that instead of pointing out what we all know is a need for greater definition. I contributed. Where is yours? Sorry for the snark, but all I see is critique. Contribute, Leap. Just. Do. It.
How bout this one…
Motivation
That is actually the word I used to describe instinctual drives back before I discovered the manosphere. It worked…the people I talked to about it totally understood what I was trying to say and nobody assumed I was advocating Biological Determinism.
@ Brendan
I am contributing. This is an attempt to illuminate and contribute to the quality of discussion because the current topic we’re discussing is how we discuss this topic. That is my current chosen topic, and rather than your claim that I am “just critiquing” I am also providing examples of how we as men could discuss subjects in greater detail and with more meaning.
If I was doing as you claim, I would merely call them shallow thinkers and move on. It would involve mere insults to their logic and discussion.
Yet I don’t think their thought processes are shallow. I suspect there’s a good deal of thought within the men who’s only contact between themselves and I are words on a computer screen. If we didn’t have this relevant discussion on linguistics of the Manosphere already going, I would ask them directly for their thoughts and meanings, or ask leading questions in hopes of opening them up as I would with someone in person if discussing something over a drink.
But, seeing as we DO HAVE this going, I think it would be valuable to discuss what we are, in fact, discussing.
And, in this discussion, it is you that are not providing anything of value. All you are doing is derailing the discussion by saying I should provide something of quality to other, separate discussions on separate matters.
@Zippy
But this isn’t what I was getting at. What is interesting is that her description of her preferred form of fornication is taken by nearly everyone as an expression of higher sexual morality, including Christians. How many people can understand that what she is describing is simply the female preferred form of promiscuity? Christians have as a group dropped biblical sexual morality and replaced it with the frame she is sharing. Bad men have promiscuous sex with women without offering them a “relationship”. Good men have promiscuous sex with women only after sufficiently comforting her that they are invested in her. And don’t forget that she describes this as her noble quest for a lifelong partner. The man up card is right there. When I wrote about it here it was satire, but she is dead serious. Moreover, most Christians hold this basic view. Lydia was beside herself when I challenged it in the post that you linked to. She never did figure out why, but she knew I was broken for challenging this sacred idea.
@Brendan
Perhaps my quip was misplayed. You did state something similar earlier. My point is that we don’t have to be in agreement for you to be useful to me, because I’m not seeking a relationship.
But I think I understand you more now: You prefer the Manosphere to remain a clearinghouse because it assuages your hurt feelings that they don’t agree with you. I note that you felt most put-upon by two women, and an MRA. For myself, I tend to think of the Manosphere as clearinghouse, too. But, if by a twist of fate, it became movement I could get behind any number of authors and commenters.
I’m all for scratching out “feminine imperative”, and calling it FEMINISM.
@Dalrock
Yes. This is the self-parody I was talking about. Some of it, anyway.
@Gabriella
Fixed that for you.
Gabriella says:
-It is nice to not be the Bad Guy today. Thanks Matt.
Cane Caldo says:
-It is nice to not be the Bad Guy today. Thanks Cane.
Fixed that for you.
Perhaps you guys could have a runoff to see who gets to be the most tragic victim?
Thanks, Cane.
LOAB – this is the other “comment elsewhere” I mentioned. The line about Girl Scouts refers to this post by Sunshinemary –
http://thewomanandthedragon.wordpress.com/2012/12/21/how-doth-the-little-feminine-imperative-grow/
Dalrock expanded on it here –
https://dalrock.wordpress.com/2012/12/26/how-the-feminine-imperative-just-happens/
Social Pathologist replied here, and that’s where my comment is from – http://socialpathology.blogspot.com/2013/01/marx-and-feminine-imperative.html
“My impression of the “Feminine Imperative” is that is just a deeper imperative filtered through a female lens.
The imperative seems to be, at root, the base drive of getting Free Stuff. What makes it seem like a conspiracy, instead of an (artificially distorted) emergent order, is that men have fewer incentives and greater consequences for following up on these drives. Women have been shielded from the visible consequences, resulting in greater incentives to act upon their drives, and greater success in attaining their goals.
The Girl Scouts in Dalrock’s post got a free benefit – they’re moved to the front of the line. Only after this occurred did they discover that they were so gifted due to being girls. Female-ness becomes the leverage to get the Free Stuff, in the service of the deeper base drive.
If this seems a little disjointed, it’s because I’m still working it out in my own head. I never even heard of the “Feminine Imperative” until a month or so ago.”
If there is a Feminine Imperative, could there be a Masculine Imperative? Would it also have harmful effects as the Feminine version does? If so, it seems men have to face the consequences of acting on that imperative, and afterward they are more likely to think ahead before acting. They then channel their energy into more constructive activities. Women are protected from their own bad choices, so they keep making them.
As for my comment above, I’ve been wondering if the Masculine Imperative isn’t something harmful or selfish, but something that drives them to build. It can be building objects, a family, a civilization, but men seem driven to accomplish things. Can women have an imperative that’s also beneficial? Having babies and raising families sounds like a possible candidate to me. If this is the case, is it possible that as more and more women ignore their imperative to have families, more and more men ignore their imperative to build things?
Speaking only for myself, I’ve pretty much lost my once-powerful drive to accomplish anything, because who’s gonna care?
each time the thoughts themselves could have gained from specific, deeper thought processes instead of relying on a term.
Again speaking only for myself, if my comments about FI seem shallow, it’s not because of the term, it’s because I don’t yet know what the underlying concept is. I keep seeing conflicting arguments but nothing has really come together and gelled yet. As you said, “we’re deluding ourselves to think we’re being specific when we’re not.” I’m just tossing my own random ideas at the wall to see if anything sticks, which apparently they’re not. No biggie, the manosphere and FI especially are all relatively new to me anyway. I don’t expect to have any deep insights.
Leap of Beta, if you were confused by my statement, that is understandable. I pieced it together from a longer response, and did a bad job of it. If you are uncertain what I mean by the Female Imperative, here it is again:
The Female Imperative is the natural and subconscious inclination of women to advance and aid the natural impulses and drives of women by means of creating and adapting social norms, practices, prejudices, mores, laws, and customs to fit that objective, while at the same time unconsciously believing and asserting that this organization of society is not simply right and just, but in keeping with the natural order of things.
Now, what part of that doesn’t make sense?
The feminine imperative: making promises you don’t intend to keep:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2265039/Facebook-Romeo-achieves-1million-likes-picture-girl-fancied–sex-hopes.html
Pingback: A War of Words « stagedreality
Forensics is not like war. Goodness. Maybe like the gentleman war with men lines up with muskets, but like war? Hardly even metaphorically. Anyone who is fancying themselves some deeply researched rhetorician ever been on a forensics team? Ever win?
Links to rhetorical rules that are feminized serves what purpose?
Are we about helping a man or some other thing?
Don’t answer.
Losing faith in men’s ability to do anything but peacock.
Donal,
I was using your statement as an example of how the Manosphere uses the term, feminine imperative, in broad ways without a specific definition. You have one specific definition there that isn’t even all that specific for how you’re using it from one comment to the next.
I will also point out that it is different from how Dalrock is originally using it in this post; which is to show specifically how ingrained feminist views are within society to the point where, as he states, “It is an amazing sleight of hand, and something I only noticed about a year into blogging.”
This is common through out our whole community, and I myself was doing the same thing until Sunshine Mary’s posts sparked the debates through a large portion of the Manosphere.
At that point I saw how inefficient it was as a tool. It’s a hammer men are deciding to grab as a makeshift, on the fly tool to perform every jobi. We’re doing so instead of taking the time or energy to find specific words or concepts for the ideas they’re trying to communicate to each other. We’re being intellectually lazy and stubborn to continue doing so.
For example, you could replace your use of female imperative within your comment as such:
“There is a biological and psychological tendency for the natural and subconscious inclination of women to advance and aid the natural impulses and drives of women by means of creating and adapting social norms, practices, prejudices, mores, laws, and customs to fit that objective, while at the same time unconsciously believing and asserting that this organization of society is not simply right and just, but in keeping with the natural order of things.”
This is more specific to what you’re saying. It communicates your thoughts clearer (I think, again, the use of the term means I have to make assumptions on your own personal definition), and thus allows us to see what your thought process is. Because we can see your thought process, it allows people following up your comment to either follow the thread of the conversation towards the biological or psychological ways in which women perform as you say, to then drive at the heart of the evil of feminism as a movement in co-opting such tendancies in today’s society.
Whats more, is that it would be a comment that made sense to ANYONE OUTSIDE OF THIS COMMUNITY. So if someone stumbled here, they wouldn’t think we’re talking in jargon and crazy. It uses the tools we have so that we’d be able to find more truth while also learning how to better communicate the truth we do find to the rest of the world.
A clarification on a part of that last comment:
“We’re doing so instead of taking the time or energy to find specific words or concepts for the ideas they’re trying to communicate to each other.”
By which I mean we’re not taking the time to use words and concepts that already exist. Not that we need to search for new words or terminology.
Very good discussion.
Firstly, as I mentioned in my post, I fully acknowledge the effects of the feminine imperative(i.e women eventually get what they want) where I dispute it is in Rollo’s understanding of its cause.
Matt–despite his abrasive manner–is absolutely correct on his insistence of some intellectual rigor when analysing the subject. Not because this is a pissing contest to see who is the smartest but rather, to actually work out what is going on here. Sloppy analysis leads to sloppy solutions or potentially a worsening of the problem–that’s why critical thinking is important. To many commentators, some of whom I imagine are crypto-MRA’s, just want to blame women for everything.
@Dalrock
The feminine imperative has warped our very ability to think morally.
Disagree. The idea of the feminine imperative is proof our inability to think properly at all, since facts contradict it’s existence. The FI effects seem largely confined to the Modern West and if one wants to be really naughty, especially strong in countries with an Northwestern European heritage. It didn’t really happen in these countries until the late 19th Century. It’s not happening in the Muslim world or Africa, it’s only just beginning to happen in Asia (with the adoption of European norms). Given that it appears to be an exceptional case in world history, how can anyone claim it as a universal imperative?
Positing the existence of an new “masculine imperative” at odd with the feminine puts us squarely back in Marxist conflict theory mode. Note, this would not be a bad thing if the facts agreed with it, the thing is they don’t. The other thing that some analysts–(I’m quite ok with amateurs voicing their opinion) is that sometimes the birth of an effect is due to a confluence of factors–that is that there is no single cause for the phenomenon.
Feminism, like all the other isms that came alive in the late 19th Century is a symptom of a far deeper malaise that is affecting the West. Repeat. It is a symptom of the disease. Not the disease itself.
So what were these factors.
Moral Relativism. Which is a perversion of the idea of tolerance. This effectively erodes any objective standard by which to judge everyone. Since, “who are you to impose your opinions on me!”
This of course is closely linked to the cult of Nietzsche and the idea of invent your own “superior” morality. This feeds the morally relativistic mindset.
Romanticism. Feelings are the ultimate standard by which we judge things.
Chivalry. It’s corruption pedastalised women and its influence of gentlemanly behaviour bred a group of men who would do nothing to “hurt a lady”. Hurt, of cause, also means not hurting her feelings. So if sweet Prudence has her feeling hurt by being called a slut, based upon objective evidence and objective moral standards, a whole phalanx of males will leap to her defence. Team woman, who naturally regard feelings as the ultimate arbiter of all actions will also back her up and a whole bunch of mangina atheists will join the attack on the grounds that there are no moral absolutes by which to judge someone.
But the real evil lurking under all of this is the one that is never mentioned because it is so congenial and thought of as harmless, and that is the cult of nice. The entire West has embraced this cult where being nice and agreeable is more important that being good. Churchianity is what happens when the religious stop worrying about being good and instead, concentrate on being nice to each other. Nice people never call anyone out, nice people never cause offence, nice people never impose their views , nice people are always “rational”, nice people never hurt anyone’s feelings. Nice people always give in. There is no fighting in nice world, that why pacifism prevails, there is no inequality in nice world that’s why nice people like socialism. The only bad people are people who don’t want to be nice. That’s why conservatives who upset the social order are lumped in the same group as fascists, capitalists and arseholes of all persuasion. They’re not nice.
The real intellectual task is to recognise where the good was dropped and the nice was embraced.
Of course using a long explanation is more specific. But the point of words, of language, is to distill meaning or to condense meaning. In this case, if I want to communicate that specific explanation, why should I have to write out the full explanation every time? Do you know of a word or two, or a short phrase, that can convey all of that meaning and already exists? I don’t. If you do, let me know and I will use it.
@ Donal
“But the point of words, of language, is to distill meaning or to condense meaning.”
The point of language is to convey meaning, not to distill or condense it. That is specifically reserved for the use of ‘terminology’. Yet depending on your goals, picking which parts of the language you use will drastically alter your success in pursuing your goal. In this discussion, and in most conversations the Manosphere has in general, the point of the discussion is to find greater meaning and truths. To do so, condensing meaning works against us – we’re not trying to quickly make a point and leave, we’re trying to find things. To rediscover truths or learn how to convey those truths to a world that has forgotten them. Which means that condensing meaning works at odds with the goals.
“In this case, if I want to communicate that specific explanation, why should I have to write out the full explanation every time? Do you know of a word or two, or a short phrase, that can convey all of that meaning and already exists?”
As I already stated, you’re trying to argue that something which has a different personal definition from one person to the next now has a specific meaning.
This is false, as demonstrated by this thread and others. People use the term in drastically different ways, then try and argue that it’s a specific term. Such arguments are contradictory and false.
In addition I replaced a two word term with two words, SLIGHTLY altered the structure of the first couple words so that it would make sense, and now you’re complaining that it’s too much work? The changes I made took relatively little time, but took more thought on what meaning I wanted to convey. Such thought means that I communicate the idea more clearly and allow a better discussion to occur after I’ve said my piece. What kind of outcome do you expect to have if you’re going to try and take intellectual short cuts that save a minimal amount of time yet have a substantially lower quality of thought.
You are demonstrating exactly the point I was conveying – you’re being intellectually lazy and stubborn.
You have made some good points with the first part of your argument, but your last part seems to have missed my point.
“In addition I replaced a two word term with two words, SLIGHTLY altered the structure of the first couple words so that it would make sense, and now you’re complaining that it’s too much work? The changes I made took relatively little time, but took more thought on what meaning I wanted to convey. Such thought means that I communicate the idea more clearly and allow a better discussion to occur after I’ve said my piece. What kind of outcome do you expect to have if you’re going to try and take intellectual short cuts that save a minimal amount of time yet have a substantially lower quality of thought.”
I wasn’t complaining about adding a word or two, I was merely arguing that writing out that whole bit, every time I wanted to communicate that general idea, is foolish. It makes sense to use the full and complete explanation when wishing to attract converts to the cause, but between those of us who already understand most of the concepts, this is not necessary. For the sake of ease of communication, surely we should have some shorthand method of referencing the idea?
My problem with the term is that it could easily be confused with ‘feminist imperative’ which is different. I think folks here can make a distinction that the overall feminine imperative of securing a mate, producing the best children possible, and securing provision/protection stuff, but that’s quite different from Feminist agenda such as VAWA,, divorce theft, and general female dominance, etc.
It does so happen that there are many women who oppose feminism, and it was much more so back towards the beginning of the movement. There are some women commenting here that oppose it as well, so it’s no good to lump feminine/feminist imperative together (as we know, feminists are often quite masculine)
That being the case, terms like feminine biology or feminist agenda work just as well, in my mind, and preserve the distinction. Given all that, while I’d regard the term somewhat superfluous at this point, on the occasion I see the word used around the ‘sphere, the context that it is in usually implies its meaning, which might be as good of a clarification, case by case, as we could ask for, if we do not have a universal definition- which will probably be as elusive as defining terms such as ‘game’.
“My problem with the term is that it could easily be confused with ‘feminist imperative’ which is different. I think folks here can make a distinction that the overall feminine imperative of securing a mate, producing the best children possible, and securing provision/protection stuff, but that’s quite different from Feminist agenda such as VAWA,, divorce theft, and general female dominance, etc. ”
Reading this, and looking back to all of the comments made in this thread so far, including mine, gives me pause. Leap of Beta and Matt A do have a point. There are simply too many possible definitions for the same words being thrown around to facilitate true communication.
Where Solomon would use imperative, I would use impulse or drive. I understand what he is trying to convey, but others might not. Unfortunately, I don’t see how a single standard could develop, given the De-centralized nature of the community.
“Feminine Imperative” as a way of how all women gain benifits at the expense of all men sounds like the MRA version of the Evil Patriarchy to me. Because of that, I’m extremely suspicious of it, and tend to agree with Matt, CL and 7 man – it all is just the result of how the sexes naturally are, and they like to take care of their personal interests.
I also don’t see how patriarchy (the western type, with the monogamy) is the work of MI. Why would men cooperate with each other so well in the past, and can’t now? Why would the more powerful men of the past agree to only have one woman, so some omega he doesn’t know can have one, too? Rich people of the past are not known for being generous. In Muslim countries, in fact they don’t.
Western patriarchy seems like MI and FI meeting each other half way.
As for the rules of discourse debate… Once you dillute your message with emotions, the message changes. Once you attack, the conversation partner might decide your goal is really to insult them, and waste their time. I totally agree we should all have thick skin and always steer the conversation towards the actual topic&arguments. But it seems irrational to argue in an insulting manner and expect people to remain 100% factual and never complain about your tone. This is especially true if we’re talking about criticism. Personal attack-style criticism tends to make people dig their heels in, not help them or convince them you’re right. “But this makes them feminine and thin-skinned” is not gonna change that. If you can’t deal with that, it’s actually your problem, because you’re the one who wants to change minds. Perhaps it’s time to learn some flexibility.
Having said that, I still agree with Matt more.
@ Donal
“For the sake of ease of communication, surely we should have some shorthand method of referencing the idea?”
I believe the differences between ‘ease’ and ‘brief’ are being confused. If you have to explain yourself in follow up comments, then you have avoided having an ease of communication in order to have a brief communication. Inadvertently you’re also hindering any communication that would follow.
Every time the term is used, in any post or comment, either assumptions have to be made by readers or the writer has to clarify which of the plethora of uses he’s putting the word to. Sometimes both are required by exceptionally murky writers
Terminology as such lends itself amazingly well to technical manuals on intellectually shallow instructions or concepts. It does so because terminology doesn’t like to be questioned and doesn’t lend itself to such questioning. If the manosphere wants to write shallow how-to manuals on how to be shallow in masculinity, then by all means it should continue using feminine imperative.
I’m not saying that avoiding such terminology will be easy, as you say it will indeed be harder. But I believe it will allow men to pursue their goals more effectively. It’s one of those things, like going to the gym to lift weights, that isn’t easy but is worth the extra effort. I’d rather not find shallow concepts on how to be a shallow man or create a shallow society, family, business, or goal. No man I know does want such shallowness. So why use shallow modes of communication to truncate deep ideas or concepts rather than use the deeper tools already constructed for us?
“I also don’t see how patriarchy (the western type, with the monogamy) is the work of MI. Why would men cooperate with each other so well in the past, and can’t now? Why would the more powerful men of the past agree to only have one woman, so some omega he doesn’t know can have one, too? Rich people of the past are not known for being generous. In Muslim countries, in fact they don’t.
Western patriarchy seems like MI and FI meeting each other half way.”
I see monogamy (lifetime, male induced) as a compromise between the two impulses or desires of men. Those would be polygny and paternity, or the desire to mate with as many women as possible and the desire to be assured of having fathered children who thrive, respectively. You give up on the former to protect the latter.
As for why powerful men would agree to it, you forget that they are a distinct minority. Perhaps 10 to 20%. If the rest of the men in a community decided to enact lifetime monogamy, then those men would have to choice: accept it, or resist and risk oblivion. Of course, that doesn’t mean that if those men think they can get away it, they wouldn’t pursue polygamy.
@ Donal
“Unfortunately, I don’t see how a single standard could develop, given the De-centralized nature of the community.”
As with anything in life. A mere leading by example is a wonderful way to do things. Normally I would simply do such (and have been the last couple weeks since I learned this lesson myself). Simply not using the term feminine imperative in a discussion, but replacing it with the concept that it usually is replacing, will do the trick. Even in discussions it’s already being used in.
The stronger frame will win. Truth and depth of thought will almost always have a stronger frame, and men generally will gravitate towards deeper thoughts, meanings, and discussions out of pure enjoyment if nothing else.
Your logic is sound. Perhaps the solution is to use the phrase, and then include the definition with it every time, at least until a standard does develop.
@ Emma
“I also don’t see how patriarchy (the western type, with the monogamy) is the work of MI. Why would men cooperate with each other so well in the past, and can’t now? Why would the more powerful men of the past agree to only have one woman, so some omega he doesn’t know can have one, too?”
The reason why is there isn’t a male imperative. Depending on if you’re Christian or Atheist there are two main beliefs for how this came about.
Religion – God gave men and women a wonderful model on how to follow God’s plan. This model gave them as individuals more happiness, health, and satisfaction than not following it, which led to its spread through out the world.
Atheist – Men and women evolved from apes. During that evolution their biological strengths and evolution led to psychological and societal evolution as well. Over time the best social structure for a civilization was found – that of agricultural societies based around lifelong monogamy with the male as head of household. This can be shown through a study of history as agriculture spread through out the world first, then followed by lifelong monogamy, as the societies that followed the combination of those social practices out produced and overran societies that didn’t. Whether you believe in the Bible or not – the practices it preaches are the same ones that have led to the current social evolution we see in the world today.
Or atleast, those are the short, bastardized descriptions that I’ve been able to concisely communicate.
@ Donal
You can use it as you want. As I said in my first comment, I’ve found it helpful in the past and done exactly as you say of using it once or twice, then never again.
However, I know that I’ll avoid doing so in the future because I’ve seen it used horribly and I’ve also seen how not using it helps men achieve their goals of communication.
I know that after this thread, unless the topic of linguistics and terminology comes up again somewhere AND captures my desire to discuss it again… I won’t use the term again. I will simply do what I advocated above; replace the terminology with the concept the author/discussion is using it for. Then I’ll move forward with that concept. Either the strength of such actions will win through or they won’t; just like they either will or won’t in this discussion.
Either way though, I know that both my thought process and understanding of linguistics have benefited from this discussion and from not having used the term in the last two weeks. Your mileage may very.
And I’m sure most men here will leap for joy at me never discussing this topic again, hah!
Anyways, I’m off this thread for awhile. Gonna go buy a bottle of wine and chill with my roomie.
If anyone here ever needs to reference these ideas in a format that isn’t a discussion, I distilled my thoughts and comments down to a post I put up on my blog.
Thanks for the thoughts and discussion everyone.
“Why would men cooperate with each other so well in the past, and can’t now? Why would the more powerful men of the past agree to only have one woman, so some omega he doesn’t know can have one, too?”
Because unless a society reaches a certain level of technological progress, it can only perpetuate itself by harnessing to the maximum the labor of ALL men. Today in the West it is largely taken for granted that the human potential of most beta males to become workers, soldiers and husbands can be safely squandered through affirmative action, sexual harassment laws etc. in order to benefit women. Those men don’t matter anymore; if they’re unsexy, they’re judged completely useless. But that wasn’t always the case. There was a time when every man was needed as a soldier/farmer/worker to benefit and defend society.
And the only way to harness the full potential of all men is through enforced lifelong monogamy, because otherwise most men won’t see a prize in life worth working themselves to death for, killing and dying for. That’s why the top men enforced monogamy in the past, and they still do in some less developed areas of the globe. They didn’t want to put it with it; the omega males didn’t want to put up with it either, because they resent becoming a worker drone with obligations; most women didn’t want to put up with it due to hypergamy. But they all had to put up with it if they wanted to live in a stable, prosperous society. But today they can achieve that without it, or at least they think they’ll be able to achieve that for a lengthy period without it. Thus most beta males are jettisoned because they aren’t needed for anything important anymore.
The same applies to women, although in different ways. There was a time when all women had to use 100% of their reproductive capacity just to keep the human race from going extinct, because child mortality rates were so high, plus adults regularly died en masse due to famine, epidemics, war etc. But none of that applies in the West anymore, so women don’t have to use 100% of their reproductive capacity anymore; they only need 20% or 30%, some of them don’t need to at all. Thus the cultural obligation of young women to become wives and mothers has disappeared. Yet another nail in the coffin of Marriage 1.0.
A stable, prosperous, advancing society primarily benefits women and their children, since they’re very vulnerable and defenceless otherwise. If we keep that in mind, we see how the feminine imperative functions. There was a time when it needed Marriage 1.0 to benefit itself. Now it needs Marriage 2.0 for that purpose. Should Western Civ collapse, the feminine imperative will return to utilizing Marriage 1.0 for its own defence and benefit. And no matter what it uses as a tool, the lie is always the same: the primary beneficiaries are men. That’s what men were told about Marriage 1.0. That’s what they’re told today about Marriage 2.0, no-fault divorce, the Pill, legalized abortion and the Sexual Revolution. It’s all a lie, and will always remain a lie, because the feminine imperative always protects itself through mainpulation and lies.
If Jesus were to come back in the next hour, I’m guessing your priorities would be different, and you would be blogging about different issues. How do you know Jesus won’t come back in the next hour? We are living in the last days, as the world around us is exploding in unrest, wars and poverty. The church can scarcely afford to waste time on dating and gender war nonsense.
brendan — Monogamy overwhelmingly benefitted the male sex, as a whole, against the interests of the female sex — it subordinates the female sex interests to the male sex interests. That matches the Bible as well. It isn’t an equality or a compromise, it’s the actual MI manifesting itself as God’s will — that is, not to the exclusion of the FI, but in collaboration with the FI where the MI is the leader.
yeah — God is not an Equalist, he’s the Father, and Christ is not androgynous, he is a man (Son of Man ie Son of the species, the select of God)
relatedly, it’s not fair for folks to blame females for hypergamous instincts — it’s part of their proper Godly and bio natures to be selective before mating
however, that selectivity must operate within a general structure and attitude of obedience towards men, so that the hypergamous instinct, useful in moderation, doesnt become the matriararchal cultures we now see
only a biblical theocracy has the power and continuity to overcome the collective clout of Team Woman and Enablers, and the only theocracy that can be trusted is one w Jesus in charge, leaving us preparatory and small tasks
@GregC
I’m all for scratching out “feminine imperative”, and calling it FEMINISM.
Too simple.
We have basic optimal mating strategies that are sex specific and conflicting.
On top of this, we have a cultural layer that interprets these strategies, sugarcoats the somewhat nasty conclusions and presents a narrative of how “men and women are”.
From that cultural understanding of the sexes, we form legal and institutionalized bonds that try to reach a compromise between the interests of men and women in a way that benefits society.
The first level is largely locked in, mostly subject of evo psych. The second level is where the feminine imperative resides in western – particularly Anglo-Saxon – civilization. And feminism, of course, is the political expression, on the third level, of that feminine imperative.
Thinking about it this way is helpful, because it readily explains why people who would recoil in horror from being called feminists are still serving the feminist interest and carrying water for it in such astonishing numbers.
@JHJ
The simple explanation is that we’ve all been steeped in it. Most haven’t thought about it much and so do it unconsiously. It’s not a biological ‘imperative’ or some kind of evil desire of women. The ‘FI’ is paranoid conspiracy territory.
If you want to have a conspiracy to look into, look at how we’ve all vbeen steeped in feminism. Feminism was not due to organic development; it was fertilized.
@Brendan on January 19, 2013 at 9:21 am, @Dalrock
tl;dr
Just kidding, a good description and analysis for the intellectually minded.
However, the 30-sec “elevator speech” version of it might be
Feminism is the set of laws in Western culture first developed to “make women equal to men” but which really said “all sexes are equal, but some sexes are more equal than others”.
The Feminine Imperative is the codification not into law, but into Western culture and into its customs, of the right of women to endlessly indulge their rationalization hamsters and their hypergamy, without individual consequence, supposedly because women are the fairer, gentler, nobler, sex, but really because the men say to themselves, “If I’m a really, really, really nice and sensitive guy, I might get some.”(*) The women get turned off by this and then set out to screw the biggest douche bag they can find, and then blame men.
An even simpler description of the Feminine Imperative is the “right” of women to act like spoiled children, because “You Go G’rllll” and “Women Are Just As Good As Men, Only Better” and then to hide behind their own skirts when it blows up in their face.
(*) I believe it was the Sweet Potato Pie Queens who opined that a woman today can get anything she wants out of a man by merely promising him a blow job. She doesn’t ever have to actually deliver or anything, as long as she can look sincere enough when she says it. I would suggest that the male tendency to do, suffer, or allow anything because “Well, I *might* get some” should be called the male rationalization hamster.
Slumlord pointed out the cult of nice. For those that are interested, I recommend listening to Ann Barnhardt’s explanation of the evil of nice.
By the Grace of God, I am not a nice person.
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Was Chris Muir reading here yesterday?
http://www.daybydaycartoon.com
He refers to it as feminine values. I don’t like like the term values as values tend to be conflated as something inherently good. Though it’s dictionary definition is quite good:
value: The regard that something is held to deserve; the importance or preciousness of something: “your support is of great value”.
@Gabriella on January 19, 2013 at 10:37 am, @dalrock
You have some *excellent* points which bear repeating and amplification.
I want to expand on this idea using ecomomics as an analogy.
Women are a product. The “imperative” is to up their value. They do this by increasing their individual value, and cooperating with others to improve the value of people like them. Women want the collective value of women to improve so that they can attract the best buyers (men..many of whom would rather rent). Some women think it would be much better to not be a seller at all, and to instead be a buyer who can choose whether to buy or rent. So instead of upping their own personal value, they try and devalue the men.
So too are men a product. This is the “Sexual Marketplace” or “Marriage Marketplace”.
So the imperative is to increase value, but the strategy can be either to improve on ones own product value, or to devalue the buyers.
Note by analogy with your paragraph above, women can devalue men as a class (Feminism) or the individual man (nuclear rejection).
However, women do not in fact do this to *all* man; in fact, paradoxically, despite the mocking of the claim that “NAWALT” , it really is true that “NAMALT”. In particular women desire “alpha males” and they do what they can as women, to bid up the price of individual alpha males and that of alpha males as a class. Part of the way they do this is to bid *down* the price for lesser males, helping the alphas to stand out even more.
In times past women could not be the buyers because the consequence of easy sex was too steep. If they were saddled with a baby from a cad they could be a permanently valueless product.
That is not the case today. You have a certain percentage of men who are still buyers (the Alpha’s) and the rest are sellers..trying to sell their product to women. Any woman..even the ones that in times past would be valueless.
Yes — but the flip side of this is, since women exchange sex for commitment, the ability of women to have sex without consequences has done two things:
1) it has (counterintuitively) devalued ALL women: since women can have indiscriminate sex, then (on paper) men think to themselves, “Hey, maybe *I* can get lucky” and decide they don’t *have* to give commitment in order to expect sex. And men (in the mass) tend to treat all women like that.
2) This especially hits the “nice guys” and the “good girls”: what had been their brand differentiation, and chief selling feature (virtue) is now seen not as something of value, but an added *cost*.
3) The other reason this hits marriage and LTRs, is that pre-sluttery, most women were constrained by biology to seek only one, or a very few, partners, on pain of being alone and unsupported; and, to get married YOUNG. But now, the logistics of the marriage market have been *replaced* by a new market, that of sexual hedonism. The result is, not only are women “free” to try multiple sexual partners, but since there is so much apparent promiscuity (“everyone *else* is doing it, I don’t want to look unusual”), chaste women no longer have either the societal expectation to back them up, nor do they have the power of withholding sex to keep men in line and winnow out the cads to find men worthy of commitment and trust (some other slut will just do the guy and leave the chaste woman out in the cold). The effect that this has on men, is that they no longer have to pretend to toe the line, since if girl X who they just met doesn’t put out quickly, they can drop her and find one who *will*; and the corollary to that, is that men develop the expectation that they can hit on women for sex indiscriminately, INSTEAD OF marriage 1.0 “courting” — not only has the nature of the approach changed, but men are now conditioned to approach many, many women, since there is very little chance of any permanence to the relation anyway.
The unfortunate side-effect is that women may have the options and value of a buyer, but they have the self-worth of a person of low value..because nobody bought them. They were created to be sellers..not buyers (or renters)… so the “buyer/renter” position makes them miserable. The lower their self-worth plummets, the more they compensate by trying to imitate the Alpha males.
This is the money quote, and the crux of the matter. The fundamental asymmetry between the sexes is — “a lock which yields to any key is useless”: women have to be selective, and the best way to do that is for women to BE sellers: to the highest bidder. But the change from the marriage marketplace to the sexual marketplace, has changed women from sellers to buyers: and the more the woman bids with her only currency (sexual congress), the *less* valuable she becomes.
There is a great analogy here to economics: inflation (too many dollars chasing too few goods).
In the marriage marketplace, there was a balance between buyers and sellers, since people ended up in LTR monogamous relationships; but in the sexual marketplace, people can have multiple short term partners; which means the supply of men willing to engage in an LTR plummets (and the supply of tingle-inducing alphas has always been low by definition).
The result is “too many women chasing too few men” with the result that the value of each woman plummets.
@grey_whiskers
Bam! Not sure I totally agree, but it seems pretty good to me.
@Stingray
Thanks for that link. He’s got some deep theology in that comic.
@grey_whiskers
That is a WoT (Wall of Text). Consider learning to use white space and better formatting to make what you write easier to understand.
He’s got some deep theology in that comic.
Sarcasm? If yes, it’s a comic. It’s not meant to be deep. Who’s going to reach more people? Those who scratch the surface or those who go over the majorities head? People need to start somewhere and he presents it in a way that many can see.
@Stingray
I was being quite serious.
Cane,
My apologies, then. It can be very difficult to discern over the internet.
Chris is extremely countercultural in a number of ways. Is everyone aware that “Day by Day” is funded solely by subscription monies, for example? He’s not bankrolled by the Gannett chain or some other quasi-state institution, but by individuals. Subscribing isn’t that expensive…
There are ideas routinely found in that comic that are subversive of several modern ideologies.
Many thanks to “Anonymous Reader” and Brendan for suggesting the books “The Fate of Empires” by Sir John Glubb, and “Sex and Culture” by JD Unwin. Both books can be found using Google. They are gold.
Anon Reader,
I remember the first time he did his yearly fundraising drive. He was merely asking for enough money to get his comic through the rest of the year. I can’t remember the specific details, but I think he only needed a couple hundred dollars. He received so much money in the way of donations that he was able to quite his day job and focus solely on the comic. His drawing dramatically improved with the extra time to dedicate to it and so did the content. Even with the economy tanking, he has still beaten his previous years drive every year. Plus, the things he gives to his donators are amazing. He seems like a very upstanding man.
People still read Matt? Amazing.
@7man on January 20, 2013 at 9:00 am:
“Wall of Text”…
Sorry, I’m normally better at formatting than that.mea culpa.
@slumlord
This was the main thrust of the OP. I see three different things involved with the discussion:
1) The phenomenon itself. There is room to disagree both on the definition of the phenomenon as well as whether it exists or not. From reading the larger comment the above excerpt is from, I am convinced that we agree on the existence of the phenomenon but am not sure if we agree on the definition. I think Rollo’s definition is more expansive, but the part which interests me most is the uncanny tendency we are observing in the west for the feral female mating script to not simply be permitted, but to become the new definition of sexual morality. This goes well beyond tolerance, or “nice”. This is the new moral order being adopted by nearly everyone, secular and Christian alike.
2) The cause of the phenomenon. This could be a mind ray from Mars or a macro effect of individual expressions of the feral female mating script influencing our larger culture. This is interesting to me but I fear the disagreement over this part is causing the very important item #1 to be drowned out.
3) If you agree with item #1, what should we call it? However, the name Rollo has proposed implies the answer to item #2. I can understand the objection to the name for that reason, but without a name discussing the phenomenon is all but impossible. My request would be for those who agree with #1 but disagree with 2 & 3 to propose an alternate term, so that we can at least discuss item #1 (we could then refer to “Rollo’s Feminine Imperative and Slumlord’s X”). The more we discuss item #1 the easier it will get to come to either agreement on item #2 or an understanding on why we disagree.
@grey_whiskers
Apology unnecessary; I am just giving you some constructive criticism so you can better convey your message.
@LastDaysWitness
Your passion in trivializing biblical sexual morality is very telling.
1) The phenomenon itself. There is room to disagree both on the definition of the phenomenon as well as whether it exists or not. From reading the larger comment the above excerpt is from, I am convinced that we agree on the existence of the phenomenon but am not sure if we agree on the definition. I think Rollo’s definition is more expansive, but the part which interests me most is the uncanny tendency we are observing in the west for the feral female mating script to not simply be permitted, but to become the new definition of sexual morality. This goes well beyond tolerance, or “nice”. This is the new moral order being adopted by nearly everyone, secular and Christian alike.
2) The cause of the phenomenon. This could be a mind ray from Mars or a macro effect of individual expressions of the feral female mating script influencing our larger culture. This is interesting to me but I fear the disagreement over this part is causing the very important item #1 to be drowned out.
3) If you agree with item #1, what should we call it? However, the name Rollo has proposed implies the answer to item #2. I can understand the objection to the name for that reason, but without a name discussing the phenomenon is all but impossible. My request would be for those who agree with #1 but disagree with 2 & 3 to propose an alternate term, so that we can at least discuss item #1 (we could then refer to “Rollo’s Feminine Imperative and Slumlord’s X”). The more we discuss item #1 the easier it will get to come to either agreement on item #2 or an understanding on why we disagree.
As I see it, we have several responses out there.
1. It is sophistry, conspiracy theorizing and it simply doesn’t exist, regardless of what you call it. Feminism exists, not this crap you’re making up.
2. It may or may not exist, but it isn’t what you, Rollo, me and others are describing it. (See the various alternatives that have been formulated upthread).
3. If any such thing does exist, it must be described it in much greater detail, with much greater support, backup, verification, vetting, validation and so on before we should even think of considering whether such a thing exists, and whether it is a useful lens in terms of its explanatory capacity and truthfulness, and, even then, we have to seriously consider whether coining a new term for this thing, once it is sufficiently defined, worked out and vetted, is helpful because doing so creates more jargon and makes the idea less accessible to the average reader who isn’t a part of the community (Leap’s perspective, as I read him).
From my perspective, I think it’s quite true that this idea is in its conceptual stages, and that we are, as a community, exploring the idea and working it out. There is a real danger that it becomes a swiss army knife that “explains everything” but doesn’t explain anything really sufficiently well, if we do not continue to discuss and refine it. That’s what we are doing, as I see it, and it is what needs to be done. I hope we continue to do that, despite the constant heckling from the category “1” types.
In terms of the wording, I can see how it can be viewed in a problematic way. The word “imperative” has strong connotations, and even though I myself in my own interpretation of the phenomenon tried to define it in a way that isn’t really the same as those connotations suggest, the connotations are what they are — and can easily get confusing, and get conflated with other things. To the extent that we are going to use a working shorthand while we are developing this idea more fully, it may be best to veer away from “imperative” towards something that is closer to what we seem to be describing (and what we both seem to be seeing).
@ last days witness
If He does come back in the next hour, then it really doesn’t matter whether we are discussing sexual immorality or war. If He tarries, then rampant sexual sin in the Church is at least as good a topic for discussion as war is. Perhaps even better, if one is to believe Matthew 24:6.
I still don’t see what all the sound and fury is about. Surely the FI is just a version of Conquest’s Second Law (“Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing”) — to wit, that any organization that fails to exclude women sooner or later becomes dedicated to advancing the interests of women. And the mechanism seems perfectly obvious to me: Women are more prone to ask for things from men that vice-versa, men are more likely to give things to women than vice-versa, and women are endlessly fascinating to men, and so can command their attention more easily than vice-versa.
As for why the west is more screwed up than the rest of the world vis-a-vis men and women, I’d suggest that its level of fat, stupid, and happy has allowed women there to imagine that it’s more feasible to throw men under the bus than would seem plausible to their sisters in more, uh, “exciting” parts of the world that lack such an expansive (if leveraged-to-the-hilt, but then women aren’t the most forward-looking of creatures) welfare state.
Dalrock, Sunshine, I know I’m quotable, but don’t go designating my work by chapter and verse (yet). Your outsized reaction to my quibbles has already inflated my ego far too much than is good for my soul.
Yours in Christ,
Matt 9:9-13
“My problem with the term is that it could easily be confused with ‘feminist imperative’ which is different. I think folks here can make a distinction that the overall feminine imperative of securing a mate, producing the best children possible, and securing provision/protection stuff, but that’s quite different from Feminist agenda such as VAWA,, divorce theft, and general female dominance, etc. ”
There is no separation or distinction.
Women have chosen to overthrow the protections of the Bill of Rights to keep men enslaved to the FI in the face of ever growing disincentives.
Using the threatpoint of ever present implication of proxy violence by the State,they modify normal male responses to one of ever increasing servitude and submission to avoid said proxy violence.
Remove the unjust application of law,the barrel of the policeman’s gun and males wouldst once again act like males.
The FI enjoys force multipliers and has no regard for genuine justice,honor,or loyalty,it only seeks MORE by ANY means.
Deny them sperm,wallet and your name.
Avoid unjust persecution,and if forced to interact on uneven ground video record all your activities.
Then you may have a chance by proving your innocence,as you no longer enjoy the presumption of innocence,how is that not direct coercion by the FI?.
It is thuggery cloaked in a pink glove.
Billions to this industry,billions!
Don’t be another victim to the misandrist VAWA money driven,anti-God,anti-family court machine.
Twenty wrote:
I’ve always known this as (John) O’Sullivan’s First Law, which has a provenance. Conquest’s Three Laws look like an invention of the blogosphere, at least after a cursory search. None refer to a primary source but rather circle back to other blogs.
O’Sullivan declared that law in 1989, and I doubt he would attempt to steal the notion without credit from Conquest — a plagiarism that would have long been exposed by now.
Matt
“Western society is obsessed with the well-being of women to the point of mass neurosis.”
– David Thomas
“Feminine imperative”, like “female solipsism”, “hypergamy”, “red pill”, “gina tingles”, etc. are all an attempt to obfuscate by converting thinking people into apparent morons blabbering nonsense no one else can make any heads or tails of.
lzozozoz
King A: Never before in the history of mankind (and owmankindz zlzozlzo) has one used so many words
to say
so
little
lzozozzlzozlzlzozz
Read further in O’Sullivan’s piece and you can see the origin of the confusion. It looks like O’Sullivan’s was grafted onto Conquest’s and made into a list by borrowing “Everyone is conservative about what he knows best” from some unknown source. It all smells fishy.
Scholars, get to the bottom of this! The provenance and correct attribution of an idea matters, and not just for trivia/curiosity’s sake, like I’ve been trying to say. You lose connection to your sources, you lose the foundation of your argument. Then you’re out there floating like an unmoored weather balloon, like a college sophomore who thinks he proves a precept by asserting it.
Matt
Dalrock wrote:
Not quite, sparky. I make no claims to leading anyone here, don’t insult me. No man of quality could properly lead a rabble of holier-than-thou whiners who get spooked by the first particle of criticism that gets through their fastidiously maintained, multiple layers of ego protection.
What gives you the impression that my joining this discourse indicates an attempt to lead anyone anywhere, other than to my side of the controversy? Who is “imagin[ing]” what here?
I didn’t send you a “new set of rules” that make me “the winner” ex post facto. That piece didn’t describe rules so much as an ethos, and it is an ancient ethos detailing how men actually communicate with one another, in contrast to women and their soft-spoken imitators. I made reference to a third party to help you understand my method of communication better. I am not engaged in a rhetorical contest, and I couldn’t care less how your butthurt audience regards me.
Finally, if you yourself led by example, you wouldn’t have to call me out on my secret motivations. You would “instead have won us all over” and dominated the conversation and ignored me — as you attempted to do at first. But no; you offer some clever explanatory prestidigitation in an attempt at a gotcha!, which only underscores how insecure you are about losing control of the direction of the conversation on your own blog. Right now your example leads others to deploy superficial snark as a means to enlightenment (or self-satisfaction).
I am not here to sabotage but participate. You seem to confuse the latter for the former when that participation takes the form of sharp and unyielding disagreement.
So instead of talking about me, offer rhetoric and substance to nullify my words, if you can. Or censor me — show them who’s the real boss. But whatever you do, don’t draw up theories of motivations because they are likelier to expose your own low intentions than they are to call me to account, particularly when your guessing has missed the mark badly.
Matt
I’ve always known this as (John) O’Sullivan’s First Law, which has a provenance.
Your bleating, as usual, adds nothing of value to the conversation. It advances no one’s understanding of anything. If you disagree, please (a.) prove (not just speculate) as to proper attribution, and (b.) explain how in this particular case the change in attribution makes any difference to the point I was making. If you can do both, perhaps I might see you as something other than an attention-whoring pedantic little twat. But probably not.
The important point isn’t who advanced the original idea of which I’m proposing a variant, the important point is whether or not the variant has predictive and/or explanatory power. Do you address that question? Of course you don’t. That would require you to say something of substance, instead of your usual time-wasting, process-based, endlessly self-congratulatory admonishments as to how everyone else is to carry on his discussions.
Scholars, get to the bottom of this! The provenance and correct attribution of an idea matters, and not just for trivia/curiosity’s sake, like I’ve been trying to say. You lose connection to your sources, you lose the foundation of your argument.
Yes! Everyone pay attention to what Matt thinks is important! He’s leading this discussion! His approval is the intellectual lodestar of not just all our discussions, but, indeed, of all discussions everywhere about everything! How could you even question a man who correctly points out that the value of an idea is directly related to who first advanced it?
And, of course, do you “get to the bottom of this” yourself? F*ck no. You just do some half-assed Googling, draw some preliminary conclusions that (conveniently) allow you the opportunity for some autoerotic backpatting, and demand that someone else look into the (tangential) matter that you’ve decided we should all be concerned with.
On the upside, I always enjoy the opportunity to insult pretentious jackasses, so thanks for that.
I’m thinking that maybe the feminine imperative is subconscious purposeful childlike behavior in women, so as to see how good of a disciplinarian/leader/protector that the man is. that in any culture, age, epoch, or government, women will be grouped with the children, and any battles must be fought against other men. “Alpha men” do what they feel like, so they appear to have the power. If you can walk into the enemys camp and do what you feel like, that makes you powerful. the “beta men” are powerless to stop them in our society (assault?). I wonder how “Alpha”, they would seem if they got a good a** kicking once in a while. And I wonder how “beta” the beta men would seem if they delivered that a** kicking. So basically, the feminine imperative is that men can only dominate women but can never fight battles with them. Men can only fight battles with other men. Just a thought I had.
it is sad that what could be an enlightening discussion (and is in some parts) has become so thoroughly unpleasant because of fighting over silliness. (and yes I mean matt king, though not him alone). i’m not a scholar (at least not on an anonymous internet blog). I’m not british so I could care less about the british and their system of argumentation. I really don’t care much about the rules of rhetoric and debate etc. Sure these are important in their place, but I wonder if this is ‘their place’. What is the goal? A pissing contest? Defining feminine imperative? Insulting each other? it is all very tiresome and scrolling through so many comments that add nothing to the conversation is a time waster for those of us who have little time to waste.
The Feminine vs Feminist goals are very much at odds. Like GreyWhiskers said..Women are devalued as a result of Feminism.
This is why there is a lot of contention between Traditionalists and Feminists. Why should a man buy/marry one of us when they could just rent a bunch of uber-sexy skank hoes? Why should they keep their eyes on us when their is a plethora of porn on the internet to look at..with bodies most women can’t compete with after a few babies. And lets not even get started on all the women who see our husbands wedding ring as a challenge. Pre-selection bias + lose morals means that being married is a DHV for a man.
What Trad women want is to be considered a prize…but instead we have people on one side making marriage seem like a SCAM, and the other side is offering No-Strings-Attached sexual buffets….so that what Trad women are offering is treated as a joke.
I was just talking to an acquaintance who told me her friend with 11 children was left by her husband for another woman. It is just a reminder that the deeper you in you get the more screwed you are when some other woman comes and makes your man a better offer. The competition is just crazy..it makes me often wish I had been a nun instead.
M King:
Orotund.
Portentous.
Condescending.
Sesquipedalian.
Inflexible.
Aggressive.
Narcissistic.
Persistent.
Grammatically erratic (very, very occasionally, so it’s not like he just don’t give a fuck)
Ten bucks says Asperger out the wazoo?
A tiny individual human tragedy, no doubt, but no less annoying for that.
And this too is the result of the collapse of marriage due to the feminine imperative (or feminist or multi-fem or whatever we’re calling it these days). There have always been men who behaved badly — horribly so, but such men were typically rare and suffered a lot of social penalty for their bad behaviour. Likewise there have always been women who behaved badly and they too paid the price. Now of course the people at the greatest risk in the system is those (men and women) who do the right thing. Bad money has chased out the good in the marriage market and no one wants to be the sucker stuck with the bum deal when the thing ultimately collapses.
@Matthew King (King A) on January 20, 2013 at 1:19 pm, @Dalrock on January 20, 2013 at 1:49 PM —
I’ve been lurking for a few months now and only occasionally posting. I’ve been too busy learning the lay of the land to pay attention to much of the interpersonal dynamics. But I notice that Matt seems to be “coming down from on high” and drawing mixed praise — even if people agree with his sentiments, his delivery is costing him. And that’s rather odd for someone who is approaching from a Christian / Marriage 1.0 perspective as opposed to a Roosh / Roissy perspective.
Matt, what I am reading into that post of yours at 1:19 is a call for a standard formalized set of terminology; agreed, such a thing is useful for analysis, and the lack of such can lead to joint navel-gazing / turf wars between people who at least should be allies of convenience, when they ought to be tackling the common enemy.
But — may I suggest two reasons this is unlikely, at least at this stage of affairs. The first is that Game / SMV is essentially is psychosocial phenomenon: which means that there are as many combinations and permutations as there are male and female pairs to interact. So if one is trying to generalize (say, by analogy to cladistics in biology without the benefit of accompanying DNA mapping), one runs into the problem that what manosphere commenter “A” calls “essential” to understanding the interaction between a couple, another commenter “B” considers “window dressing”. And this is often because comenter “A” is concerned with the interpersonal details (how did the guy get her attention / take her home / overcome last minute resistance / break up and spin another plate), commenter “B” is concerned with teaching other men about the rationalization hamster, or the long-term consequences of hypergamy. Since “A” and “B” like two blind men each exploring a portion of the elephant, it will take some time until *all* the relevant portions are even identified (let alone assigned proper relative importance).
The second reason follows from the first. In the earliest stages of any new intellectual discovery, people have the first glimmer of insight into a subject, and form the crudest models. In order to discuss with each other, they define things in terms of the early models, notwithstanding the fact that the models may be rendered totally invalid, or completely inapplicable, by later insight. As an example, in atomic and molecular spectroscopy, where the lines representing absorption/re-emission of photons by electrons, were related to different quantum numbers of the electrons. The electron orbitals were initially labeled “s” for spectral, but then more orbitals were discovered, corresponding to different rotational angular momentum. These were called “p” for principal, and then “d” for diffuse, and “f” for “fine” — if people had already known electronic structure theory and quantum mechanics when they first saw the emissions and absorptions, they no doubt would have given the sets of orbitals different names; but they didn’t. Hindsight is always 20-20.
Have patience, grasshopper.
@grey_whiskers
Women need a cartel to get this back, a Sex Cartel.
Gabriella, you make a lot of good points. Lets flip it around for a man’s perspective.
Why should a man buy/marry a woman when the woman can just decide a few years later that she is unhaaaaapy and take the house and kids? Why should women keep their eyes on us when there is a plethora of past boyfriends/FWB on the internet to look at… with alpha traits most men can’t compete with after years of beta indoctrination. And lets not even get started on all the men who see our wife’s wedding ring as a challenge. Hypergamy + loose morals means that being married is a minefield for a man.
Whatever disagreements that might result over some ephemeral concept of a Female/Feminine Imperative, there can be no doubt that Feminism has hurt men and women equally.
@Donal
You fell for Gabriella’s reframe. How in Hell is a woman losing her husband equal to a man losing his wife, his kids, his income, and his house? Keep in mind, this is roughly a 30% / 70% instigating party process; with a 10% / 90% outcome, respectively.
No man of quality could properly lead a rabble of holier-than-thou whiners who get spooked by the first particle of criticism that gets through their fastidiously maintained, multiple layers of ego protection.
A man of quality would not listen to your bullshit for 5 minutes before he was fed up enough to kick your ass.
I didn’t say it was equal. I shared the perspective of a female who is at odds with feminism for various reasons….the biggest reason being that feminsim devalues what I have to offer a man.
@empath
Starve the Beast…No Food for Trolls
@Cane
I was going to point out that you missed my re-frame of her re-frame, but now I think I understand what you are aiming for. Is the trap you are pointing out my statement that feminism has hurt men and women equally? Because my operating assumption has been that feminism has hurt men more in the short run, but in the long run would be an absolute disaster for women. Far more than it would for men.
Which, now that I really give it thought, means that feminism hasn’t hurt men and women equally, depending on what point of the curve we are on. Which raises a good question… how far along are we on this path to destruction?
Anyone else think it funny that Matt said he (the British) considers debate a sport, or am I the only one?
@Donal
The end of your argument was what Gabriella was after–though she may not be exactly aware of it. The blood of millions of father-child relationships runs in the street, but you closed your argument with a few sentences about “equal pain” so as to show Gabriella that you were on her side, too.
That’s what a woman’s “But I know this one girl…” reframe does. It is an emotional sidetrack from the real problem, to what she wants to care about instead. You got punk’d.
@Gabriella
I didn’t say it was equal.
I didn’t say you said it was equal. That wouldn’t have been a reframe, but a rebuttal.
@Cane
The worst part is that her comment wasn’t responsible for that. There are still traces of the Blue Pill in my system that I don’t notice most of the time. Hopefully it won’t take a lifetime to purge them…
For all you truth seekers, this is an incredible talk from Jordan Peterson. At least listen from around 21:40, when he talks about having a priori ideas that you believe are the truth, and how that makes it difficult to take correction and make minor adjustments.
I do think we are headed towards a dystopian future that *may* be worse for women than it is for men…only because male labor will always be needed but if women are not needed for procreation than they are little more than societal baggage. I wrote about that in an old TC article A Handmaids Tale.
But my point in sharing the feminine perspective or “frame” is to show how the feminist goals are at odds with the goals of traditional woman whose main goal is to be of high value to a man and to have her children well provided for.
And that goal is very much threatened. Anecdotally speaking, the majority of my female friends who married young and had more than 3 children have had unmarried skanks try to seduce their husbands (some with success, others not). Home-wrecking is a SPORT for the modern women, and my husband has been a target more than once. If I was ever a feminist I have definitely become progressively less feminist as I have seen how it threatens everything I hold dear.
Still fairly new to this site, but the more I read the more I think: “Damn, poor bastards.” I don’t know everyone here, but is anyone in a solid relationship that works they way they’d like? Getting sex pretty much whenever/however they want, content, happy, at rest, etc. I read people like that bloviating Matthew King dude and my first reaction is that this poor bastard is not getting ANY and is thoroughly frustrated.
Matt, I’m a few comments behind, but I cannot wait to chime in. I had been an admirer of yours from afar a couple months back, but I am now confused. Are you conducting some sort of experiment? Are trying to see how much shit testing of Dalrock you can get away with before he bans you? Seems like “suicide by moderator”. I’d rather you wouldn’t. Not that I’m anybody to you.
DJ, many of us are regular folks. The issues are actually real, if you can stomach the bloviating its a great place to read and learn things that maybe you haven’t heard before. The Matt King types can chase off readers who can find that kind of stuff on a gazillion blogs.
One of the pitfalls of having written for as long as I have is that you have to keep reinitiating those unfamiliar with your core work over and over again. The main reason I started my blog was to collect and develop the principles and ideas I’d been discussing for the past 12 years on forums like SoSuave, as part of my area of interest in behavioral psychology when I was at university, and from my experiences in peer counseling.
What prompted me to collect all of this was the repetitions of common debates I’d get into and end up c&p’ing ideas I’d developed years earlier in order to catch the participants up to where I was as far as my ideas had developed.
Now that I’m into the 2nd year, 2 million visitors and approaching 300 posts, of Rational Male I’m running into the same problems again. So I get the familiar accusations of not having thought through some aspect of a concept that I actually did several years prior and have built upon those conclusions.
So when I read things like “Rollo knows his shit, but he never addresses issues A, B & C so I disagree,..” I have to grin and bear it, and link the essays where I actually do address issues A, B & C. So in the interests of getting everyone up to speed here are the pertinent links most readers are simply too lazy to look up:
https://rationalmale.wordpress.com/2011/12/20/the-feminine-reality/
https://rationalmale.wordpress.com/2011/12/21/fem-centrism/
https://rationalmale.wordpress.com/2011/09/07/the-feminine-mystique/
https://rationalmale.wordpress.com/2011/10/03/war-brides/
And just to address Dr. Helen’s soul mate mythology:
https://rationalmale.wordpress.com/2011/08/30/there-is-no-one/
https://rationalmale.wordpress.com/2011/11/10/good-girls-do/
Other way around. When you work in the liquor industry, weekends tend to be your work days.
@Dalrock on January 20, 2013 at 3:22 PM
Women need a cartel to get this back, a Sex Cartel.
Thanks for that interesting link (it’s always depressing to find out that one has been scooped intellectually, Ecclesiastes notwithstanding; it’s even worse to find out one has been scooped by one’s ideological enemies on the very ground of contention).
Anyway — the idea of a cartel leads directly to Game Theory (the Mathematician Nash, not the Manosphere Roosh) and prisoner’s dilemma: with a cartel, the first person to break the embargo makes out like a bandit, and everyone else gets hosed. Do you remember the response to
The Sex Strike? (Yes, the link was closed; it got flamed to a crisp in short order.)
Speaking of Game theory, I am tempted to wonder whether both Marriage 1.0 and the current hedonistic SMP are something like Nash equilibria — the difference being that the participants are not discrete individuals, but populations which are being depleted (by marriage or old age) and replenished (by kids growing up and entering the marketplace). If the latter is true, one way to destabilize the current situation is to reach the young in time so they will not play by the current rules: both MGTOW and Game seem to be efforts to accomplish this…
And one other point — perhaps what we are seeing with the inflation of the price of sex with sluts (inflation applied to sexual access) is the popping of the pussy bubble; aside from changes in the behaviour of the men, women from other countries / cultures are now becoming cost competitive (initial high seeking and acquisition cost balanced by lower lifetime cost of ownership)…
Reading through this thread, leaves me with a queasy feeling… This must have been how it was, back when the existence of gravity was discovered and debated. There was determination of how one could establish that gravity indeed existed… and then there were the implications of that knowledge.
@ gdgm+
“Reading through this thread, leaves me with a queasy feeling… This must have been how it was, back when the existence of gravity was discovered and debated. There was determination of how one could establish that gravity indeed existed… and then there were the implications of that knowledge.”
Interestingly enough, gravity was the example I used on Empath’s site as an analogy for the natural and subconscious inclination of women to advance and aid their natural hypergamous and provider/protector seeking drives by means of creating and adapting social norms, practices, prejudices, mores, laws, and customs to fit that objective, while at the same time unconsciously believing and asserting that this organization of society is not simply right and just, but in keeping with the natural order of things. (“The Female Imperative” or “FI”)
Here is what I wrote on Empath’s site:
I liken the FI (Female Imperative) to gravity. Gravity is the weakest of the four fundamental forces, but has an essentially unlimited range. It is always at work, but most of the time you don’t notice it. However, when you get a preponderance of mass together, it can overwhelm anything, including light. What Western Civilization is facing now is just such a mass. The reason why the FI hasn’t really been perceived before is because that coalescing of power hasn’t happened until now, or perhaps, happened to such a degree until now.
I do think this is a useful discussion, vitriol notwithstanding, because it does help us establish boundaries around what is Feminism and what is female nature.
DJ- I have that. Based in red-pill truth. It’s exceptional.
Here I go stating the obvious….feminism is a word with its own set of issues, isn’t it? Churchian women are feminist in that whatever they say/do/want is to the benefit of women. Look at the TWAF list I posted awhile back. Traditional women against feminism selling gynocentric notions. That’s why the idea of a FI is compelling if imperfect. But lets at least admit that no matter who cooks it up and how good it tastes even to the point people kiss their fingertips and say, “Perfect”, somebody is gonna wanna improve the recipe with a pinch of something new.
If you say that anything that benefits women is feminist then the Bible is feminist..since it frequently directs men to provide for female needs. Love your wife, live with her in understanding, provide for her, give her children, honor her, be faithful to her, etc etc.
To want those things is not feminist. Devaluing men is feminist.
@ Gabriella
“If you say that anything that benefits women is feminist then the Bible is feminist..since it frequently directs men to provide for female needs. Love your wife, live with her in understanding, provide for her, give her children, honor her, be faithful to her, etc etc.
To want those things is not feminist. Devaluing men is feminist.”
Looks like the Hamster ate his Wheaties today…
Explain.
In other words.. I am not hurting men If I want things for myself that don’t hurt men. The things I want are the things the Bible supports..IE provision, fidelity, and love through lifelong marriage.
The Bible also directs me to give certain things..Obedience, fidelity, and industriousness through lfielone marriage. It is a good exchange.
The argument seems to be that if it benefits a female then it is feminist. That is what I am arguing against.
The men in the manosphere trying to describe the ‘feminine imperative’ reminds me of The Blind Men and the Elephant.
Matt
So good to read you here. Your rebuke of me on Rollo left me stunned and gun shy in comments. I had never been trolled before and I took it kind of hard. I mistakenly thought you were a normal person. I hadn’t quite put it together that you were that Matthew A King idiot from Heartiste and now I find you here.
And I feel so much better now because I have read your comments and you are an complete idiot. And associated them with the stupid crap I had read before on Heartiste.
The Imperative exists. I can detail example after example where the benefit of women is embedded in the cultural and moral codes of particularly American society and in Western society. The whole moral code is one big relativism that has been evolved and changed as societal conditions evolved and changed to continually favor women at the expense of men, the true biological nature of men, the nature of how women are, how they think, what they want. The essence what is even considered “A Real Man” is fostered by women and echoed by society.
If you can’t see that then maybe actually read a book or something, get a real education maybe like in a real university. Jerk wad.
Sir, I know Rollo Tomassi and You are no Rollo.
Cheerlead this, dickwad.
The essence what is even considered “A Real Man” is fostered by women and echoed by society.
I like this. I tend to focus on how its fostered by the church, but your statement is equally correct and speaks to something ubiquitous.
Is it any surprise that women are not receptive to the concept? It is as if they are taking it personally. Women wouldn’t do that….I have to think of something else
Ok Matthew A King. I wouldn’t take me on if I were you on this subject or any actually.
This is from Baumeister on “Sexual Economics” one of professor dude guys that actually has credentials and works at like, a real university, and is considered a noted expert on the subject.
See, Matt, real intellectual quote and reference sources and not just spit shit out their assholes.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/vg7322727mgl1875/fulltext.html?MUD=MP
“Sexual marketplaces take the shape they do because nature has biologically built a disadvantage into men: a huge desire for sex that makes men dependent on women. Men’s greater desire puts them at a disadvantage, just as when two parties are negotiating a possible sale or deal, the one who is more eager to make the deal is in a weaker position than the one who is willing to walk away without the deal. Women certainly desire sex too — but as long as most women desire it less than most men, women have a collective advantage, and social roles and interactions will follow scripts that give women greater power than men (Baumeister et al. 2001). We have even concluded that the cultural suppression of female sexuality throughout much of history and across many different cultures has largely had its roots in the quest for marketplace advantage (see Baumeister and Twenge 2002). Women have often sustained their advantage over men by putting pressure on each other to restrict the supply of sex available to men. As with any monopoly or cartel, restricting the supply leads to a higher price. ”
And that, Matthew A King, is the Feminine Imperative in a concise and economics inspired definition. All moral codes in western society are the product of the above economic reality designed to restrict the supply of sex and to impose social and economic conditions on men to gain access to sex. You can deconstruct practically most moral values to achieve this aim, particularly all moral value pertaining to sexual code of conduct and the conduct of men pertaining to women. And as Baumeister states “cultural suppression of female sexuality throughout much of history and across many different cultures has largely had its roots in the quest for marketplace advantage ” and women are the originators and prime supporters of said morality because it benefits there Feminine Imperative to so.
Eat it Matthew A King. You are a paradox, you suck and you blow at the same time.
God I love finding out who you are. The sheer relief I feel. It is amazing. To be trolled by you validates me intellectually. You have to be to the most obnoxious idiot in the manosphere.
That’s why the idea of a FI is compelling if imperfect.
Indeed, it is gap-bridging, and as such as significant explanatory power beyond simply yapping about “feminism” or “it’s because the right wing is really just liberal as well, and that is why they think that way”, or “it’s because were all just too tolerant and nice”.
“it’s because the right wing is really just liberal as well, and that is why they think that way”
Go orthagonal man, because its an exclusive unique way of thinking!
Or shuffle along with us pedestrians
@TFH
That is the first explanation I’ve heard that makes any sense at all, however, that doesn’t seem to be what everyone else has been talking about. People are acting like it’s some vast female conspiracy or like women are simply evil, which I’m just not buying into.
What you have outlined is simply what the manosphere has been talking about already, and it seems to me that this whole FI thing is nothing but a huge derailment that has got everyone at each other’s throats rather effectively. It’s not describing anything we don’t all know already but just adds a lot of clever sounding gobbledegook.
In other words, the whole discussion serves no real purpose.
Oh, did Matt post here? You’ll have to pardon me, I was too busy transcribing illuminated manuscripts from 12th century Jesuit monks to be bothered to read through this entire comment thread.
From The Hypergamy Conspiracy:
https://rationalmale.wordpress.com/2012/03/13/the-hypergamy-conspiracy/
Like many other men steeped in fem-centrism, Social Pathologists’ misunderstanding about the feminine imperative lies in defining it in intentional terms. He believes the feminine imperative would necessarily have to be the result of deliberate intent on the part of women, but his misunderstanding – due to his feminized conditioning – is actually further proof of the totality of the social saturation of the feminine imperative.
@Rollo
He believes the feminine imperative would necessarily have to be the result of deliberate intent on the part of women, but his misunderstanding – due to his feminized conditioning – is actually further proof of the totality of the social saturation of the feminine imperative.
This is weak. Now any disagreement is not only ‘evidence’, but ‘proof’ of this cack-handed ‘theory’. What a scam!
How does this FI theory address the PTB (Rockefeller) machinations to promote feminism in the early 1900s as described by Aaron Russo? Feminism was not an organic development. Although the deliverate intent was not by women, there was a deliberate intent. Since it was not by women, the dominance of the women (and feminism) in the world cannot be attributed to the theoretical FI.
@Mark Minter
Then why the focus on the feminine imperative now? This is the least sexually restricted time in memory.
Furthermore: If women have often sustained their advantage over men by restricting each other (which I fully agree with) then why in the world is the feminine imperative predicated on the idea that women are protecting each other and banding together simply because of a shared chromosomal configuration? It is, in fact, the opposite! This throws “Team Woman” (as conceptualized in the Manosphere) not only out the door, but down the block!
@TFH
What do you mean when you say “geared to transfer…to women”?
@Rollo et al
Then–at best–“Feminine Imperative” is the most misleading term imaginable. What you are describing is men being cowards, and raising other men to be cowards. At worst, then, we can say that to call it the “Feminine Imperative” is a form of woman-hating; of transferring the blame for what men do to women, i.e., scapegoating and cowardice.
If this sounds familiar it’s because it’s been passed around for several thousand years. We call it The Fall, and you can find it in a collection of stories. There’s a website, and everything.
You people are asking a piece of wood for instruction.
Then why the focus on the feminine imperative now? This is the least sexually restricted time in memory.
Furthermore: If women have often sustained their advantage over men by restricting each other (which I fully agree with) then why in the world is the feminine imperative predicated on the idea that women are protecting each other and banding together simply because of a shared chromosomal configuration? It is, in fact, the opposite! This throws “Team Woman” (as conceptualized in the Manosphere) not only out the door, but down the block!
Like.
@Rollo and CL
If one subscribed to the bible as truth, then addressing potential “conspiracy” behind the FI becomes pretty easy. You have women’s frailties and appetites and instilled rebellion…
and you have a reptilian liar whispering in her ear.
That’s all it takes.
Rollo, your suggestion seems to be more evolutionary and avoids any reliance on biblical backing, and while I always find the evolutionary suggestions of how things got the way they are fascinating, I can’t help but notice the correlations in scripture and real life that point to this truth.
If the Feminine Imperative has a conspiracy behind it, or some dark leader trying to subvert everyone into a disorder that causes disaster and suffering, that would be the devil, ultimately. The evil one. The lie, of course, is that these feminist attitudes will benefit women (or even all of us), when really, it harms us all.
A feminine imperative would be one driven by their innate human design- i.e. have kids, stay alive, etc.
A feminist imperative would be the same, but with the addition of lies that cause it to mutate into something harmful.
It is an important distinction, to me, because base feminine motivations are not necessarily incongruent with what is also best for others- does a woman exert self-discipline and show deference because she is wise enough to know that she will be best promoted that way? Or does she seek to rule, seeing it as a competition, instead of a cooperation?
I know that God instilled a mutinous element in women, in the garden, that she would always try to rule over her man, but her man would rule over her, so I know she has an innate nature to defy her natural role… but simultaneously, there is an innate nature for them to operate in that very role. This is the woman’s root inner conflict.
I am reluctant to try to assert that all females, per the Feminine Imperative, are “like that”.
Shall we say then, that since they have that inner conflict, that any base motivation a woman would have is to be disdained and railed against? I should say not.
So then, is the Feminine Imperative a combination of genuine feminine operation and feminism(masculinism), and that it possesses both the capacity for creative harmony or destructive subversion? That it may or may not be a negative element, depending on the context?
Shall we just dump women’s proclivity for sin into the definition and thereby call the whole thing corrupt and undesirable?
I think there needs to be a distinction, because just as women have the capacity to be horrible and destructive and even feral…. they also have the capacity- within their original design, even- to operate according to God’s design for the benefit of all around her.
Maybe some of the FI is directly malicious, but maybe some of it is quite reasonable too, and within the scope of original design.
Would we fight harder for such distinctions if we lived 80 years ago, when we knew more honorable women?
Team Woman was never described as a conspiracy where women act together for their mutual benefit. It was just personalizing everything and imagining it happening to them so they support another woman against a man that neither is attracted to.
Also a free agent woman (Team Woman) will snipe at another woman with a man (Team Her Man) in order to get her back in the herd for shared misery. Team Woman does not act for the overall good of women but is driven by the female nature and is competitive. Women compete with each other for resources, but will personalize the loss of resources and then the individual woman will support another woman in extracting resources that she has no way of obtaining. This is due to her own insecurity and fear.
I think that the actual words used in the term are becoming a huge distraction, due to the connotations they have that are not actually what is posited by the ideas (which are in flux themselves to some degree, at this stage, as well), but nevertheless are what is connoted by the term, which means that certain connotations are being “read into” the ideas that are not really in them, or not in the specific way that the connotation suggests. As I said upthread, we probably need a better term for what is being discussed, because the term that is being used is becoming a distraction from the task of refining the ideas — that is, what is happening is that either the term is attacked directly in a visceral way due to the connotations (regardless of how it is actually described in substance) or certain aspects of the substance are being critiqued in contradistinction to the connotations of the term — it’s currently right now a churning cycle around a term due to its connotations.
@Solomon
If the Feminine Imperative has a conspiracy behind it, or some dark leader trying to subvert everyone into a disorder that causes disaster and suffering, that would be the devil, ultimately. The evil one. The lie, of course, is that these feminist attitudes will benefit women (or even all of us), when really, it harms us all.
Exactly. Ultimately, this is what is behind all conspiracies to do harm and this is what we all need to be aware of if we are to have the slightest hope. In each attempt to nail down a definition of this FI idea, there is no hope, and only an excuse to bash women rather than try to redeem any sort of humanity out of it. This alone ought to set off alarm bells.
@CL
I have every confidence, CL, that you will come around to my way of thinking. You always do. It’s ok if you have to keep it on the DL, though.
Horse hockey. You’re selectively forgetting at least half the hashing out process. This is expected of a woman.
This is where the Team Woman ended up, but it most certainly WAS described as a conspiracy.
Some women do this sometimes, but other times they’re really concerned about the other person. FGM is a phenomenon not of hate, but seriously misguided concern.
If I understand you: This makes no sense. If I don’t understand you: It still makes no sense. It seems to me that you have fallen victim to that which you warned about above; an inability to correct because of your attachment to what you have made an a priori concept. In this case: “Team Woman”.
That’s kinda where I am on it now, though I still think there’s another category in there that would be useful to tease out. There are connections between the two: Eve’s fallen nature causes her to try to dominate her husband, and that’s certainly reflected in feminism. But feminism — a branch office of liberalism as you say, or modernism — goes further than that. It seems to seek to debase everyone, not just men. So the female imperative (which I’m defining for the moment as “societal pressure to defer to women’s desires in all things”) supports feminism too, but doesn’t explain all of it.
I think there is a new insight here — or maybe the rediscovery of an old one — but I think we risk missing it if we focus too much on “female nature” or the natural urge to protect mothers. That’s appealing because then it’s no one’s fault and we can talk airily about how it’s a feature not a bug (like hypergamy) and we’ll just have to be smart enough to deal with it. But “female nature” isn’t what’s happening when a school nurse takes a 15-year-old girl to the abortion clinic without her parents’ permission. It’s not what’s happening when all our media encourage women to fritter away their childbearing years on meaningless college degrees and even more meaningless short-term relationships. Those things don’t rise out of any desire to protect the next generation or women’s “best interests.” Those are kowtowing to women’s immediate urges, plain and simple. It’s not “female nature” to kill your own child or put motherhood off until 40. That’s something else.
If it’s not just feminism being looked at from another angle, then we’ll have to call it something else.
@Brendan
No. You’re just wrong. The phenomenon is that men stupidly kowtow to women because men have a tendency to make idols out of anything; especially returning to our favorite: pussy. You, among others, have attempted to blame women for this. Women are wrong for asking for worship–and they certainly do–but men are to blame for actually doing it. You want to scapegoat men with some shadowy notion of “imperatives”, but never come to a spiritual conclusion about what is obviously a spiritual matter! You’d rather psychologize it. Your Oprah is showing.
@Cane Caldo
There wasn’t a hashing out process of the Team Woman concept. It was simply an observation of the typical behaviour of women, and it holds up. You appear to be mistaking personalisation and pandering with empathy, but this is not the same thing. Often the pandering is so a woman can secretly gloat.
For reference, the original Team Woman post that coined the term was 365 words long, and 7man posted it on October 31st, 2011 as follows:
@CL
You’re as bad as Rollo. To wit: “See, I’m right because I’ve been saying this nonsense for a really long time.”
@Cane Caldo
That wasn’t what I said or implied and that was a weak attempt to refute me. There was no big argument over the Team Woman concept and it is simple and easy to understand. I merely posted it for reference to show that it wasn’t a ‘conspiracy theory’, as has been suggested here.
I’m perfectly willing to accept being proven wrong, but that hasn’t happened yet in this particular instance.
Not too topic hijacky, I think, can’t find a suitable in-tray to dump this in. Apologies in advance.
A little horror story from yesterday’s tabloids.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/wife-of-brain-damaged-yob-attack-victim-1531909
For the next week, anyone masochistic enough can hear the woman herself, hamstering fit to bust on this radio interview.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01q1fzj
It gets zapped on Saturday. Runs from 37:40>>59:59 + a few comments at 1:08:58>>1:14:40.
There was actually an extra discussion tacked on involving a nice cuddly wet-as-a-fish Anglican ex-bishop and a usually quite annoying American chap (not automatically wrong, just a bit of a shouty berk).
The Bish of course claimed he couldn’t possibly comment, terrible moral dilemma, what a brave woman, wish her all happiness etc.
Whereas Charlie got it right straight out of the traps.
What “moral dilemma”? Are you kidding me?
But this section seems to have been chopped off (I think they were just filling airtime till kickoff at Gillette Stadium (full live commentary, plus chat sessions, we’re not complete barbarians you know).
@ DJ,
(i) but is anyone in a solid relationship that works they way they’d like? Getting sex pretty much whenever/however they want, content, happy, at rest, etc. (i)
Yes, happily married for 19 years.
Game has helped my marriage get even better. And I am just beginning to learn it, lots more I don’t know.
@Dalrock:
But this isn’t what I was getting at. What is interesting is that her description of her preferred form of fornication is taken by nearly everyone as an expression of higher sexual morality, including Christians. How many people can understand that what she is describing is simply the female preferred form of promiscuity? Christians have as a group dropped biblical sexual morality and replaced it with the frame she is sharing.
You are definitely right about that (as long as we acknowledge that NACALT, and actually mean it as opposed to deploying it as a conversation stopper). But this just means that feminism (a form of liberalism/modernism) has infected the thinking of these Christians.
Liberalism/modernism (freedom and equality unmoderated by any tradition or other authority higher in the authority hierarchy) is ultimately motivated by the Fall, because it emancipates our base natures and appetites. So they are “connected” in the sense that all error is connected to the Fall.
But we already have two perfectly good words here: “feminism” and “female nature”. From the outside looking in, the adoption of “the feminine imperative” looks like bafflegab: a kind of turf war of words between pseudointellectuals like Rollo and Matthew King, an excuse for boys to play AMOG in the MMA ring – a place where fake manliness is put on display under artificial lights with nothing real at stake.
When it comes to the “feminine imperative” I think I’ll personally tap out and get back to real life.
@CL
Come now, CL. You’re being facetious.
I will grant you that 7man may have coined the specific term “Team Woman” in a post on Oct. 31st, 2011. But he was not the first to discuss, or even attempt to codify the phenomenon he discussed…badly, I might add, and with confusion.
7man wrote that IN RESPONSE to the larger discussions of the Manosphere about why a woman seem to sometimes band together with other women, and sometimes band together with her man, and still yet other times be concerned about only herself.
Did you see Vox’s AGP post on H.L. Mencken? Female solipsism and “Team Woman”–as outlined by 7man on 10/31/2011–is completely nonsensical as a concept and as a post. And it has nothing to do with a desire to share misery for its own sake; at least not anymore than to share joy for its own sake–which women love to do, as well. This should lead us to the conclusion that the goal is not misery, but sharing. I leave it to others to detail why he introduced such a bent in his post.
@Zippy:
LOL, yeah, pretty much. Although I like what Rollo has to say, the actual power of AMOGs is that they do NOT make it look like they are trying super hard. Alpha at its basic level does not loudly demand submission–it fully assumes it and simply remains in control.
Glad to hear there are some good relationships out there, BTW. Last year my relationship with my wife changed for the infinitely better, although my path was somewhat the opposite of others. I tended to the alpha side of things, but for years I have always thought I needed to keep working up the alpha–so poor Mrs. DJ has lived too long in the dread that I will dash off and leave her. A varying mixture of both skill sets is key. Attraction + comfort = sex however/whenever.
Two other helpful items for us (no surprises): working out (always do this, always with more weight-lifting than cardio), and divorce from Christian culture. Not divorce from Christianity or friends, but from the toxic culture that you guys have described with great alacrity here and elsewhere.
@Cane Caldo
I never said 7man was the first to discuss the idea – that would be ludicrous – but that what he offered was an epigrammatic term with a concise definition. Rollo has failed to do this and instead refers to several lengthy blog posts (which seems to be his M.O.) to get everyone “up to speed” and yet, there is still no indication that the ‘FI’ is of any use at all as a conceptualisation of the issues.
Team Woman, on the other hand, was a simple concept and people adopted the term as a descriptor of certain behaviours of women. It is not all-encompassing, obviously, but that doesn’t render it nonsensical. So far, it hasn’t been refuted.
I’m afraid I’m missing how Vox Day’s post fits into this. Are you saying that women are mostly motivated by ‘sharing’ (a term I dislike when applied to the emotional realm, by the way) for its own sake? Because if so, I’m not sure I buy that. There is usually some kind of selfish motivation, even if the gain is only ‘warm fuzzies’.
I absolutely believe it is a conspiracy, as evidenced by the very few (those of us who have taken the red pill), who can see the truth of what is going on. Also, it is very evil. The conspiracy wasnt concocted by women though, but by the Father of lies, Satan, in attempting to turn everything upside down. Which, by the way, is exactly how Satan ended up in the position he is in now. As Gods second hand man, he succumbed to his desires, and attempted to place himself above God. He ended up being Gods favorite, to being below everyone else.
@DJ
@CL
You implied it. I love to shred these games of “I never said…” Bull. Above you wrote:
The unavoidable implication then is that Team Woman arose from 7man; which you punctuated with a date, and then regurgitated the whole post.
What is nonsensical and false can be neither epigrammatic, nor definitive…as we’re seeing with the Feminine Imperative…which is more likely the Masculine Impairment.
As I said: I have every confidence that you’ll see it my way.
It is not simple, and it is a confuser of certain behaviors; not a descriptor. It is refuted by itself and on its face. This is the nature of nonsensical things.
Let me change the term from “sharing”, because I am sympathetic to your dislike. Women are driven to be in communion with others. This is the driving force behind a man’s success with a woman. They derive fulfillment from being with someone else; whether in joy or misery, but I daresay they prefer joyous communion a bit more. Happily-married women are more satisfied than commiserating biddies.
It’s not Team Woman, or Team Her Man; it’s Desire for Communion. Selfishness plays a role, but in a very real sense nobody can be in communion unless both (or more) parties are co-experiencing (sharing) the sensations. This means that if she wants to experience joy with a man, she has to desire her own joy as well. That’s not solipsism, or a female defect. That’s love.
Tam the Bam:
That story illustrates why marriage is also a commitment to years of sexual abstinence, possibly even permanent sexual abstinence, should the need arise; and why every man (and woman too) should be prepared for it. “In sickness and in health”, as the trite old saying goes.
@Cane Caldo
The desire for communion doesn’t negate the Team Woman concept. Failing being happy in communion on a Team Her Man, she will resort to the commiseration of Team Woman. Unfortunately, with the culture the way it is, Team Woman has become the default.
Genetic studies have shown that in pre-history, only half as many men as women reproduced. Perhaps 80% of women, and only 40% of men. This is possible because the women shared the alpha males. Our biological heritage is that a woman of reproductive age is valuable just for existing, but a man of reproductive age has to do something more than merely exist – he must be better than most of the other men, he must be an alpha male, a “real man”.
This is the biological imperative that is burned into our DNA. It is neither a “feminine imperative” nor a masculine one. It is one of the facts of life – but it’s one that they will never teach you in school.
If you believe in the difference between alpha and beta males, and (for the men) you wish to be sufficiently alpha, then you are already serving this biological imperative. It is not hard to believe that the alpha male phenomenon has existed in all places and at all times.
Phenomena such as legally enforced extraction of money from the ex-husband serve women’s interests, but are not part of the biological imperative, because they have not existed in all places and at all times. They are part of our current social and legal rules, but in a different society, even a matriarchal one such as the Mosuo, people would scratch their heads and wonder how we got ourselves into such a mess.
There is no imperative for our society to choose legal and social arrangements that shamelessly advance the interests of women. Other societies do not. In this particular place and time, women have the upper hand, and that is in part because men had no idea how ruthless and determined women could be in the pursuit of their own interests.
When many more people have taken the Red Pill, some of these laws and conventions will be rolled back. Things that cannot be rolled back include the alpha/beta distinction, and the expendability of men, because these are part of a genuine biological imperative.
James:
Genetic studies have shown …
Yes, well, I’ve studied a little bit of bioinformatics and biophysics at the graduate level; and my advice (which is worth what you paid for it) is that when someone starts a sentence with “genetic studies have shown” with reference to a putative prehistorical evolutionary past a wee bit of skepticism is in order.
CL, there is no feminism without a feminine imperative. If the Rockafellers did promote feminism as some plot to destabilize markets, they were only successful because there was a feminine imperative to base feminism upon.
This is the problem christianist guys have with the concept of the feminine imperative, they want to conflate the meta-scale dynamics of fem-centrism, feminine primacy and the imperative with the historically small-scale social dynamic of feminism. They hate liberalism/feminism so much that it blinds them to the larger paradigm.
Zippy: Aye, and at least half of Nolan’s commenters were well aware of this, which is I suppose not too depressing.
Even the most blood-drinking, pillaging and treacherous heathens used to set great store by their word, once solemnly given. Doesn’t apply to women, apparently. Even the Bish was saying “move along, nothing to see here”.
I wonder why she didn’t go the whole hog, and do the decent thing and shove a pillow over his face, before she got up the duff with a new (this time fertile) man? Or at least apply for an annulment.
Poor guy, probably sentient but utterly powerless, and she’s up there every day and “in your face!” with it. And getting massive props from all about her.
Sick.
@Rollo
the meta-scale dynamics of fem-centrism
BBB (Bullshit Baffles Brains). You use a lot of academic sounding language and say nothing. You even manage to squeeze in a ‘paradigm’. Don’t you know that the cool term nowadays is ‘rubric’?
@CL
You’re in luck: I am at work, and yet nothing is required of me.
No more than negates the need for phrenology.
A woman does not always experience commiseration with women and happiness with men. Sometimes they are truly happy in communion with other women, and sometimes they commiserate with men (drug abuse, wives that like their beaters, women in a loose harem) So, let’s rephrase your statement to reflect the whole spectrum:
“A woman who fails to be in communion with a man, will resort to communion with women.”
Shocking, I know. Why be in communion with women when there’s so many other alternatives to men…you know…like locusts, or blue whales.
Here is where the crux of your and 7man’s and lots of people’s confusion lies: The way of the culture is one of commiseration in general and for all, men and women alike. Compounding and complicating this is that men have retreated from the authority and audacity they ought to be exercising. This started sometime before 1920, culminated in women’s suffrage, and now is a full-on tare-a-thon among the wheat; with fathers raising daughters to be extraordinarily feral (h/t: Dalrock) and capitulating in the face of detonation (h/t: Dalrock) because they, too, are sons of men who groveled before women instead of God.
Generally, women can commiserate easier with other women than men. It follows that we ought to EXPECT that women would commiserate with other women, and that in times of widespread commiseration we would then find groups of women commiserating together. That is, unless they are one of the luckier ones who have found a group to be in joyous communion with a group of women. (I know: unheard of ’round these parts.), or they are in communion (of either joy or pain) with a man.
A man who can offer hope to a woman can lead her out of the comfort of her herd quite easily, and yet her nature has not changed one whit.
@Rollo
I am so glad you came back. Let’s switch out your fancy restaurant garbage for Cane’s Crystals, and see which one patrons like better
Rolls says:
I say:
And, before the votes are tallied, let me say that your comments last evening were characteristically silly.
Let’s check out the credentials: your own blog, some “interest in behavioral psychology” in college, 12 years of being really liked no-seriously-dude on a seduction forum, a splash of “peer counseling” (not including SoSuave or seduction?), and a living in marketing libations known to lead to bad decision-making?
HAHAHAHA!
If you had said, “beer counseling”, at least that would have been consonant with the rest of the resume. I have no doubt you know how to pick up chicks. What I doubt is that you know your ass from your elbow.
@Cane Caldo
We seem to be more or less in agreement but you are quibbling for some reason. You have valid points but they add to rather than negate 7man’s conceptualisation of Team Woman, which, incidentally, is consistent with Genesis 3.
A man who can offer hope to a woman can lead her out of the comfort of her herd quite easily, and yet her nature has not changed one whit.
Agreed. Nowhere have I or 7man said otherwise.
@Brendan
Agreed. I also think there are two other factors in play here. Some are trying to consider the implications of the idea before they evaluate the accuracy of it. It also seems that some are taking issue with the idea because they disagree with Rollo. This isn’t to say that none of the disagreement is valid, but that all of the “Oh no! What does this mean about women!” and “Its Rollo’s idea so it must be wrong” is making it very difficult to get to whatever that valid objection might be.
Cane Caldo wrote :
So what ought men to do about this?
No, Dalrock, I think you are not right when you say that people are disagreeing with the idea because they disagree with Rollo. Personally I really wanted to give the FI a fair consideration and welcomed the opportunity to be corrected. However, when I was still questioning this idea after a couple of weeks, instead of doing an intellectual take down of what I was writing, the way a serious man would, Rollo began verbally pissing himself on other people’s blogs about me, saying that I am just like Susan Walsh and (bizarrely) that I am probably just writing all this in hopes of making money off it someday. I think it IS important to consider the source. If Cane Caldo proclaims that the FI is a real thing, I think many of us will be much more willing to consider it at this point than if Rollo does. Listening to snakes never ends well.
@Zippy
This is the understanding I was aiming for with the OP, and what I fear continues to get lost in the wrangling over the name and the mechanics. This is something very noteworthy. Our moral code has morphed to an uncanny resemblance to the feral female mating script. We can discuss how we think this happened and what we should call it, but we should be careful not to lose sight of the concept while hashing out the other two.
As for NACALT, one could take it a step farther and point out that true Christians aren’t like that, since this false sexual morality is at war with the Bible. Either way, painfully few modern Christians aren’t like that, which is the fundamental problem.
But Feminism already has a specific meaning and it isn’t what we are talking about. Tacking on an additional meaning to a well used and already defined term is even more confusing than creating a new term. What I think you are getting at isn’t a name for the phenomenon, but an explanation for it. Either way I think Feminism falls short. Feminism’s aim was to destroy marriage and free women from the oppression of men. In fact, they wanted to make women “free” to behave just like men sexually. Yet what has sprung up instead is this uncanny feral female script embedded in our moral code. This script involves a deep desire to obtain one sided commitment and the attendant validation from men which feminists cringe at.
@Rollo:
This is the problem christianist guys have with the concept of the feminine imperative, they want to conflate the meta-scale dynamics of fem-centrism, feminine primacy and the imperative with the historically small-scale social dynamic of feminism. They hate liberalism/feminism so much that it blinds them to the larger paradigm.
I’m not sure the prefix “meta” means what you think it means. But in any case I rather suspect a pot-kettle situation here.
For myself – and I’m hardly alone in this among orthodox, traditional Christians – I see the origins of liberal modernity (of which feminism is, again, a specific manifestation with a much longer pedigree than most moderns would concede) going at least as far back as William of Ockham’s nominalism. In the spirit of nonsectarianism I’ll make only a passing note of the explicit positivism in the actual text of the Alcoran of Mahomet, the familiarity of John Wyclif (the Morning Star of the Reformation) and his compatriots John of Gaunt and Geoffrey Chaucer with the religion of the Moors, the political advantages of the ‘collapse of the hierarchy’ implied by Wyclif’s ecclesiology and sacramental theology, the translation of the Koran chartered by Martin Luther a few centuries later and his explicit preference for Moslem theology over Catholic theology, etc etc etc. In short, and for the benefit of those unfamiliar with the history, I see liberalism as having roots extending at least as deep as 600AD when one crazy Arab heretic turned from Jerusalem to Mecca as a way of, shall we say, policing the hierarchy, in the process incorporating logocentric positivism directly into his “holy book”; followed seven hundredish years later by Wyclif’s adoption of an (highly ironic: sola scriptura is not to be found in Scripture) implicit logocentric positivism into the Canon of Scripture attested to by the tradition of Catholic Christianity.
So anyway, while I am certainly willing to grant fundamental differences of view on “the larger paradigm” it seems a bit of a stretch to propose that traditional orthodox “christianists” lack perspective on a “larger paradigm”.
I also can’t resist noting that my understanding of things is informed by actual recorded history, not myth-making about pre-history resting on dubious theories about how bouncing molecules lead to a “feminine imperative”. I will ultimately disagree with others who have a different view of history, of course; but at least we are disputing over actual views of actual history rather than over which evo-psych myth admits of greater truthiness.
@Dalrock:
But Feminism already has a specific meaning and it isn’t what we are talking about. Tacking on an additional meaning to a well used and already defined term is even more confusing than creating a new term. What I think you are getting at isn’t a name for the phenomenon, but an explanation for it. Either way I think Feminism falls short. Feminism’s aim was to destroy marriage and free women from the oppression of men. In fact, they wanted to make women “free” to behave just like men sexually. Yet what has sprung up instead is this uncanny feral female script embedded in our moral code. This script involves a deep desire to obtain one sided commitment and the attendant validation from men which feminists cringe at.
Hah, so the shoe is on the other foot now. I think feminism has a ‘larger’ meaning and I find the contradictions within it expected rather than signs of multiple different phenomena. You think of feminism in a more narrow sense and look for different terms to label these other, contradictory phenomena. So in the end I think we probably just disagree about the semantics not the substance.
The semantics are important because the pedigree is important. If pedigree is important than etymology is important, and how we speak about things will change how we think about things: lex orandi, lex credendi.
Still, I think we are in basic agreement on the substance, and that is worth a lot.
@Dalrock
This isn’t to say that none of the disagreement is valid, but that all of the “Oh no! What does this mean about women!” and “Its Rollo’s idea so it must be wrong” is making it very difficult to get to whatever that valid objection might be.
I don’t see that being the case in any of the objections. The objections are mainly about the shoddy reasoning and the lack of willingness to question the idea, as well as how quickly people jumped on board and the defensiveness with which they react to any criticism. This statement from you seems to be an attempt to discredit the critics by attributing motivations not present.
The onus is on proving a new theory right, not on attacking anyone challenging it because they are supposedly in denial, which supposedly affirms the feminisation of the culture, thereby proving FI is right. Ideas gain strength through testing for faults, not in looking only for confirmation.
But it is time for me to bow out of this debate, since the manosphere appears to have made up its collective mind.
@Dalrock (and Brendan)
So do I. My contention is that the words are a sort of Gordian Knot in the way of real understanding. While it frustrates you, Brendan, and others to focus on the words used instead of the phenomenon itself: words matter. In this case (and by my lights) the words are an obstruction in-and-of-themselves because their meanings cast shadows on what you’re trying to illuminate. I see no alternative but to smash the shadow-caster down, so that you can do exactly that.
And I don’t know whether I would like Rollo or not. I think his incarnation online is mostly a fraud, so it’s impossible to tell. I can say that I enjoy demolishing his pathetic version of credentialism-by-repetition-of-nonsense when we share a space.
@SSM
Bow before God. No man can serve two masters. No man. <–THAT, by the way, is an indicative, not an imperative. It's not a command (imperative) not to serve two masters; it is a statement (indicative) that it is not possible. So serve one, and it will be impossible to serve the other.
I realize that this is not an exclusively Christian format, and that all are welcome here. At the same time: I am enthusiastically God's servant, and if I represent Him and His wisdom badly, I will at least do it fervently with a whole heart.
As for Rollo's "Christianist" swipe, and I only say, "Guilty", and "If you continue to conjure your modernist psycho-babble I will gleefully dash it on the Rock." Christianist"… Who says that? Someone has been reading too much Toilet Paper Memo and Huff-Blow, and whoknowswhatelse liberal bunk.
@Cane Caldo
Perhaps because we’re now seeing the cumulative effects of the FI, in a way that we did not before (more frivolous divorces, ex-husbands being pushed to pay greater $ amounts of alimony, childrens’ greater difficulties in school after parental divorce, etc.)?
And a later Caldo post:
Oh no – the “man up” theme is back again!
I am concluding that the FI does exist (though, in search of a new term, I’d call it the “Feminine Meta-Preference” – women’s words/concepts may indicate one preference, but their actions often indicate otherwise). If nothing else, all of the noise, denial and upset in this thread shows the OP has hit a nerve. Or has come closer to an unpleasant truth than many would care to admit!
@Zippy
Agreed. However if we can’t name it, it makes it very difficult to think it and discuss it. Also, while ideas are influenced by the names we give them, longer term the more powerful transfer works the other way. This is why attempts to rename handicap to “differently abled”, “special”, etc. ultimately fail.
Yes. This was all I was hoping to flush out with this specific post. In fact, it is more than I was hoping for because understanding where we differ on the phenomenon (outside of naming and mechanics) was my primary aim. That it turns out we are in agreement is a bonus.
@Dalrock:
I’m still going to call it “feminism” though. 🙂
[D: Well played.]
@gdgm
Indeed he has. Here it is:
It never left. What it means to be a man is to man up; up and out. Women don’t “women up” because their identities are not rooted in projection, but inclusion. That doesn’t mean the SoCons, TradCons, etc. are right in their reasons or methodology of Manning Up–they’re not (and neither is maybe most of Game)–but that is always there. The desire to Man Up is what drives the Manosphere, and PUA, and MRA, and the Orthosphere and all these new and different groups.
To deny it is a lie, or worse: further capitulation.
@gdgm+
Oh no – the “man up” theme is back again!
Perhaps that is because there are legitimate times and places where growing a pair is actually necessary. As with the feminine desire to submit to a strong man, you won’t suppress nature by constantly shaming it.
Sure, it gets abused in the form of “man up and marry those sluts” (among others). But just what exactly is wrong in general with suggesting that men should (for a whole variety of reasons including self interest) act like, you know, men?
Cane Caldo
Then why the focus on the feminine imperative now? This is the least sexually restricted time in memory.
Least sexually restricted time in memory, for whom? For every adult human? For every woman? For every man? In legal terms? In social terms? Be more specific, if there is a point to be made.
As to “why focus on the feminine imperative now”, I’m assuming that to be a rhetorical question.
You can’t be serious.
Sharing misery sharing joy….the quest for empathy
Hmmm, one other interesting thing I’ve noticed: while this is not a _specifically_ religious / theological blog, it seems that the more “religious” people have reacted MUCH more strongly against the FI / Feminine Meta-Preference concept, than those who are less or-non religious (such as Rollo, I think). I wonder why that is? I’m an agnostic myself, so don’t feel I have a dog in that hunt. Which may be why I have NO idea what Cane is trying to say when he writes:
Eh, wot?
Similar with Zippy, who actually touches further on the point I was making when he notes:
But I think Zippy’s asking me about the term ‘man up’ “in general” is a way of him trying to “move the goalposts” from the _abuse_ context I was referencing.
It seems the women are miffed they cannot silence discourse/dissent on the net as easily as they can IRL via shaming language and proxy State violence.
Ah well, they can retreat behind the real life walls of the fortress FI,and the men will circle the wagons,and the men will circle the wagons.
So it’s off with a toss of the hair and the slamming door,no ‘internet police’ to call,so sad.
There is nothing wrong with suggesting men should act like men (here).
There is nothing wrong with telling a room full of Nascar drivers they need to drive faster either.
For those of you who are having trouble accepting that we are dealing with something more than just feminism here, consider this:
Most of us would agree that the rot of feminism has seeped deep into Christian churches in the Western World. Most churches (with a few exceptions, the Orthodox Church being an example) are now heavily feminized. It is easy enough to see how feminism is responsible for this.
But what is making it so difficult to eradicate the feminism which has infected the Church? Why is there so much resistance? Especially from those women who will often proclaim themselves anti-feminists?
One could make the argument that they are simply feminists, and can’t/refuse to see it. But even when you point out how much their views coincide with feminism, they still have trouble rejecting those views. I would argue that there is something more at work here than just feminism. Feminism might color a person’s view of the world, but it is principally a conscious choice. Why then the unconscious resistance to its elimination from so many self-avowed opponents? I think we are dealing with something unconscious or sub-conscious here. Something that might be rarely seen or felt, but which is now visible thanks to an accumulation or convergence of factors, just as gravity is often not felt until sufficient mass gets together. What is this force? My take:
There exists in women a natural and subconscious inclination to advance and aid their natural hypergamous and provider/protector seeking drives by means of creating and/or adapting social norms, practices, prejudices, mores, laws, and customs to fit that objective, while at the same time unconsciously believing and asserting that this organization of society is not simply right and just, but in keeping with the natural order of things. (“The Female Imperative” or “FI”)
Zippy
But just what exactly is wrong in general with suggesting that men should (for a whole variety of reasons including self interest) act like, you know, men?
For whose definition of “men”?
Yours? Cane Caldo’s? King A. Matthew King’s? Mohler’s? Driscolls? Pope Benedict’s?
A few weeks back I was talking with a man who was looking for the local rescue mission. I paid attention to him because his demeanor and clothing suggested a military background. Sure enough, he’d gotten out of the Army in the last year, had been in a combat unit in the sandbox, and now could not find a job. It appears that one reason he’s living hand to mouth is divorce. It’s hard for a man to contest anything in Family Court to begin with, it’s even more difficult to do so from 10,000 or so miles away, when you are outside the wire more often than not. So he got the shaft, period, and his skills as an enlisted man in combat arms do not readily transfer to the work place.
Which of you manly men wants to give “man up” lessons to a combat veteran of Iraq, who apparently did the right thing by marrying, and who now has little more than what he’s carrying with him, because he was betrayed by “his woman”, with the full assistance of every legal service and every social service she chose to contact?
What do you say to him? He’s a pleasant enough fellow, so long as you don’t mention “women” or “wife” in conversation…
It’s all very well to chide men to “man up” and “not be cowards” from whatever chairs we happen to sit in. Again, these online conversations often have nothing in common with the real world men I meet from time to time – the divorced welder, the divorced HVAC tech, the divorced college instructor down the street, and so forth.
These men are being “men” as all the institutions, including any church you care to mention, have defined it. And more than a few of them are being seriously harmed – emotionally, physically, you name it – by the results of their “manning up”.
“Man up” = “The Beatings WIll Continue Until Morale Improves”, for far too many men.
I see them every week, somewhere, and they are found in all walks of life – blue collar, middle class, tenured faculty, etc. How is it that the world I live in is so different from that of you manly men, that you apparently never encounter them?
There is a real world out there, with real men and all too often children, being harmed in real ways, by the real legal and cultural artifacts created to serve women’s “needs” and “desires” and “wants”. I can’t believe I’m the only one who lives in that world.
@gdgm+
But I think Zippy’s asking me about the term ‘man up’ “in general” is a way of him trying to “move the goalposts” from the _abuse_ context I was referencing.
A fair point.
I would propose that “man up” loses validity when it attempts to shame one group of men into cleaning up the mess made by another group of men, treating the mess as if it had been made by the first group.
I’m not sure that can be imputed to Cane Caldo’s comment though.
There exists in women a natural and subconscious inclination to advance and aid their natural hypergamous and provider/protector seeking drives by means of creating and/or adapting social norms, practices, prejudices, mores, laws, and customs to fit that objective, while at the same time unconsciously believing and asserting that this organization of society is not simply right and just, but in keeping with the natural order of things. (“The Female Imperative” or “FI”)
That’s one formulation of it.
One key threshold issue is whether this isn’t just “the nature of things” — basically, this view (James, TFH to a lesser extent, both upthread) is that of course the social order (of which the moral order is just a part) is always set up to benefit women and their reproductive adenda because women are the rarer reproductive resource, and so this isn’t an imperative in favor of women’s interests but one in favor of the interests of the species as a whole. Note that this would include the institutions of “patriarchy”, which in this view are just what served the interests of the female reproductive agenda in that period of time prior to the modern era (this is questionable, in my view, but it appears to be the view from this perspective I am describing — I know you have described patriarchal monogamy as a compromise position, which is something I have advocated in the past as well but which is subject to some question, I think). The divergence between James and TFH here appears to be that TFH thinks that this is now obsolete and that we are on the brink of overthrowing this because women’s reproductive capacity is no longer the critical and rare resource it was in earlier times while James seems to think that the underlying organization around sex and reproduction will always lean towards the female interest because this is the species interest, but that the mores and norms and so on will be rolled back eventually.
In other words, a key question is whether such an inclination exists more generally in the culture as a whole, but not only in women — it’s a social inclination in favor of women, rather than one advanced by them specifically per se (although some women will participate in advancing it, as we have seen in the recent era with feminism, many men have done so as well). It’s not restricted to being in women or being advocated by women, but it does advance the feral female sexual agenda. Again, in getting at that one’s perspective on the role played by “hard” monogamy is key — i.e., whether it is simply the manifestation of this thing in prior eras, or whether it was a compromise position between male and female interests, or whether it was the triumph of the male interest, which was itself a compromise worked out among men with respect to their competing reproductive interests. All of that is important in understanding what this thing is, or may be, where it comes from, and what, if anything, can be done about it.
I mean to put words in no one’s mouth, but there is definitely a distinction between the MANdrosphere goal of being the very best Man you can be ‘Man Up’ and the call for submission to Men by various groups that falls into the marry the slut ‘Man Up’ category.
There seems to be some talking past this on both sides. “That word may not mean what you think it means.”
We should all take care in this quest to identify if the FI exists as a separate ‘thing’ and, if so, what it should be called, not to pigeon-hole ourselves and each other into fenced off camps. That will only shut down real debate on this and related issues.
“In other words, a key question is whether such an inclination exists more generally in the culture as a whole, but not only in women — it’s a social inclination in favor of women, rather than one advanced by them specifically per se (although some women will participate in advancing it, as we have seen in the recent era with feminism, many men have done so as well).”
Yes, this is something that I have been trying to assess. At this point I think that there exists a male equivalent as well, but I don’t know if it is as strong as the female inclination. What I do find interesting is those men who have been co-opted into advancing feminist interests. Part of me wonders if this is a hijacking of the “Male Imperative”, in so far as that feminism has managed to trick men into acting in ways that help out the feminists by convincing men that they are in fact advancing their own interests in the process.
I am of the school that “Hard” or “Lifetime” Monogamy is a male invention, advanced by everyone who wasn’t an Alpha Male, to ensure greater access to women. What we are seeing now is an attempt by women, whether they realize it or not, to eliminate it.
I don’t think you can really understand why feminism has been such a success unless you understand how the modern male mind works. This is where there is a huge gap in the manospheres understanding. Men don’t date other men, so often a man’s understanding of men is based on his understanding of himself. Men project their own wants, needs, desires, and ambitions on to other men and then come away confused as to how the women seem to be winning.
Here a few points to consider..
1. Decadence leads to androgyny. Men are less masculine, women are less feminine. See: Rococo Period as an example of men developing effeminate preferences. When men are less masculine women are naturally less feminine. This results in…
2. Companionship elevated to the highest good. Contrast this with the propagation of children being the highest good. They are very different. A man wanting a companion looks for different characteristics in a woman than a man looking for a good mother to his children. This is why chastity is not considered important to the vast majority of modern men. They are not looking for a “good woman” so much as someone they can relate to. If you have been in the dating market as a woman looking for a man who makes you feel feminine, then you no how difficult it is. Most of you here want a feminine woman, but you might be surprised by how many men are actually turned off by that. Most of them want a buddy..with boobs.
3. Masculinity triumphs in hardship. During hardship everyone is tougher..men and women both (see: Frontier Women), but the masculine and feminine roles are treated as necessities, and both men and women experience more honor and respect in living out those roles. If you look at cultures where the propagation of children is still considered an ultimate good, you will also see the traditional roles more highly valued. One such example is the Orthodox Jews. Their main focus is increasing the population of Orthodox Jews and as such are entirely oriented towards the well-being of the family and the health of the community.
AR……yes
I keep saying, lets reserve a space for the readers and for those who actually see past their
16:9 (1.78:1) aspect ratio.
@Zippy on January 21, 2013 at 9:33 AM —
But we already have two perfectly good words here: “feminism” and “female nature”. From the outside looking in, the adoption of “the feminine imperative” looks like bafflegab: a kind of turf war of words between pseudointellectuals like Rollo and Matthew King, an excuse for boys to play AMOG in the MMA ring – a place where fake manliness is put on display under artificial lights with nothing real at stake.
I happen to disagree; try this one out and see if you concur, or at least partially so.
Female nature is what it is — rationalization hamster, short term focus, solipsism, hypergamy, willingness to walk away from a man despite “relationship equity” on his part, attraction to emotional topics rather than rational ones, so on, so forth.
Feminism is the trend in late 20th Century Western countries to get laws passed which declare that ‘all sexes are equal, but some sexes are more equal than others’
Female imperative is somewhere between the the two — it is the incorporation into base culture (“the way people act when they are not taking deliberative action” or “the matrix”) of sets of attitudes, beliefs, conventions, and customs, which disproportionately make it easier for women to act according to their nature (short term, emotional, acting on tingles, and the like) without being assigned individual culpability for it, due to stereotypes or beliefs about “what women are like” which absolve individual women of much of their social responsibility and *social* consequences which a man acting in a similar fashion would have to face; in particular, a way to get men to defend a woman for the very same behavior a man would be ostracized for.
@dolangraeme:
But what is making it so difficult to eradicate the feminism which has infected the Church? Why is there so much resistance? Especially from those women who will often proclaim themselves anti-feminists?
Liberalism. (Or modernism, if you prefer). Liberalism is the way all respectable people think in modern first world societies. Most people who claim not to be liberal still have strong loyalties to liberal principles: many are nominalists who think they make themselves not-liberal or not-feminist by asserting a different name for themselves, that they cannot be defined by others but only by their free and equal selves in an assertion of autonomous will.
You can see this with feminism: Christian feminists think that opposing abortion and formally being in favor of traditional marriage makes one not a “feminist,” that one can still hold that men and women are basically equal and wives need not submit to husbands without being feminist, as long as one makes the proper dispensation when it comes to abortion and a few other issues.
Trying to separate feminism from liberalism doesn’t work. Feminism is a form or manifestation of liberalism: a revolt against nature in the name of freedom and equality; an assertion that authoritative discrimination based on differing, unchosen male and female natures (among other things) is inherently bad; a destructive acid thrown on anything and everything perceived to be tyrannical and oppressive to the free and equal new androgynous man.
All the different mainstream political factions you see are different forms of liberals. They haggle over who is in favor of authentic freedom and equal rights and vilify other kinds of liberals as liars who don’t support RealTrue[tm] freedom and equality. Liberals of a more ‘conservative’ or right-leaning bent agree on the basic liberal principles – that freedom and equal rights are the highest legitimate authority in the political domain, that public morality is legitimately enforceable only to the extent it is supported freely and equally by “we the people” – but think that leftists take things ‘too far’ or that leftists are really just power hungry liars who don’t support Authentic[tm] freedom and equality. There are go-slow liberals and go-fast liberals; liberals who think that “good” liberalism can work if only the culture is functional, and liberals who think certain kinds of people have to be eliminated before it will be possible for a “good” liberalism to triumph. But they are all liberals: human beings with strong commitments to the liberal principles, the notion that the political buck stops at the consent of a free people with equal rights.
Ironically, liberalism has already comprehensively triumphed. All respectable people have liberal commitments. This is as true of all those people in pews and pulpits as it is of others.
The fact that liberalism is ultimately self-contradictory is a feature, not a bug. It is what makes liberalism so adaptable: by creating its own enemies without challenging fundamental principle it takes all the oxygen out of the room. Who is like the Beast, and who can stand against him?
@grey_whiskers:
Feminism is the trend in late 20th Century Western countries to get laws passed which declare that ‘all sexes are equal, but some sexes are more equal than others’
I think this is far too narrow. How can feminism post-date female suffrage? Even folks who don’t share my historical view in all its detail have to concede that feminism is a much larger phenomenon with much greater longevity than what is being admitted here.
The reason I resist renaming a portion of feminism as “the feminine imperative” is because liberalism’s triumph is driven by nominalism. What is renaming a portion of feminism “the feminine imperative” but more nominalism? Once you understand nominalism’s role in the triumph of liberalism/modernism it becomes clear that the disputes over language are not a pedestrian quibble among technologists over what to call the latest discovery.
If you really want to kill the weed, you have to pull it out by the roots.
@AR
How much more specific would you like than quoting Mark Minter’s comment, as taken from a book? Least sexually restricted for women, and by women.
It was and I am. That book–which MM was touting as real evidence for the case of FI–forwarded the idea that for generations unnumbered women restricted each other from promiscuity. If evo-psych can be extrapolated from anything–and I’m very dubious–but if it can, then behavior of nearly all women across nearly all time ought to be evidence that the Feminine Imperative–if it exists (I’m even more dubious of this)–is to restrict the sexual activity of women. The Feminine Imperative, as outlined, is the exact opposite of this; it’s said to be the acceptance of female promiscuity.
@Empath
And? This is what women were built to do. They need it to succeed in their tasks as helpmeets. If you don’t like this, you don’t like women. It is often grossly misdirected, but it is necessary. If women were to get back on the path of restricted sexual activity, the empathy would work in favor of the moral.
@AR (again)
Gabriella at least had the excuse of being a woman. Your attempt to reframe is equally noxious. Your vet friend isn’t here. For all I know he doesn’t even exist. How shall I generate empathy for him? We’re talking about a concept, not your friend. Besides: for all I know, he MAY need to man up.
@Empath (again)
Look away, lest you be disgruntled by AR’s quest for empathy for a divorced soldier he met once. (Who’s imperative is feminine again?)
@AR (again and again) and freebird
Freebird nailed it. Your oppressors are other men, subjugating themselves to women’s desires. Take your poor vet friend, AR. Somewhere, there is another vet who became a cop–as they often do–and he’s out there hauling someone just like your vet off to jail for “abuse”. That cop, is divorced too, and takes his anger out on “real scum” like this abuser/deadbeat dad; so he roughs the bastard up on the way to the car; maybe a taze or too.
Does the Feminine Imperative know it is feminine? It’s taken over the cops and courts and government, and every other institution mostly made up of men…
Yes, it’s you against the world, AR. *SOB* Nobody understands! *SOB* It’s particularly despicable for someone who just tried to generate empathy for mistreated men to, at the end, stand on those same men, and make it about himself.
@ Everyone pissed off at calls to Man-Up, and thinks enjoying the fight is “ruining the debate”:
Read The Abolition of Man. It’s short.
And I like Matt King. He’s an asshole, and he’s rude to everyone including some of my friends. That makes me want to punch him sometimes, but I can’t because I don’t know where to find him. Nevertheless I consider him a kindred spirit. Zippy too. They may not feel the same, but that’s their business.
From time to time when I run across yet another “ManUP” screed, I find that revising the words “ManUP” to “You people are not living according to my standards” does not change the meaning of the rant, in fact it is often clarifying. The interesting thing about this is the issue of standards – whose, done to whom (yes, I am referencing Lenin).
Across the mandrosphere, I find articles written by men for other men, suggesting ways that men can be more masculine, more manly. Often they are discourses on how men can be more independent, in some way or other. Weight training increases circulating T and that may be attractive to women, but I see articles on that topic that are purely oriented along health and independence lines. Hunting, fishing, building shelter, all are useful skills in and of themselves, regardless of whether “chicks dig it” or not. Any number of MGTOW types are interested in many practical arts, they simply don’t care what women think of those things.
As with any open-source environment, expertise is demonstrated, not assumed. Hawaiian Libertarian’s article at Heartiste is considered a source document on married Game because he succeeded in saving his marriage, not because he has a k001 name. The weight training discussions tend to tie back to known experts such as Mark Rippetoe, again not because someone “says so” but because Rippetoe’s reputation derives from his record – effective strength training while minimizing injury.
Some of these men, it appears, are the intended targets of the “ManUP” diktat. Yet oddly enough, those ordering other men around never seem to quite explain why it is that men should pay attention to them. Given the harm that has been done to the social structure via various means, most especially the law, “ManUP” cries from feminists such as Kay Hymowitz are met with the derision and anger that they deserve – having taught men to hate themselves, feminists have zero credibility now. Traditional conservatives, who have supported feminist laws for 30 years, are continually surprised to learn that they, too, have zero credibility with many men.
I suggest that those who wish to order men to “ManUP” should consider exactly what gives them the authority to issue that order, and how they can demonstrate that authority (aside from just yelling a whole lot). Elementary public speaking techniques teach, among other things, that one should establish in the introduction “Who you are, and why the audience should listen to you”. Perhaps a similar notion would be of use to the “ManUP” diktat-wannabes.
“Who are you order other men around, and why should they follow your orders?”
Sterling example, and thanks, Twenty. Here I make a simple point of clarification that ever so mildly challenges a commenter’s presentation of things, and what is the reaction?
All of this may be true, I’ll grant it. But what did I do to this guy? Any ideas? Where did the personal angle come from, and how does it become my sole responsibility for going off-topic when I respond in-kind to neutralize a spasm attack?
Matt
I asked:
Which of you manly men wants to give “man up” lessons to a combat veteran of Iraq, who apparently did the right thing by marrying, and who now has little more than what he’s carrying with him, because he was betrayed by “his woman”, with the full assistance of every legal service and every social service she chose to contact?
What do you say to him? He’s a pleasant enough fellow, so long as you don’t mention “women” or “wife” in conversation…
It’s all very well to chide men to “man up” and “not be cowards” from whatever chairs we happen to sit in.
Gabriella at least had the excuse of being a woman. Your attempt to reframe is equally noxious.
It’s a question. You don’t like questions, I know, but too bad. So sorry if I was totally rude in asking you and some other armchair commadoes what real men in the real world should be doing.
Your vet friend isn’t here. For all I know he doesn’t even exist. How shall I generate empathy for him? We’re talking about a concept, not your friend. Besides: for all I know, he MAY need to man up.
Where did I ask you to generate empathy? You have arrogated to yourself the authority to order other men to “man up”. Fine, then, let’s get down to real world details, not airy handwaving.
Go to any Army base or fort. Find a man whose wife dumped him while he was over in Iraq. Now, you are claiming the authority to tell him to “manUP”. Fine. Tell us what you will say to him.
If that is too difficult for you, then go to your nearest rescue mission or homeless shelter. Pick any middle aged man who is not an alcoholic, drug user, or mentally ill – they are there. Now, order him to “manUP”. Tell us what you will say to that man.
Or if that is too tough, then just pull your head out of wherever it is currently located, and look around your place of employment, your church, your social circle, your neighborhood. Without too much effort you likely will be able to find a man who has been frivorced and ground up in the divorce industry. You are authorized to order him to “ManUP”, right? Tell us what you will say to him.
Again, so sorry to bring the nasty old real world into this thread, but frankly “manUP” from keyboard kommandoes reminds me a whole lot of ordering some legless man in a wheelchair “Just stand up and walk! Right now! Get on your feet!”, but without all the little trivial details such as, oh, physical rehab, fitting prosthetics, more physical rehab, and so forth.
There is no call for empathy here, unless you choose to create a strawman. I’m asking you for concrete, manly advice, oh manly man, that you as a man would give to another man whom you are ordering to “ManUP”.
Too complicated for you? Too difficult? Asking too much of you?
Great Books For Men GreatBooksForMen GBFM (TM) GB4M (TM) GR8BOOKS4MEN (TM) lzozozozozlzo (TM) wrote [using the term loosely]:
For serious, brother? That’s rich, considering the source. At least I attempt to, you know, use words.
Matt
Saying that men need to “man up” and be men for their own sakes is never bad, but that’s rarely what happens. The context almost always makes it: “men need to man up to fix this particular societal problem that we’re talking about, because otherwise we’re implying that women might be at fault, and eeeeeeek!”
In this conversation about the way society currently defers to the whims of women, throwing a “man up” card is a way of saying that men have caused this situation and only men can fix it. Which may be true to some extent, but to divert the focus to that makes women out to be innocent bystanders yet again, and that’s not true either.
Tam the Bam wrote:
You are aware that it is impossible to use this word unironically, right?
Which are the terms you’re having trouble with (or are so sure the others beneath you must have trouble with)? What was the longest word I used here? “Nomenclature”? “Empathologism”? I did say “teleological” once.
No, this is how chumps tell on themselves. “Orotund. Portentous. Condescending. Sesquipedalian.” They read their own deficiencies into the people for whom they have no other explanation. Not unlike GBFM, as I noted immediately above.
Matt
Cane Caldo
Freebird nailed it. Your oppressors are other men, subjugating themselves to women’s desires.
“Desires” is a pretty fuzzy word.There’s more going on than “desires”. It’s almost like some kind of imperative is at work, eh?
Take your poor vet friend, AR. Somewhere, there is another vet who became a cop–as they often do–and he’s out there hauling someone just like your vet off to jail for “abuse”. That cop, is divorced too, and takes his anger out on “real scum” like this abuser/deadbeat dad; so he roughs the bastard up on the way to the car; maybe a taze or too.
No doubt. So what?
Does the Feminine Imperative know it is feminine? It’s taken over the cops and courts and government, and every other institution mostly made up of men…
Ok, that’s actually a recognizable point, maybe. It should be obvious that there is a strong drive within men to protect women – inborn or learned, either way – and that drive can be, and has been, harnessed by women for their own pleasure and purposes. Now, is that difficult to comprehend?
I can’t believe I’m the only one who lives in that world.
Yes, it’s you against the world, AR.
No, child, that is not what I wrote. Why don’t you man up and try honesty some time, instead of playing these stupid little games ?
While you and the rest of the “ManUP and serve women! Now!” group yammer at each other, real men get hurt in real ways. I’m not in any kind of job that brings me into contact with them, I just happen to be gregarious enough to talk with people and listen to them. So all you “ManUP” armchair commandoes become a bit tiresome from time to time, especially when the online chest-beating and dung-throwing stands in contrast to the men I know who are trying to do the right thing as they were taught, only to be blindsided by a female-centric social and legal system.
*SOB* Nobody understands! *SOB*
Well, Candy Cane, you seem to be remarkable clueless, so it’s clear you don’t understand. I’ve had to teach you before, about such things as “justice first, reconciliation later”, but it seems that some of the lessons don’t stick.
It’s particularly despicable for someone who just tried to generate empathy for mistreated
men to, at the end, stand on those same men, and make it about himself.
As much contempt as I have for strawman arguments like this, right now I’m finding something else to be more disgusting. Specifically, it is particularly despicable that blowhards like you talk a lot of talk, but apparently can’t be bothered to take even one step to walk the walk.
It’s not like I’m asking you to actually interact with another human being in person. Nothing so, utterly, utterly beneath you. I’m just asking you to talk, something clearly within your skill set. Tell us all how you would go about ordering an unemployed, divorced, combat vet living on the street to “manUP”, ok?
C’mon, oh manly man. Strut your manly stuff. Provide a concrete, real world answer to a real world question. Or is that too much to ask of such an oh-so-manly man as yourself?
And? This is what women were built to do. They need it to succeed in their tasks as helpmeets. If you don’t like this, you don’t like women. It is often grossly misdirected, but it is necessary. If women were to get back on the path of restricted sexual activity, the empathy would work in favor of the moral.
Cane, there is no “and”.
And no, getting them back on the path of restricted sexual activity , while I wouldn’t say has NOTHING to do with empathy as a force for good or bad, would not correspond to a solution to the empathy problem. The drive for empathy experience is ever and always present, either restrained and directed, or unfettered and wild (feral). That empathy is what they were built for, and that it has a righteous manifestation does not settle the matter at all. To get to the empathy experience very wrong hoops are jumped through, analogous to sating the male sex drive and the wrong hoops that leads to.
I have made no reference to not liking empathy. Stay with the sex/male comparison, that would be like saying if you don’t like sex, when pointing to how it can manifest in corrupt ways.
Look away, lest you be disgruntled by AR’s quest for empathy for a divorced soldier he met once. (Who’s imperative is feminine again?)
Relax the mind. Come down from ludicrous speed because you are missing my point by inferring an “empathy bad” subtext that is miles from what i am getting at. Empathy is not bad, empathy is not the enemy, female empathy is not the enemy.
“Women” and “Men” are abstracts… It isn’t like some organization with a CEO. It isn’t like you can demand that the organization known as Men or Women amend their policies. It is futile to try and decide whether Men or Women are to blame or whether it is up to Men or Women to fix it.
*I* as an individual woman am responsible for our current climate to the degree that I am sinful..which is to say that I have contributed. Sometimes unknowingly, sometimes out of weakness, and at times out of pure selfishness.
Individual men have contributed to the societal ills to the degree that they are sinners. All men here are sinners so no man here is innocent either.
The only way to correct the situation is for each individual man and woman to be fastidious defenders of what is Good and True.
It is the male prerogative to never leave simple what could be complicated.
Cane
Ive lost what you are on about. Seriously. I can see “man up” as having more than two meanings, more than four, more than a lot. The one the works the best is the one that honestly expresses how men have allowed rot creep in all its forms resulting in the legal and church condition we face and as many have outlined above.
When I write to or speak to pastors about the feminism of the church, the “man up” these will be central to their response. So, I deal with it up front, acknowledge the reasonable aspect of it, and move on. But I close with something along the lines of, “unless and until the women of the church are spoken to and at, telling men to man up is a waste of time….especially as they frame it”
Why am I wrong? Be specific.
The only way to correct the situation is for each individual man and woman to be fastidious defenders of what is Good and True.
A true statement utterly lacking in utility in present times. This reminds me of its corollary where a comment about the cause of divorce is made, almost regardless whether it lays blame on men, women, or hermaphrodites, some woman will say “all this fuss about the law and divorce and stuff is useless, we know what causes divorce…..sin causes it and if we could all just stop sinning so much all would be well”…..followed by a chorus of agreement and the sound of pencils putting periods on completed sentences.
@A-Nancy-mous Reader
I don’t have to go find them. They write me more often than you know. I tell them to Man Up, essentially. Some listen. Some don’t respond again.
I do this all the time. At work. WIth my friends. In my church. To my priests. Everywhere. If you want to know what I say: read my blog. It’s LOADED with ManUp talk. Some men seem to respond to it. A lot of women do. That may be proof of my guilt in your eyes, but–then again–I already plead so. Either way, even if those folks are wrong to listen to me, I do live what I say, and say what I live. You have encountered the Real Deal.
This is the same game that CL likes to play! How often do you dress in the clothes of the other female commenters? First Gabby, and now CL. SSM: watch your shoes. Someone might be eyeing them…
That whole screed about the vet and Man Up was one, big, call to empathize with men who have been screwed by a system that is set up to promote women and denigrate men. Which I wholeheartedly and fully agree with–but because I don’t get get the sackcloth and ashes spread around well enough for your tastes, you start throwing out reframes and shit-tests like a damned girl.
And if this is unconvincing to others, we can go over to the comments of The Book of Oprah. Start here. The comments keep going on and on about how AR shit-tests commenters by judging whether they generate enough empathy for Andrea Yates kids, Mary Winkler’s husband, and the general misandric zeitgeist in which we surely live. He’ll know when you have because you’ll call those women bad, and if you’re really serious: all women. When you’ve done so, he’ll write your name in his secret book that you are a Serious Person About the Zeitgeist and not just another Leninist dressed in TradCon clothing.
Hey, whatever, A-Nancy-mous Reader. But if you’re going to lie, reframe, shit-test, police the hierarchy, judging the performance, and seek to get my empathy instead of my allegiance, and all the other things that we routinely decry women for doing…I’m going to call you a Nancy. and a liar.
grey_whiskers wrote:
Well, don’t. I am not “call[ing] for” anything, really. I am suggesting that the invention of precious terminology is often the cover for an inability to systematically investigate a subject. The terms are used as placeholders — a God of the gaps — so that the more practical discussion can proceed.
Yes, smart observation. Which underscores the need for … wait for it … a more systematic investigation than tossing out impressions and seeing what is popular enough to stick.
Indeed, but this is crux of it. But let’s first seriously consider whether yours is truly a “new intellectual discovery.” Like NBC reruns, I suppose, “If you haven’t seen it, it’s new to you!” The immodesty that attends the idea of a “new intellectual discovery” is a barrier to not just understanding but also dissemination. It’s why scholarly peer-review is necessary, to know whether it already hasn’t been thought and said before.
But who cares about those DWEMs! What does it matter, that was then, this is now, we would have to adopt new idioms in any event. True enough, but this adds to the immodesty. To imagine that one’s own feeble skills of articulation are superior to the ones that came before is folly, if only because longevity proves their worth and at least circumstantially proves our inferiority. Granted, this misconception is the relativist disease of academia which pervades the entire culture and silently influences our own investigations. That’s no excuse if you are serious about getting to the heart of the matter. Superficial analyses designed for AFC consumption can contradict themselves five times in the same paragraph (much less across the work of five different sophists) without a firm tether to “the best that has been thought and said.”
We go to the classics to get traction. They are the grit under the tire that gets us off the ice. Otherwise we are burning out our engines spinning our wheels, unable to get a grip on a mutually respected standard of communication. Even if the classics are erroneous or incomplete, they still provide the common authority against and through which we might convey the deepest concepts to each other.
Matt
Mr. A is Mr. A whimpered:
… especially after the Beast devours your weaksauce protestations like the thin gruel they are.
@empath
Because women are followers, not robots. You can’t just give them instructions. You have to walk in front of them.
Predictably obsessive: “You are aware that it is impossible to use this word unironically, right?”
It does betray it’s origins as a typically ponderous Victorian academic’s idea of a joke, and yes I’m having a bit of a laugh.
I forgot
Obfuscatory.
Grandiose.
Petulant.
Bombastic.
Hyperlocutory (yes, I know. Irony. It’s like bronzy, but made of iron)
Hectoring
and
Maladroit.
Somebody is Trying Too Hard, and it’s showing. Bespeaks a certain unease, and disjuncture with the avowed ambition which belies the ostentatiously verbose and domineering attempt at a higher register (see what I did there?)
Learning shows to best advantage when worn lightly.
Like my old gran said, yer catches more flies wiv ‘oney than wiv vinnygar.
I see nobody’s taken my $10 yet.
See you again soon, no doubt.
Not really. The point in finding and defending truth is to make sinning uncomfortable. Thats how bloggers can be a force for good.
You can find plenty of women who praise marriage and claim to hate feminism, and yet they’ll say young women should go to college so they can be independent and not need a man, just in case that part of their life doesn’t go well, and there will be plenty of time to get married at about 28. I think Dr. Laura from the radio fits into this category — I haven’t listened to her much or in ages, but I think she was against early marriage, and yet she was opposed to promiscuity (a contradiction with late marriage, but anyway) and fairly orthodox in her religious beliefs, enough that people considered her “conservative.”
So you have women who don’t fit into the feminist mold — they’re anti-abortion, pro-nuclear-family, pro-matrimony, pro-homeschool, definitely not attending any Gloria Steinem book signings — and yet they aren’t what their great-grandmothers would have called good wife material either. They’re sort of in-between traditional femininity and feminism, but I don’t think it’s as simple as a hybrid of those two extremes either. Personally, I think it’s something else, perhaps with roots in those long-standing forces, but spurred by political and technological changes into becoming something truly new.
(I know, there’s nothing new under the sun, but sometimes there is. For instance, the “dick on demand” phenomenon that social media and smart phones provide for women, as Rollo has discussed, really is new. Never before in history have ordinary women been able to receive routine offers of dick, day-in and day-out, on a level that was previously only available to the lady of a castle when the lord was away at war, but now with total anonymity. That’s completely unprecedented, and almost no one is talking about it. If, 20 years ago, a man had knocked on his married ex-girlfriend’s door, and when she answered said, “Hey baby, what’s shaking? You still look good naked? Need any dick? I got some here if you do,” he would have found himself in a fist-fight with her husband right there on the porch. Now, she gets messages like that on her phone, and not only is it no big deal, but if her husband noticed her ex’s name showing up on her phone and objected or insisted on seeing the message, he’d be accused of abuse by trying to control her. That’s been a huge change in the power balance.)
So I think there’s something different here that isn’t covered by the old terms, and that’s worth coining a new one. Finding a satisfactory term and definition is a whole other step, though.
By the way, the FI of necessity means that men and women are different. The FI directly contradicts the feminist notion that “men and women are exactly the same except women can have babies”. Plenty of conservative, anti-abortion, feminists clearly have that as a premise.
Contradicting fundamental premises makes people unhappy.
@Cane Caldo:
And if this is unconvincing to others, we can go over to the comments of The Book of Oprah. Start here. The comments keep going on and on about how AR shit-tests commenters by judging whether they generate enough empathy for Andrea Yates kids, Mary Winkler’s husband, and the general misandric zeitgeist in which we surely live. He’ll know when you have because you’ll call those women bad, and if you’re really serious: all women. When you’ve done so, he’ll write your name in his secret book that you are a Serious Person About the Zeitgeist and not just another Leninist dressed in TradCon clothing.
I’m not sure why you even respond to Anonymous Reader. What is the point, really? Leave the poor thing alone in its bubble.
Because women are followers, not robots. You can’t just give them instructions. You have to walk in front of them.
I’m not sure why you are doing so…..but that doesn’t answer the question. I’m not demanding an answer, and I’m certainly not demanding a specific answer, but that comment is a true statement that still misses the point.
@Zippy: “Genetic studies have shown …”
It’s good to be skeptical.
The study was of DNA from mitochondria (female line) and the non-recombining part of the Y chromosome (male line), and is here:
http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/21/11/2047
The findings were discussed here:
http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm
and then by Roissy:
http://heartiste.wordpress.com/2010/07/27/proof-of-the-modern-american-harem/
especially after the Beast devours your weaksauce protestations like the thin gruel they are.
So that’s what you ate that gave you corridor trots all over your keyboard.
Here’s an example of women: Plans to pick me up at 10:45 for doctor appointment. Confirms with self and family days in advance as well as night before. Texts an hour after the time she claims she thought the appointment was at 2 PM saying it’s my fault I didn’t curtly remind her or ask if she was still picking me up at 10:45 for my appt. Further says that because it’s my fault for not making sure she followed through with the plan, she doesn’t need to come get me to take me elsewhere until she feels like it because she’s mad that I made her upset by missing my appointment that she was too fucking lazy and entitled to come pick me up for on time. Lies boldfaced about it and starts text argument trying to prove how it’s my fault she didn’t pick me up on time, and how she doesn’t need to come get me now, even though she thought the appointment was at the time she decided to reply to texts defending her not being on time for the imagined hour of the non-existent appointment which had now been hypothetically missed both at the real time and at her pretend time. Therefore I am irresponsible because I am responsible for her responsibilities. My mother, a week later, after proving that my sister did know about the appt actual time, and was in fact just unwilling to, based on not feeling like it, come get me when she knew she should, explains to me that it’s my fault for not taking responsibility for getting a ride from the person responsible for giving me a ride to the place I’m wrong for having scheduled a missed appointment at due to the irresponsible not getting a ride form the person who I was responsible ensuring gave me the ride I was responsible for not having gotten.
The outcome would have been the same had I missed the time for picking up my sister. Either way, it’s my fault. And I can’t blame someone else (that’s not me, and a girl) for something they did or didn’t do, because I must be held accountable for my mistakenly thinking women should be held accountable for their responsibilities, and I must be blamed for even thinking I could call bullshit, and that it’s my fault. That’s the hamster logic and that’s just a minor example. She further decided that when she finally felt like giving me a ride, due to how irresponsible I was and how angry she was at me for her not doing what she was supposed to, that I should be punished by having my soda dumped out while I walk into the gas station. Because I made her feel bad, wah. My fault.
This may be a shitty example, but I think it speaks loud and clear: entitled bitchy girls are the “marriage material” according to most men. I know she is the marriage material type because she simply is. And what a fool will the man be that falls for that trap. Moral of the story is women can do anything they want by virtue of how they feel according to being a woman, and any man who does anything is wrong for having done anything at all because baby wants their bottle now.
+1 to Anonymous Reader’s point at 1:41 pm above, re: the impact of “Man Up” statements compared to what some real men are going through. I know, and also work with, a number of men who are _like_ what Cane and ‘Trads’ promote: hardworking, Spirit-filled, husbands and fathers prayerfully seeking to lead their families and do good within their communities.
That is, until they are blindsided by their unhaaaaaappy wives filing for divorce. Then their lives change. Their past certainty is often lost.
Some of those men (and their then-wives) gave me grief 10 or 15 years ago, for not being married nor religious as they were. “Our church needs you to come to Christ!” they’d say, “Women are looking for a good guy like you to become saved, and take up leadership of a family!” It’s later difficult to hear from those same men, post-divorce, and hear the sadness, confusion, anger in their voices. I wasn’t looking to say “I told you so”, I truly felt badly for them. “I love my kids when I’m able to see them…” as one fellow said. So I listen to them, buy them a beer or two, give them suggestions when they ask for them.
So to compare the real experiences of people I know – who WERE trying to “man up” – to the harrumphing and theorizing I read here… doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. And C.S. Lewis is over-rated!
Cane Caldo
That whole screed about the vet and Man Up was one, big, call to empathize with men who have been screwed by a system that is set up to promote women and denigrate men. Which I wholeheartedly and fully agree with–but because I don’t get get the sackcloth and ashes spread around well enough for your tastes, you start throwing out reframes and shit-tests like a damned girl.
Yawn. All I want is for Cane Caldo to answer two questions:
1. Where do you get the authority to order other men to “ManUP”?
2. What would you say to such a man as I have described?
Too much work to answer questions? Too offensive that someone would dare to ask a question of The Great And Important Cane Caldo? Or what? Can’t “man up” enough to just answer a question, evidently.
And if this is unconvincing to others, we can go over to the comments of The Book of Oprah. Start here. The comments keep going on and on about how AR shit-tests commenters by judging whether they generate enough empathy for Andrea Yates kids, Mary Winkler’s husband, and the general misandric zeitgeist in which we surely live.
Is it a strawman, or is it projection? I can’t tell, and see no reason why I should bother to find out.
The Winkler -Yates test is very useful is smoking out tradcons who are all too ready to white knight for women; ready to defend women no matter what they do. There’s nothing about “empathy” in there. It’s all about objective standards: is murder a crime for everyone, including women, or only for men? It smokes out the “men bad, women good” feminist premise that so many traditional conservatives carry around in their head. Is that what really stings? The truth about women’s capabilities for evil actions?
Hey, whatever, A-Nancy-mous Reader. But if you’re going to lie, reframe, shit-test, police the hierarchy, judging the performance, and seek to get my empathy instead of my allegiance,
Nice job of projection. Cane Caldo projects all his bad habits onto me, in one tidy little bolus.
He does my job for me.
and all the other things that we routinely decry women for doing…I’m going to call you a Nancy. and a liar.
Aside from namecalling and projection, Cane Caldo seems to have nothing else to offer.
Certainly he’s not up to the task of actually explaining what he means by “ManUP”.
I guess it’s just too much to expect of him.
@James:
Right off the pages you linked:
To estimate population parameters such as Ne and the TMRCA, it is necessary to generate locus-specific estimates of the per generation mutation rate. Our specific methodology for estimating this quantity differed for the NRY and mtDNA, although in each case our estimate was based on the degree of sequence divergence between humans and chimpanzee. We assumed the split between humans and chimpanzee to have occurred 6 MYA (HaileSelassie 2001; Glazko and Nei 2003) and also assumed a 25-year generation time for both males and females.
(Emphasis mine).
How precious.
ZippyCatholic
I’m not sure why you even respond to Anonymous Reader. What is the point, really? Leave the poor thing alone in its bubble.
Oh, the irony.
@Cane Caldo
Then why the focus on the feminine imperative now? This is the least sexually restricted time in memory.
I imagine that it is due to the sexual exchange being decoupled from the financial exchange through state intervention. Women no longer need to provide any particular man with sex to financially benefit from men as a group. Women can and are sleeping with dozens of men and later marrying, or attempting to marry, more financially stable men as providers. A single mother is subsidized in her lifestyle through state financial aid, and a single women is subsidized through affirmative action and make-work government employment.
Married women, or marginally committed women in a LTR, who do engage in a debased version of that exchange are rarely held to that commitment, and men are again bled for financial aid when that relationship ends.
There is no sexual restriction in modern times because the state steps in with cash and prizes regardless of the woman’s conduct. Since men no longer have the ability to refuse financial aid to women, why would any sex cartel continue?
@Cail Corishev:
So you have women who don’t fit into the feminist mold — they’re anti-abortion, pro-nuclear-family, pro-matrimony, pro-homeschool, definitely not attending any Gloria Steinem book signings — and yet they aren’t what their great-grandmothers would have called good wife material either. They’re sort of in-between traditional femininity and feminism, but I don’t think it’s as simple as a hybrid of those two extremes either. Personally, I think it’s something else, perhaps with roots in those long-standing forces, but spurred by political and technological changes into becoming something truly new.
It is wrong to look at it as a “hybrid”. These are human beings. What you are looking for is their degree of personal allegiance to liberalism. Right-liberals like “Dr. Laura” see leftists (and therefore feminists) as the “other”; but in reality they share the same fundamental political loyalties. It is arguable that a right-liberal’s loyalty to liberal principles is more tenuous than a left-liberal’s. But in general you have to look at people as people: people with ideas and commitments and loyalties.
As I described above, right-liberal feminists will claim that they do not have feminist commitments (having feminist commitments is what it means to be “feminist”). But that is because they oppose abortion and a few of the other consequences of feminism, not because they actually have no personal loyalty to feminism.
So I think there’s something different here that isn’t covered by the old terms, and that’s worth coining a new one. Finding a satisfactory term and definition is a whole other step, though.
Advanced liberalism is different from classical liberalism even though the latter is the mature form of the former. I suggest “advanced feminism” if you really must have a different term for “what feminism has become since the suffragettes”.
Should read “even though the former is the mature form of the latter.”
I see empath’s point, as well as Cane’s. As far as The Church goes, I think there most certainly needs to be some leading of the females, and it should begin with the pastors. But most of them are as blind to this spirit of feminism as the women are.
@A-Nancy-mous Reader
Who would have thought? A passive-aggressive response from a someone who acts like a silly girl.
No, Zippy is right. I thought we were having a good scrap, but between your womanly wiles and your strong affection for men, it seems you are getting into a defensive crouch, and that’s definitely not my game.
@Empath
Sorry; that was probably obtuse. I do like parables quite a lot. I will write a post. My habit of turning posts into comment fodder has already gotten out of hand today.
Cail Corishev
(I know, there’s nothing new under the sun, but sometimes there is. For instance, the “dick on demand” phenomenon that social media and smart phones provide for women, as Rollo has discussed, really is new.
Social media interconnectedness may not be totally new, but like online widescreen pr0n or readily available manufactured calories, it is clearly something that the human brain is not really prepared for. Facebook alone can be a serious threat to any marriage. 20 years ago, if a high school flame wanted to track down his /her twu wuv, it took time and effort. Not as much as 20 or more years before that, but still – before reverse lookup was a click away, it took time. Now with Facebook alone, all sorts of old, presumably done, relationships can be revived in the convenience of a smartphone call over lunch.
I know people who refuse to “do” Facebook, for various reasons (none are Amish). But they are for the most part over 40. The college people I meet both on and off the job are linked in to varying degrees, but they are thoroughly linked in. They live on the phone.
So take as a given that any 20-something man marrying a 20-something woman is going to have to deal with a form of “competition” that is both impersonal, and very personal, at the same time. I guess I would advise anyone marrying at this time to have only a joint Facebook or other social media page, just for a start. But that’s just for a start.
All this leaves aside the sheer volume of superficial attention that just about any woman can get via OKCupid, PlentyofFish, and other dating sites, from men. Each woman can have her own little set of perpetual beta orbiters, the inverse of a virtual harem for men. Now, if that level of attention is a woman’s “normal condition”, when and if she marries, how does she turn away from that? How does she turn that part of her life “off”? Yet if she doesn’t, the temptation to cheat “just one time” either physically or via an emotional affair is always going to be present.
It’s like having strangers coming into the house at all hours of the day and night, just to “talk”.
Cane Caldo, two questions:
1. Where do you get the authority to order other men to “ManUP”?
2. What would you say to such a man as I have described in this thread?
Mark Minter wrote:
Oh, please. Don’t take others’ opinions of you so hard, brother. (I don’t — if you hadn’t noticed.) Your odyssey only further confirms I did was the correct thing. And certainly don’t substitute those same insecure subverters’ opinions for your own judgment of me.
I admire the anger you bring to the conversation, but as you know firsthand, getting to the truth of the matter is a painful journey. Lots of toes will be stepped on, lots of noses tweaked, lots of bitches slapped. If you look around, you have already gotten plenty of positive feedback from admirable people. Build on that, and don’t pick scabs and bleed to death over old wounds.
I join your admirers, as you are one of the first commenters here to bring outside material to support your contentions. Bravo for that. I am attacked from all sides for so arrogantly suggesting others do as you just did, to back up their notions and musings, and for pointing out how otherwise weak their assertions are in the absence of such support.
Let’s consider your Baumeister citation, it’s an interesting angle. But also let’s make a stronger connection to the utility of the term “Feminine Imperative,” and consider whether it can be explained in simpler terms.
“Men’s greater desire” for the sexual act was always balanced by the woman’s greater desire for familial stability after childbirth. This is the truce that allows civilization. There are more variables at play than the question of who wants sex more.
The problem with their innovation — looking at the sexual difference as a matter of economics — and indeed the problem with economics in general as a comprehensive explanatory method, is that it reduces agency to the individual level and presumes the individual acts rationally. The reason why human behavior cannot be quantified (though the social sciences try) is because the variable of human irrationality blows up every formula in which it appears. Is there another area of human behavior that proceeds more irrationally than the “sexual marketplace”?
And there is a huge red flag in their précis. “We have even concluded that the cultural suppression of female sexuality throughout much of history and across many different cultures has largely had its roots in the quest for marketplace advantage.” This is backwards-formulation for a couple of scholars seeking to explain why women until very recently were not feminists and why feminism only occurred now. They’re not on our side. Of course they understand the sexes as fundamentally antagonistic because that is the assumption behind feminism itself.
Here is where your anger gets you in trouble (and, frankly, makes you irrational). You felt their antagonism so you seek sources that justify it, like Baumeister above, and thereby justify your backlash. The sexes are not born in natural enmity. The very act of civilized reproduction requires cooperation, and the natural method of that, until the manipulations of the feminist era, has always been an agreement to, yes, fight, but then let men win. Even now after a half-century of flipping this formulation on its head, natural male dominance is naturally reasserting itself, despite the decades of risible artifice (like the WNBA and women firefighters). Your story is proof of that.
Matt
A-Nancy-mous Reader
1. From my Father
2. This is what my Father says…
Cane Caldo, are you now claiming to be Jesus?
If you really believe that, seek competent medical help immediately.
Cane Caldo, where in your Bible does it say that you should always seek to create anger in others?
Please quote, in context. From either Bible – yours, i.e. the one you wrote, or the one everyone else reads.
Oh dear. Someone needs to read their Bible.
Props to Anonymous Reader – ‘he’s’ nailing it and I personally am hoping for a response to these Man Up ‘arm chair commandos’ who do not offer a an example of ‘why’ men should follow their advice – “who are you to order other men around?” AR What incentive besides a ‘pie in the sky by and by’ ?
“Go to any Army base or fort. Find a man whose wife dumped him while he was over in Iraq. Now, you are claiming the authority to tell him to “manUP”. Fine. Tell us what you will say to him.
If that is too difficult for you, then go to your nearest rescue mission or homeless shelter. Pick any middle aged man who is not an alcoholic, drug user, or mentally ill – they are there. Now, order him to “manUP”. Tell us what you will say to that man.”
I want to hear it…
Hey, cool. We’re in agreement.
You didn’t do anything to me. I just don’t like pseudo-intellectual blowhards, and I’m not a nice person.
I see empath’s point, as well as Cane’s. As far as The Church goes, I think there most certainly needs to be some leading of the females, and it should begin with the pastors. But most of them are as blind to this spirit of feminism as the women are.
Cane’s point and mine are not mutually exclusive. That IS my point. Which I think is kind of what you are saying about the overall point….if that makes sense. We could say then that the pastor needs to man up. That would be true too. But the necrotizing fasciitis is lose in the church to such a degree that, put it this way, it was Jesus, not a pastor on 1st Whatever of Anytown that healed lepers. A little second hand Jesus at and to the ladies could sort the problem, but they are second hand Jesus-ing the men, over and again.
Last Sunday we visited a new church, not giving up finding one that will listen about evangelical feminism. The pastor gave a good message, then at the end he was talking about some family weekend thing where kids and seniors and marrieds had various seminars available. He added, “you needn’t be in a bad marriage to benefit, Sarah tells me all the time that there is room to grow….yuk yuk” (reference to his wife being his proxy holy spirit). The church burst into chuckles. That was the ONLY thing he said that was in a literal way suggestive of the problem….but its a huge one….yet so easily missed by the clucking men there. So, at that family gathering they are serving wild game, mainly ducks donated by hunters in the congregation….see that’s the pandering of men, not the training of them. Joseph of Jackson would know the drill….too well.
Ive arranged a coffee with the pastor. We spoke tonight, and will meet next week. I do this. I try things. And all this yammering about immanentizing the eschaton by manning up may miss something. Leaving the women out of it…..for example the two topics they had for men and women were:
Men training to be Godly Fathers….vs…….Freeing Mothers see the contrast?
the work is on the street. Even that soldier is a mark for it. He needs help, deserves help for no other reason than we are called to do it. The work on that guys behalf includes in your face discourse with these feminist pastors
I like parables too Cane. I work with a guy who I swear speaks only in them. That gets tedious.
I’m reading the book by Unwin recommended above by Brendan, and it has a lot of material that will be of interest to readers here.
For example, when missionaries converted a pagan society to Christianity, do you think the sexual mores of that society became more or less strict?
In fact they became less strict. Writing in 1934, and using “Catholic” sometimes in the sense of “Universal” and not “Roman Catholic”, Unwin writes:
In modern times a form of Catholic Christianity is being widely disseminated throughout the uncivilized world; and, though Christians may dislike it, the effect of their teaching upon uncivilized societies, is not to tighten but to loosen the sexual regulations. The reason is that the Christians merely forgive and forbid those sexual lapses which under native rule were effectually prevented.
Nor is this something that only modern missionaries do. Unwin notices the loosening of sexual morals not only in conversions by contemporary missionaries, but also in the conversion of the English in the 7th century.
The motivation of missionaries is described in the context of the preservation of pagan rituals in Christian practice:
When the Catholic priests began to convert the pagan Teutons, their aim (as it still is) was to increase the number of their flock, for it was only to the members of the Catholic Church that they could extend the benefit of atonement and the blessings of salvation. To this end they were ready to sympathize with any ritualistic behaviour which did not conflict with their fundamental doctrine, that of the Trinity, and with their fundamental rite, that of the Eucharist. For the rest, new converts, and indeed all adherents to the new faith, were permitted, and even, encouraged, to worship their god in the manner most suited to their particular mentality. And this is occurring again in England during the present Catholic revival.
In Christian terms, what we consider to be “biblical marriage” Unwin calls “Pauline absolute monogamy”, and he identifies it with the Protestant Reformation.
Unwin attributes the modern success of Western Civilization to “Pauline absolute monogamy”, but notes that every society that practices absolute monogamy ultimately relaxes its rules and collapses soon afterwards. He writes:
… the same changes were made successively by the Sumerians, Babylonians, Athenians, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, and Protestant English. These societies lived in different geographical environments; they belonged to different racial stocks; but the history of their marriage customs is the same. In the beginning each society had the same ideas in regard to sexual regulations. Then the same struggles took place; the same sentiments were expressed; the same changes were made; the same results ensued. Each society reduced its sexual opportunity to a minimum and, displaying great social energy, flourished greatly. Then it extended its sexual opportunity; its energy decreased, and faded away. The one outstanding feature of the whole story is its unrelieved monotony.
Anyone reading Unwin is likely to conclude that we must resist the trend away from absolute monogamy at all costs. The book is cited on many Christian websites because it provides exhaustive historical and anthropological support for such a view.
However, for anyone who believes that Christianity can and should be a citadel that resists rather than embraces the drift to permissiveness, there is a sting in the tail: it lies in Unwin’s account of Christian conversions, and ultimately in the nature of Christianity itself.
The reformed Western churches have had a 500-year flirtation with “Pauline absolute monogamy”, but their present direction, however deplorable, is a drift back towards the broad mainstream of the Universal Church. A Church whose overriding concern is to maintain and enlarge its congregation, and which has little interest in the sexual conduct of its members, except when it is required to dispense either forgiveness or (verbal) prohibition.
In other words, even if we restrict our view to Christendom, we are living at the tail end of a geographical and historical blip.
The Bible brings heft and rigor to any discussion of humanity and the spiritual.
The man made physical world was quite well built using hard wisdom derived from Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, and Arithmetica Universalis and communicated in extremely effective language built therein. Its not nebulous, even potentially nebuous, and for discourse to not stray, in a pure sense that’s the language that affords traction.
It would be great to see heft added to any discourse. The notion of what is heft has little to do with gaining traction for much more than the construction of some bigger then life online persona. That then is license to call out those lacking same, and make the specious claim that any assertion not drawn of and from the language of the classics is windblown detritus.
I hate to say this and risk contributing to Cane Caldos already huge head, but his advice is pretty rock solid.
I don’t know what protestants call it but the RC refers to the duty to minister to others as the Spiritual Works of Mercy. They are…
To instruct the ignorant;
To counsel the doubtful;
To admonish sinners;
To bear wrongs patiently;
To forgive offences willingly;
To comfort the afflicted;
To pray for the living and the dead.
The key from Unwin is that these kinds of things are NOT just something that happened in the last few hundred years, NOT something that is only related to the West (in the grand scheme of history), and occurred in societies that pre-dated nominalism, liberalism and what we now know as feminism. It is NOT new. Read Unwin.
AR – “Go to any Army base or fort. Find a man whose wife dumped him while he was over in Iraq. Now, you are claiming the authority to tell him to “manUP”. Fine. Tell us what you will say to him.
If that is too difficult for you, then go to your nearest rescue mission or homeless shelter. Pick any middle aged man who is not an alcoholic, drug user, or mentally ill – they are there. Now, order him to “manUP”. Tell us what you will say to that man.”
there is no answer…?
Gabriela these things are not being refuted. What is being insisted is that if that is to be done to/for people, it isnt. It is being done to men.
I don’t know if Rollo’s objective is to increase the animosity between women and men or to divide men so they squabble and are not paying attention to world developments, but this is the outcome of his FI theory. Solutions and resolution are not forthcoming in this discussion.
Are any of you paying attention to the increase in price and demand for guns and ammo? It has increased by 300% to 500% in the past 3 months. When people scramble for silver, the same thing will happen.
Buy silver now for $32 plus 3 and sell in 3 months for $100 or more. I could be wrong and silver will go down a bit, but I doubt it, especially if you are willing to be patient and have a 2 to 5 year time frame. (Less than $4k will buy 100 ounces, which is not a huge risk.) I doubt that you will see less than a double. (Think about the rule of 72 to see how rare this is.) Has anyone paid attention to the increase in commodity prices (grains) and that China is accumulating or that Germany is repatriating their gold or that the US mint ran out of 6 million ounces of silver in about 10 days?
These things set the stage and offer the wise a preview of what is to come. Do your homework and investigate. If silver declines to $26 or so, buy it with both hands and cash in your retirement accounts to go whole hog.
Stop the squabbling and pay attention to what is important!
For those that think the US will ever repay the $16 trillion in nominal debt and the unfunded liabilities several times larger, go ahead and ignore my insight. Your retirement funds are as secure as your faith in women to manage the world as they cement their control and dominance over our civilization.
Yeah, I think that women will demand less from the government, jobs will be plentiful and taxes will decrease…. NOT! So either believe in what I find farcical or buy some silver as insurance for future uncertain times and probable decline.
(P.S. Never ask for a woman’s advice or permission on financial decisions.)
@Matthew King (King A) on January 21, 2013 at 4:18 pm —
You had written —
I am suggesting that the invention of precious terminology is often the cover for an inability to systematically investigate a subject.
That may be true on some occasions, such a thing happens; but what I am suggesting here is *much* closer to your next sentence:
The terms are used as placeholders — a God of the gaps — so that the more practical discussion can proceed.
I think the problem is that people are recognizing these facets of intersexual and intrasexual sociology, but they don’t want to *wait* until it has been thoroughly investigated by “the professionals” — they are looking for empirically based advice to improve their lives NOW, dash it all! Therefore they have to use some terms or other to talk about these things “in the meantime”.
And then of course, one has the issue touched upon by Dorothy L. Sayers, that specialists appropriate certain common-usage words and apply them to an individual entity within their intellectual specialty, where the specialist’s word differs from the vernacular, causing no end of confusion. (C.S. Lewis pointed out the example from apologetics where the phrase “Immaculate Conception” in the minds of the uneducated *always* meant “Virgin Birth.”)
and you also wrote
We go to the classics to get traction. They are the grit under the tire that gets us off the ice. Otherwise we are burning out our engines spinning our wheels, unable to get a grip on a mutually respected standard of communication. Even if the classics are erroneous or incomplete, they still provide the common authority against and through which we might convey the deepest concepts to each other.
which echoes the thought of C.S. Lewis that reading the old classics is the best antidote for the characteristic errors of one’s own age. Agreed, in general, for both your reasons as listed and his.
BUT — the difficulty I see is that the particular set of sociological circumstances we are facing is pretty much unique in Western History (womyn having the vote and controlling sex and appropriating wealth and the force of the state and all the rest of it; Clytemnestra and Messalina and Petronius and deTocqueville give either parallels or predictions, but not to the situation we have being pretty much “society-wide”). Therefore, there may be elements or words or terms which are not covered by the classics; while I agree with you that we may nonetheless get traction and authority from them, there still remains the problem of what we are to *call* things which have not been discussed before. (For things newly rediscovered, borrow and propagate the language from the original, long-forgotten pioneers, if necessary.)
@dalrock, @all —
This site acts different than some others I am used to posting on. I have been accustomed to entering the <p> to end a paragraph, and seeing an empty line feed put in the text at that point: but such is not the case here…can anyone give me a recommendation for alternative tags (“Oh wretched man that I am; who shall separate me from this Wall of Text?”)
[D: See Zippy’s comment below. You can also use blockquote /blockquote and b (bold) /b inside greater than and less than symbols]
Oh shut up, 7. That’s not the topic here, and you can knock off your attempt at grandstanding.
I R foreigner. Silver is taxed into irrelevance (VAT) and guns are the biggest no-no imaginable. Tactical response squad throught the door at 5 a.m., gas, flashbangs, and H&Ks ready to spray.
Hell, even tiny penknives somewhere in your car, much less your pocket, can get you a stretch, and no arguing.
Advice? Maybe stock up on ballpoint pens? Do somebody a right mischief with them you can.
@grey_whiskers:
I just type in plain text. Paragraph breaks are just blank lines.
When I quote text I use <i>italics tags</i>. Other tags probably work too.
Brendan:
The key from Unwin is that these kinds of things are NOT just something that happened in the last few hundred years, NOT something that is only related to the West (in the grand scheme of history), and occurred in societies that pre-dated nominalism, liberalism and what we now know as feminism. It is NOT new. Read Unwin.
I will read Unwin, if I can find a copy. Nothing on Amazon, eBay, or Abe at the moment.
But whatever you mean when you say “these kinds of things”, you must be speaking pretty loosely. Otherwise archeologists have an awful lot to answer for.
At church on Sunday, the governer of South Carolina, in town for something going on later that night at the church, was called up by the pastor to say a few things. He had a lot of biblical knowledge, and I don’t doubt he is a Christian, but It was as if he has been programmed to input women as much as possible. Having taken the red pill, it just stuck out like a sore thumb. I first noticed it when he was talking about training disciples, and he referenced Jesus training His disciples and WOMEN.
OK, B.
I now bow to your wisdom (even though I was not grandstanding or trying to, but instead was being sincere). Time will tell if your admonition was warranted. I give it until the end of April and if I am wrong, I will grovel at your feet. (I note it only took you 11 minutes to do your homework.)
But whatever you mean when you say “these kinds of things”, you must be speaking pretty loosely. Otherwise archeologists have an awful lot to answer for.
Just read Unwin. You can download it from the internet if you Google around enough. He was a cultural anthropologist, and his writings have been suppressed due to his decidedly un-PC perspective. As James notes, his point is that relaxation on sexual mores happens after a society reaches a certain level of prosperity, as if almost on cue, and features things like easy divorce, child support and so on. It’s not new. We’re living through the contemporary cycle of this, much to our misfortune, but it isn’t new. That idea, coming as it did as feminism was ascendant, was very, very unwelcome, and his book is therefore very hard to find because no-one will print it now. But you can find a PDF on the internet if you look properly.
The other book recommended upthread by AR , “The Fate of Empires”, is also well worth a read, and is also hard to find (for similar reasons).
7, stay on topic or get lost. Really.
Brendan- Wouldn’t you say that it is because privilege results in people being less oriented towards family?
@Brendan
I didn’t say it was new. I said that our understanding of marriage is not one that has been shared by Christians in all times and places, or even enforced by the Church. Unwin makes this point on pages 374 to 376.
Although we are passing through a cycle that has been repeated many times throughout history, I believe that Christianity cannot help us stop the progression of this cycle, because if we believe Unwin then what we often call “Churchianity” has historically been the rule rather than the exception. If we want society to enforce monogamy more strictly, people might pay more attention to the utilitarian argument that this is a strategy for economic and political success.
Anyway, that’s just my opinion. Many thanks for drawing attention to the book. There’s plenty there to discuss.
The most sobering thing is the apparently unstoppable progression of the social changes identified by Unwin, ending in social collapse, usually through invasion by a neighboring people who are at an earlier stage in the sequence from absolute monogamy to “freedom”.
James —
I know you weren’t saying it was new — my comment was directed at others upthread, not you. Thanks for your comments on the book — they’re insightful.
Brendan- Wouldn’t you say that it is because privilege results in people being less oriented towards family?
Doubtless this is a factor. I’d expect there are others as well which underlie *why* that happens consistently in rather different historical, cultural and geographic contexts. The point is that it is NOT something that springs solely from the last 300 (or even 1400, if you want to take it back to Mohammed, which was also suggested upthread) years, just because the last time it reared its head was 1500 years ago. History is long. Unwin isn’t arguing for the FI, in the various ways it has been explained (which are in flux), but his book is evidence against the idea that “this is all just about feminism and/or other philopsophical-politica developments specific to our age”. That is certainly our context, but these kinds of things (which have been different in each context, depending on the context) are recurring, and not novel as has been suggested upthread. That’s my main take-away from Unwin.
@Zippy
I got my copy from:
https://www.box.com/mensarefugee26388/1/17654084
The page has links to three .rar files. The total is over 60Mb.
If the “download” buttons on this web page don’t work, right-click on the file name and select the “preview” option. Then try the “download” buttons on the preview page.
You need all three files. RAR is an antiquated archive format and you may need to download a tool to unpack the archive. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAR
It’s long off copyright, as far as I am aware.
Brendan:
Unwin isn’t arguing for the FI, in the various ways it has been explained (which are in flux), but his book is evidence against the idea that “this is all just about feminism and/or other philopsophical-politica developments specific to our age”.
Who said that it is? The modern age certainly didn’t invent the female nature, or the Fall, or all of the political tendencies Plato told us about in the Republic. I’ve already said that there is the female nature (with us since the Garden), and feminism, which is a form or expression of liberalism, which has a much longer pedigree than most people who use the term “feminism” would allow. (Heck, Art Deco was arguing in the Amelia Earhart thread that there was no such thing as feminist agitprop when she achieved the amazing headline-worthy milestone of being a passenger on a run-of-the-mill flight; and another commenter here described feminism as “late twentieth century”).
The notion that the manosphere has just discovered this brand new thing, always existing since antiquity but never before understood by humankind, thereby earning the honor of naming it like an astronomer naming a newly discovered pulsar, is – shall we say – a wee bit implausible, and looks more than a little like a dog marking a hydrant.
The idea that I am going to read one forgotten, de-facto banned book and become utterly enlightened over and against a lifetime of reading and experience strikes me as wildly implausible, and even rather gnostic. But I’m always willing to learn, and I’ll certainly (attempt to) take a look at Unwin’s book and its referenced factual foundations (or lack thereof, as the case may be).
James:
Thanks for the link, but it didn’t work. I keep getting a modal dialog box with “Page Expired”.
Good Zippy. You did make the argument that “this hasn’t appeared anywhere outside the contemporary West” upthread, which is what I was referring to. I also doubt that you will be swayed by Unwin’s book, but it is evidence against the proposition I have placed in quotes here, which was advanced by you and by others upthread.
@GregC: I wasn’t aware that the governor of South Carolina had recently undergone a sex change operation. Better clarify yourself or risk not being taken seriously …
“The Female Imperative is the natural and subconscious inclination of women to advance and aid the natural impulses and drives of women by means of creating and adapting social norms, practices, prejudices, mores, laws, and customs to fit that objective, while at the same time unconsciously believing and asserting that this organization of society is not simply right and just, but in keeping with the natural order of things.”
I like this definition.
A woman will do her utmost not to ask for a favour or recognize something as a favour, but will do her utmost to construct what she is asking for as in line with an established but often unwritten rule that you should know about and is just common decency, common courtesy and so on.
Anti-game is most often born out of integrating those unwritten rules.
@Zippy on January 21, 2013 at 8:53 PM, @Dalrock
I just type in plain text. Paragraph breaks are just blank lines.
Yogurt of Zeus! So simple I never thought to try it (insert obligatory reference to how the World War I vintage biplanes helped cripple the Bismarck).
I attempted to leave two or three blank lines between the italicized quote and my comment. Let’s see if it works.
@Zippy on January 21, 2013 at 10:25 PM —
and another commenter here described feminism as “late twentieth century”
I’m thinking that would be me. It’s just the old confusion over hand-waving terms. I don’t want to get into it in *too* much detail, for fear of derailing the thread/starting another mini-flame-war, but yes, Feminism predates the late 20th century.
Whether you go back to the suffragettes (for example), or “Rosie the Riveter” or whatever; or whether you consider feminism has having been conceived by, or pushed by, or usurped/appropriated by the Marxists…some of the confusion depends on where a commenter draws the line between “this and so much was merely preparatory for the fems or their Dark MastersTM to begin to put their plans into practice” (differentiating between intent and society-wide effects, or whether one looks at the wholesale changes in legal framework, or one looks at the changing social roles and mores engendered first by the pill, then promiscuity, then divorce, then frivorce…where does one draw the line?
When the first philosophical changes happened, when the first serious break with traditional marriage 1.0 happened, or when the cumulative differences from marriage 1.0 exceeded such-and-so-much magnitude, across 10% (or 20%, or 50%) of the culture?
My remark of “late 20th century” was talking about the open, wholesale, rejection of marriage 1.0 as even a viable, intellectually respectable “choice” to the lay person among the chattering classes, and to those hoi polloi who hoped to be thought fashionable and up-to-date and modern and sophisticated and so on, when the chattering classes deigned to look at them. This would include hookups in lieu of dating (or even a prerequisite), the acceptance of the Carousel, virgin shaming, unlimited abortion, frivorce, and the like. (“Marriage” to this set means “my very special day” to which a man is mostly a fashion accessory or a social signal to the other carousel riders that “I’m specialer than you. I *landed* a man” as opposed to a serious vow before God of sexual fidelity and a commitment to stay together through hard times). I’d set that time frame as late 1980s at the earliest.
I realize the overall silliness of this question, but its not completely silly and its asking for an opinion obviously. Zippy made a comment above that indirectly caused me to have this thought.
He said:
I’ll certainly (attempt to) take a look at Unwin’s book and its referenced factual foundations (or lack thereof, as the case may be).
Someone will infer that I am somehow suggesting that we take a book, any book, that appears to be scholarly, and accept that, and I make no inference of any such thing. In general, however, how do people decide where the facts to be references are? There is evidence of a number of answers.
1. The book is very old
2. The book is deemed a great work or classic, and everyone knows it is
3. The book represents something that is counter to what the masses believe
4. Simply it is esoteric
5. It is often quoted
I could go on, but my question suggests another. If you are reading a book that popped up somewhere on the human time line, do you question it based on books that popped up earlier on the human time line? Should we ultimately reference cave drawings for credibility?
Straw man answers that infer certain subtexts can be kept to yourselves. I’m using absurdity to ask a question.
What I suspect in many cases of male “works read measuring contests” (note I do not suggest that any reference to any work is necessarily this, and I think the difference between a sincere reference and peacocking is obvious, and respect the former sometimes going and reading whats been cited if not read prior) is being done by the guys who, when in college in the early 80’s, would constantly poo poo things, especially popular music, because they’d say “how can you like that, its too commercialized” and never realize the great contradictions built into that thought. A subset of folks always seek to differentiate themselves with things they consume, which is very different than just happening to be a consumer of something different. (in keeping with the adage that the non conformist is the biggest conformist of all)
Brendan:
You did make the argument that “this hasn’t appeared anywhere outside the contemporary West” upthread, which is what I was referring to.
Your quotes aren’t real quotes, because I didn’t actually say the quoted words, did I? And using “this” as an ambiguous referent is a nice rhetorical trick; but does anyone who is actually paying attention fall for it?
“A-Nancy-mous Reader
1. From my Father
2. This is what my Father says…”
Got that AR? Man up because Jesus. What a devastating argument. Meanwhile in the real world…
Thanks. CORRECTION: FORMER GOVERNOR of S. Carolina (David Beasley)
@Zippy
I think the site has hit its download limit – try again in February.
There is a copy here that you can read in the browser, but you cannot download it unless you have paid for a Scribd account.
If you don’t mind using BitTorrent, a Google search turns up a number of torrent links.
Thanks James.
grey_whiskers wrote:
It doesn’t work that way. There are ideas, and there are an individual’s knowledge or ignorance of those ideas. Conjuring up new terms and attempting to add them to the general conversation is likelier an indication of ignorance than it is the discovery of a “novel” concept. To use “place holders” and stop gaps in the name of practicality is to place practicality above the truth, which is tempting in the short run but catastrophic to the greater project.
It’s like plugging a leak in your pitcher with bubble gum, rather than taking the time to permanently repair it. It’s useful for a short haul, but eventually you’ll spend more time addressing the consequences of the flaw than you would if you had stopped and addressed the cause thoroughly.
Now, on top of all this come sophists who make broad claims about how water-tight their reasoning is, how there are no leaks, and how any refurbishing would be a waste of time, because “they don’t want to *wait*.” That’s one way to go about it, but it risks dissolving into Babel-like incoherence the more ambitious you become. And from the way the andropundits talk about these matters, it’s clear their ambitions are transformative, reaching for new modes and languages to confront what they assume is an entirely new circumstance.
Well, the circumstance is just not new. In fact it is as old as The Garden. Some of the details have changed, of course, but like any judge we must apply fresh facts to a long-standing code, rather than writing new, idiosyncratic legislation: “Hard cases make bad law.”
You either know this or you don’t, you’ve either encountered and studied the code or you haven’t. So in not knowing what they don’t know self-appointed thinkers and tinkerers will spend their energy detailing distinctions without differences, which is motivated (in the best case) by an overemphasis on practicable knowledge or (in the worst case) by the desire to be thought of as a pioneer.
Those of us who are aware of the larger, long-term dynamic required for an intellectual accomplishment at least know how much we don’t know — and it is vast, and impatience is no shortcut. Our mission therefore becomes monotonous, ringing the old tower bell for further hard-work and investigation, while the Ice Cream Man comes jingling down the road tossing quick-satisfying treats to all the eager students.
Of course, the unstudied and untutored find this juxtaposition hilarious, as they have no recourse but ridicule when their ego prevents them from considering the possibility of their naïveté. They mock others a lot — and I get it all, from censorship to mimicked voices to cartoon caricatures to fantasy narratives to foot stamping to tough-guy potty language to highfalutin stabs at deconstruction — even as their (occasional) attempts to offer alternative substance mock them without their awareness.
Matt
@Zippy
The idea that I am going to read one forgotten, de-facto banned book and become utterly enlightened over and against a lifetime of reading and experience strikes me as wildly implausible, and even rather gnostic. But I’m always willing to learn, and I’ll certainly (attempt to) take a look at Unwin’s book and its referenced factual foundations (or lack thereof, as the case may be).
There are plenty of surprises in the book, even if you have a lifetime of reading and experience. Also 200 pages of footnotes, if you want to chase references.
Many rights that we think were first granted to women in the 20th century have been granted many times throughout history; many points that we debate on this blog, such as a wife’s duty to submit to her husband, are recapitulations of arguments that have been fought and (inevitably) lost many times, in some cases as much as 4,000 years ago. In every case, the country that granted these rights was overrun by a less “enlightened” neighbour (but then, it is the fate of every nation ultimately to be conquered, and Unwin is not careful about discussing cause and effect).
I did not know, for example, that in the late Anglo-Saxon period women enjoyed a freedom that was erased by the Norman conquest and the Reformation, and was not restored until the 20th century.
In the English Reformation, the authorities took a literal interpretation of Paul’s words that a husband and wife were “one flesh”, and with this excuse they made a married woman a legal non-entity. (This explains why, if you were slandered by a married woman, your remedy in English Law until the early 20th century was to sue her husband.)
I haven’t read the whole book yet, but as far as I can see (and in addition to studying a large number of “uncivilized” societies) Unwin chronicles the trajectory of several “civilized” societies, and notices their remarkable similarities. He explains the first of a sequence of reforms by saying that no society has been able to tolerate absolute monogamy for very long; but he does not explain why the subsequent reforms always follow the universal pattern that he has identified.
It is quite possible that they form part of a broader set of social changes. Glubb’s pamphlet cited above discusses the trajectory of great nations without mentioning relations between the sexes. I have not read Toynbee’s “A Study Of History”, although the summaries that I have read do not mention gender relations, nor do they insist that decay is inevitable.
From the Christian standpoint of this blog, Unwin is very much a double-edged sword. He presents a detailed account of the demise of nations that have chosen the same path as our own, and so he appears to offer a warning against the folly of straying from what we consider to be Biblical principles. Yet, if you believe in the Divine Editorship of the Bible, you will probably be disappointed by Unwin’s attitude towards Paul. I suspect that Unwin will be more influential in the non-religious part of the Manosphere.
In every case, the country that granted these rights was overrun by a less “enlightened” neighbour (but then, it is the fate of every nation ultimately to be conquered, and Unwin is not careful about discussing cause and effect).
Sorry, I do not think we are in danger of being overrun by Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Egypt.
Sorry, I do not think we are in danger of being overrun by Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Egypt.
Of course, those aren’t our neighbors. Those are Europe’s neighbors. Our neighbors are Mexico and the Central American nations. (And, of course, those filthy Canadians.)
Just saying.
Say something different. Mexico has a per capita income about 20% of ours, has a population just north of a third of ours, has an institutional military which has not been fully mobilized against a foreign power since 1848, suffers debilitating social disorders, and is affected by the miasmas ambient in western civilization at large.
@Art Deco
Western Europe will be Muslim in 100 years’ time (if we last that long).
By some accounts, a third of French people under 20 are Muslim; if true, then in 50 years time, at least a third of French people under 70 will be Muslim.
In Britain, a quarter of children are born to women who were not themselves born in Britain. If variant spellings are added together, the second most popular name for new-born boys in Britain is Mohammed. Half of new allocations of public housing in Britain are to people born abroad. Among other reasons, the Labour Party has grown to despise the white working class, and is more comfortable peddling “grievance politics” to women and minorities. For no better motive than spite towards right-wing racists, they opened British borders. The Conservatives also encouraged immigration in the early sixties, but their motives were to drive down wages and reduce the bargaining power of organised labour.
More than half the terrorist plots against the United States originate with British Muslims of Pakistani descent. The Muslim population of Britain grew 70% between the censuses of 2001 and 2011. Anyone who opposes further immigration is shouted down as a racist. Western Europe is on the same trajectory as Lebanon and Bosnia, just 100 years later than them. I suspect the trends will not stop until we have civil wars mid-century.
The influx of foreigners is one of the historic stages of decline identified by Glubb in the pamphlet mentioned above, along with the Welfare State, decline of religion, and pessimism.
Please, for the love of God, do not make the same mistakes in the USA that we have made in Europe.
Verdad
Say something different.
Thank you, but I prefer it my way.
Mexico has a per capita income about 20% of ours, has a population just north of a third of ours, has an institutional military which has not been fully mobilized against a foreign power since 1848, suffers debilitating social disorders, and is affected by the miasmas ambient in western civilization at large.
Been to California lately? You might stop by, and then try not to be too obvious about shifting the goalposts from “overrun” to “invaded”.
And while Mexico has serious problems, including some shared with the West, it does not suffer from self-hatred.
When the Hebrews were freed from Egypt they shortly after rebelled against God and started worshipping Idols and being sexually loose.
It seems when people are not worried about their survival they forget God. That seems to be a recurring theme in the Bible and in history.
So the million dollar question is how do you build a society that worships God even in times of plenty?
Ah, that explains it. If you really think that’s what’s going on here, it’s no wonder you’re so contemptuous of it.
Western Europe will be Muslim in 100 years’ time (if we last that long). By some accounts, a third of French people under 20 are Muslim
The accounters are pulling your leg. The non-indigenous Muslim population of Europe (Albanians and Pomaks being indigenous) is about 5% of the total. It is somewhat larger than that in France (6.5% perhaps). Metrics on total fertility rates differ somewhat from reference source to reference source, but in general the total fertility rates of feed countries for muslim immigration (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Turkey) are between 1.9 and 2.8 children per woman per lifetime. Total fertility rates throughout the Near East and North Africa have been declining for 50 years and are at high levels only in those countries which have levels of economic development similar to tropical Africa.
Total fertility rates for Britain and France are currently about 2.0. In the rest of Europe it is lower, but the nadir in total fertility rates in Europe was around about 1997. The problem is much more severe in Germany and Austria, which have had abiding subreplacement fertility rates for a generation. It has seen some improvement since then. (And, pace Mark Steyn, the muslim population in France does not account for its satisfactory fertility rates, unless you think Algerian women in France are bearing 10 kids during their fertile years while their counterparts in the old country are bearing 2).
So, nothing to worry about then.
Of course, from Wiki there is this:
Which countries-of-origin lead the “Average number of children in France per woman” category? Well, Algeria, “Other Africa”, Tunisia, Morocco, and Turkey. Can you detect a theme there?
Sounds like they’re well on their way to dissolving the people and electing another to me.
Also, it’s a little misleading to imply that France is representative of Europe in terms of TFR, when, in fact, it’s an outlier.
@Art Deco
The figures from the UK census are, however, beyond dispute. Admittedly the numbers are still low, at 5% of the population; but the growth rate is 70% per decade – a factor of 3 every 20 years. The principal growth mechanism is not a higher birthrate, but continued primary immigration, and secondary immigration, particularly the South Asian practice of arranged marriage to someone from the home village in Pakistan/India/Bangladesh. Arranged marriage prevents assimilation – every generation is the same as the one before, with one parent typically from rural Pakistan or Kashmir, and one who is caught between two cultures.
No mainstream political party has the cojones to say “enough”. Apart from anything else we would need to legislate a derogation from the European Convention on Human Rights.
30 years ago, women wearing the niqab could occasionally be seen in Central London, where rich Arabs from the Persian Gulf live, but not in provincial cities like Birmingham. Now they are a common sight in Birmingham. In some London boroughs, Muslim vigilantes challenge non-Muslim women whom they feel are not dressed appropriately. I am both sorry and ashamed to say that this is our future.
My figures on the Muslim population in Europe were from the Pew Charitable Trusts. France has in excess of 65 million people, so the 4 million from its former dependencies in the Maghreb would amount to about 6% of the population, proximate to Pew figures. The remainder would refer to immigrants from other European countries. There was considerable refugee flow out of Germany in the run up to the 2d World War, mass refugee flows during and after the war, and labor migration due to the integration of factor markets with the creation of the European Union.
James did not say that in 100 years France would be overrun with Sicilians and Bohemian Jews. He said in 100 years time Europe would be overrun by Muslims. The weighted average of total fertility rates in the Near East and North Africa is now about 2.7 per the World Bank. It has declined 70% since 1960 and declined by about 15% since 2000. The same metric for Europe is about 1.8. It has declined about 40% since 1960 but has increased by about 10% since 2000. You ought to be concerned about the implications of persistent low fertility in Central Europe and the industrial Orient, not scare scenarios about Muslim wombs.
Art Deco: Find out whether your number of Maghrebi includes Pied-Noir. That number looks like the INSEE number which is not the government agency, INED is. INSEE includes pied-noir in its Maghrebi number. I’ve seen anywhere from 4-8% TOTAL (including subsaharan) of which 2% would be Pied-Noir. A far cry from ‘Eurabia’ scenarios.
Go outside of Marseilles and Paris and you’ll likely never encounter an immigrant, having spent most of my summers there since I was an adolescent.
RAND study on the return to fertility among European women (its real, and still increasing):
http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG1080.html
I quoted:
You replied:
“Outside of EU27” doesn’t sound like “Sicilians and Bohemian Jews” to me.
Thank you for your input, but I get all the advice I need about what I “ought to be concerned about” from the MSM. I just can’t handle any more, what with all the worrying I have to fit in about right-wing extremism and high-capacity clips*.
I note that you’ve completely failed to address the Mexicanification of California. TBH, I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make — it seems to be something along the lines of “demographic shifts don’t happen, nothing to see here, la-la-la” — but I don’t think you’re making it very well. How about a thesis statement?
* Irony!
@Matthew King (King A) on January 22, 2013 at 9:26 am —
(long description, agreeing in part, dissenting in part, deleted for brevity)
That’s great, but what does waiting for rigorous, consistent, built-upon-the-best-of-past-classics language have to do with the 22-to-28-year-old AFC who is looking for how to improve his chances with girls (up to and including screening for marriage or avoiding it altogether given the current asymmetry in divorce laws)?
There is always room and a need for the vernacular; home remedies may supplement or act as stopgaps before professional medical treatment; if you are sounding the clarion call that ad hoc, populist discussion is not a permanent solution, or not a reliable one, I largely agree the risk is there; but does that mean it should be abandoned all together?
In other words, what if the paradigm of “either / or” for internet bull sessions “instead of” formal study, is replaced by “in the meantime, if used judiciously” while formal study is underway?
@James on January 22, 2013 at 11:02 am —
(long discussion of Unwin deleted for brevity);
Am I mistaken, or did James Dobson of Focus on the Family make reference to Unwin in one of his earlier books? (Churchianity types seem to love Dobson.)
In Sweden women born to foreign parents are less likely to have children than women born to Swedish parents. The increase in immigrants is mainly family members of immigrants who have been granted residency.
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@Art Deco
I agree that we do not need to worry about Muslim rates of reproduction. We simply need to reduce immigration from countries whose citizens show any degree of organized hostility towards us.
If our economies need continuing immigration, there are plenty of countries we could choose, _none_ of whose people want to plant bombs, blow up planes, or religiously harass women.
@grey_whiskers
I don’t know, I haven’t read Dobson.
Funny comment on female tennis players:
http://mobile.news.com.au/sport/tennis/women-too-unstable-to-dominate-tennis-says-jo-wilfried-tsonga/story-fndkzym4-1226560485457
Look how even Chinese women in China have the hypergamy mental illness:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/25/business/as-graduates-rise-in-china-office-jobs-fail-to-keep-up.html?pagewanted=3
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Female Imperative in action: a woman is never to be held responsible for anything.
I have just returned form a visit to my Dental Surgeon – a check-up – perfect teeth but I need to book a new check-up for six-months time and pay for the present one. I go to the desk and I note that the middle-aged female receptionist has light brown eyes and must have been pretty hot twenty years earlier – obviously used to male attention. She tells me the cost is £20.00 which is about U.S.$25.00. I hand over a twenty pound note – the one with a Scottish Economist on the front and an elderly woman on the reverse – we like equality here – and she then asks if I want to make another appointment. I say that I do but that I would prefer that she first mark receipt of my payment in her book. She, is most offended by this and says that she was going to do so afterwards and then asks, accusingly, ‘Don’t you trust me to do so?’, to which I reply nonchalantly ‘how would I know.’ I can tell she is offended. She marks the book with receipt of the payment (although I am not offered a receipt), makes the new appointment and curtly says good bye.
I am the paying patient, but as usual one might have been mistaken for thinking that I was there to serve her imperative.
The biggest proponent of “no sex before monogamy” happens to be one Patti Stanger – the women behind Millionaire MAtchmaker. Carried on ITV2 over here – it’s one of those series where you feel lobotomised watching it.
Oh – she also claims feminist credentials. However – this clip shows the lie to that… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ii85hTSYHBU