Via MarkyMark, I stumbled across this article in an upcoming issue of The Weekly Standard, a publication founded by noted neocons Bill Kristol and Fred Barnes.
What struck me most about the article is not what the article said…for its content was pretty standard fare for those of us here at the Spearhead and others who have been floating about the MRA/FRA/PUA sphere for any appreciable length of time. No, was was surprising to me was that the issues and viewpoints we express here at the Spearhead have surfaced in yet another mainstream venue. What’s more, they were penned by a conservative female member of the mainstream chattering class (click here for Ms Allen’s bio).
First, we have the author noting that it seems that cads and thugs, rather than the majority of honest, dependable “nice guys”…beta and ‘lesser’ men…seem to be reaping the retrograde social harvest that women’s lib has sown:
Welcome to the New Paleolithic, where tens of thousands of years of human mating practices have swirled into oblivion like shampoo down the shower drain and Cro-Magnons once again drag women by the hair into their caves—-and the women love every minute of it. Louts who might as well be clad in bearskins and wielding spears trample over every nicety developed over millennia to mark out a ritual of courtship as a prelude to sex. It helps, of course, that there’s currently a buyer’s market in women who are up for just about anything with the right kind of cad…
Then the author notes that some pretty significant socio-cultural moral shifts may have quite a lot to do with it, and that the fembots have been cheering it all along:
…delayed marriage (the average age for a woman’s first wedding is now 26, compared with 20 in 1960, according to the University of Virginia-based National Marriage Project’s latest report); reliable contraception; and advances in antibiotics (no more worries about what used to be called venereal disease). No-fault divorce, moreover, has pushed the marriage-dissolution rate up to between 40 and 50 percent and swelled the single-female population with “cougars” in their 30s, 40s, 50s, and beyond. On top of it all is the feminist-driven academic and journalistic culture celebrating that yesterday’s “loose” women are today’s “liberated” women, able to proudly “explore their sexuality” without “getting punished for their lust,” as the feminist writer Naomi Wolf put it in the Guardian in December.
All this takes place to a basso profundo of feminist cheerleading.
And then the author becomes the very first female that I personally have witnessed acknowledge the apex fallacy in writing, as she rightly observes that the alphas and sigmas benefit while the betas, deltas, gammas, and omegas are forced to learn evo-psych-based game if they stand any chance of attracting the attention of the modern-cum-paleolithic hypergamous female:
While it’s a truism that the main beneficiaries of the sexual revolution are men, it is only some men: the Tucker Maxes, with the good looks, self-confidence, and swagger that enable them to sidle up successfully to a gaggle of well turned-out females in a crowded and anonymous club.
Out of such [an environment] was born the “seduction community,” part band of brothers, part nakedly commercial and ferociously competitive business enterprise.
All this is fairly pedestrian intro-level manosphere information. It isn’t until page seven of this twelve-page missive where Ms Allen starts to bang out doubles and triples. First, she notes that the beta and delta male has been disenfranchised in a big way:
Evolutionary psychology also provides support for a truth universally denied: Women crave dominant men. And it seems that where men are forbidden to dominate in a socially beneficial way—as husbands and fathers, for example—women will seek out assertive, self-confident men whose displays of power aren’t so socially beneficial. This game of sexual Whack-a-Mole is played regularly these days in a culture that, starting with children’s schoolbooks and moving up through films and television, targets as oppressors and mocks as bumblers the entire male sex. Not surprisingly…many women satisfy their yearning for dominance by throwing themselves at bad boys or even worse.
Then she correctly perceives that the current dating scene, by disenfranchising the second- and third-tier men who make up the bulk of society, produces a demographic disaster-in-waiting, something that myself and others here have noted as well:
The percentage of children growing up in fatherless families—a chief risk factor for social pathologies—has risen concomitantly: from 9 percent of all households with children in 1960 to 26 percent today. On the plus side of the ledger, these negative trends don’t affect the college-educated as severely. College-educated women have significantly higher rates of marriage and lower rates of divorce than women without college degrees. The bad news is that such women, who tend to marry late, have far fewer children. In 2004, according to the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, 24 percent of women ages 40 to 44 with bachelor’s degrees were childless, in contrast to 10 percent of women without a high school diploma. Marriage is slowly becoming a preserve of the elite, who pay a price in severely reduced fertility.
[Blogger] Roissy often writes of a coming “apocalypse,” a thorough collapse of civilization thanks to the stalling of its reproductive matrix.
One thing we know for certain is when a culture’s men are disinvested in the outcome of society, and when marriage for them becomes unattractive, they will cease to either marry or be involved. They will sit on the sidelines, play MMPRGs and smoke dope, and no amount of cajoling will succeed in getting the main body of them off top dead center. The Romans ran into this very issue…first they gave women the vote (over Cato the Elder’s objections), then, like magic, their bachelors refused to marry in the female-empowered culture that ensued. I suspect that, just as there is nothing new under the son, the moral fiber of Romann society was dealt a fatal blow by ancient feminism and that the trials and tribulations we experience today…where invested males “enforce” upon divested males…existed back then as well. But I digress, and to get me back on track, I quote Allen again:
In The Mating Mind, Geoffrey Miller wrote:
Our ancestors probably had their first sexual experiences soon after reaching sexual maturity. They would pass through a sequence of relationships of varying durations over the course of a lifetime. Some relationships might have lasted no more than a few days. . . . Many Pleistocene mothers probably had boyfriends. But each woman’s boyfriend may not have been the father of any of her offspring. . . . Males may have given some food to females and their offspring, and may have defended them from other men, but . . . anthropologists now view much of this behavior more as courtship effort than paternal investment.That’s a pretty fair description of mating life today in the urban underclass and the meth-lab culture of rural America. Take away the offspring, blocked by the Pill and ready abortion, and it’s also a pretty fair description of today’s prolonged singles scene. In other words, we have met the Stone Age, and it is us.
I had read once somewhere…Vox Day’s place I think…that the natural progression from hunter-gatherer society to agrarianism to industrialization to feminism leads inexorably straight back to hunter-gatherer, do not pass Go, do not collect $200. And thus far, the fact that we are seeing the matriarchal social/reproductive patterns of the Stone Age savannah return to our once advanced culture lends creedence to this prediction. Allen seems to agree, insofar as she cites “long-term monogamy” (I presume that she would oppose short-term monogamy, or what we’ve come to know as serial polyandry) as the principle building block of Western Civilization, and to cast that cornerstone aside threatens the entire edifice.
But Ms. Allen isn’t done. Here come some more doubles…again noteworthy in that it is a more mature established female columnist doing the noting:
Some argue, though, that it is actually beta men who are the greatest victims of the current mating chaos: the ones who work hard, act nice, and find themselves searching in vain for potential wives and girlfriends among the hordes of young women besotted by alphas.
During this process, monogamy as a stable and civilization-maintaining social institution is shattered. “Monogamy is a form of sexual optimization,” [Author Roger] Devlin told me. “It allows as many people who want to get married to do so. Under monogamy, 90 percent of men find a mate at least once in their life.” This isn’t necessarily so anymore in today’s chaotic combination of polygamy for lucky alphas, hypergamy in varying degrees for females depending on their sex appeal, and, at least in theory, large numbers of betas left without mates at all—just as it is in baboon packs. The aim of Mystery-style game is to give those betas better odds.
It is worse than that, in my opinion. Not only does Average Joe have a hard time getting a woman to pay attention to him, but if he does manage to pair off with a used-up former bad-boy semen receptacle, she will be less able to have a lasting relationship with him. In other words, she’ll dump him as soon as possible with a better man, which is often the paternalistic State.
In all, this was an excellent article in which I urge you, dear reader, to peruse all twelve pages. To me, it is encouraging that the truth is starting to bubble to the surface. Whether or not it is enough remains to be seen. One thing is for certain, though: the voluntary surrender of the technology of patriarchal civilization by our women in favor of a more primitive, paleolithic form of social organization can’t help but to bode ill for us all.
About the author: EW is a well-trained monkey charged with operating heavier-than-air machinery. His interests outside of being an opinionated rabble-rouser are hunting, working out, motorcycling, spending time with his family, and flying. He is a father to three, a husband to one, and is a sometime contributor here at Spearhead. More of his intolerable drivel is available at the blog The Elusive Wapiti.
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{ 36 comments… read them below or add one }
*Grabs a bag of popcorn and sits back* Hey, if you can’t ward off the apocalypse, at least enjoy the show…
The thing what we have to do, when the ladies get their Wile E. Coyote moment, is not to offer them the old way back, but instead demand a new system, that is much more beneficial to men. Them as the breadwinners, plus sandwiches, backrubs and wake up blowjobs ought to be included in the deal.
Good find and great write up.
Good read.
While it is good to see this starting to get traction in the MSM, we should not forget that the neocon’s of The Weekly Standard were more than willing to sell men out in the 80′ and 90’s when the bible thumper’s and feminists aligned (the former being one of the few bastions of the neo-con base).
Still, it is good to see the message spreading. It has become a force ‘too big to fail’ [tongue squarely in cheek].
“instead demand a new system, that is much more beneficial to men”
No doubt. Personally, I’d like to see women saddled with pulling their own weight and being held accountable for their actions.
Is that so much to ask?
“No doubt. Personally, I’d like to see women saddled with pulling their own weight and being held accountable for their actions.”
You are damn straight about that .
An unusual and encouraging article.
By the way, I don’t see a link from the blog entry to this discussion thread. Such a link would make it easier to post, and allow you to set options like "Notify me".
@ ‘Reclusive white ass (a.k.a Elusive Wapiti – I have broadheads set up for the reclusive white-butt, thus my handle
– you must be in the Northwest)
“No doubt. Personally, I’d like to see women saddled with pulling their own weight and being held accountable for their actions.
Is that so much to ask?”
It is only too much to ask of a child . . .
You are exactly right – equal rights means equal responsibility. Women want equal rights with a ’safety net’. When they are forced to stand on their own merits alone they will, for the most part, retreat to their child mentality of dependency.
Equal rights -I say give it to them good and hard . . .
I wonder what this ‘conservative female member of the mainstream chattering class’ was thinking and/or saying about this subject -say- 20 years ago, when she still had the looks…
Although a major colapse is inevitable, is good that more people are aware of the fact that this society, in it’s current form, is seriously fucked up.
There isn’t a comment section in there? Wanted to see the denial of grrls and their White Knights.
And finally, as noticed here, she forgot to add something, the lack of interest in Marriage is in both sides. To put it bluntly:
Between being a videogame addict, and marring an used up cum-receptacle on decline, many men are choosing the former, simply because they have seen with their own eyes that choosing the latter unavoidably ends up with the guy being eviscerated of the most horrible ways by a divource court.
Forgot to add:
I rather die that be a backup plan for a Cougar.
Good stuff and nice to see our memes being broadcast in some parts of the MSM. Allen isn’t a feminist, for those who are not familiar with her. She’s ben pretty antifeminist in every article I’ve read by her over the years and is frankly loathed by the feminist community, yet the article speaks the truth.
One thing she doesn’t tackle so well, however, is that if you step back from the “what is best for society” angle and get more granular, what you see displayed (as Devlin would say) is the different sexual preferences of men and women when left to their own devices. As Devlin says, the current scenario is the female sexual utopia par excellence — the women (from average on up) get access to the top men for seed, get support from the collective (i.e., the state) which obviates the need to pair-bond with a male who is inferior to their preferred seed-sire, and make the bulk of the males pay for the system. This is reinforced by the technological and legal changes which have made sex so free-flowing: safe, reliable abortion legally available on demand; reliable, cheap contraception available on demand; no-fault divorce available on demand. All three huge benefits to women in facilitating their sexual shangri-la, and all available to them on demand.
I would note that this is *not* the primitive pattern of human mating, however. Hunter-gatherer societies did not have reliable, safe abortion or reliable, safe contraception — certainly analogues existed but they were neither reliable nor safe. And a man who cuckolded another of the tribe was pretty likely to get a spear in the belly as his reward (unlike today’s legal regime which protects the cuckoldress and her lover and actually rewards them while punishing the cuckold socially and financially –> a regime that could only have been invented by the likely cuckolding alphas and women who benefit from cuckolding) – hunter-gatherer societies were noted for their relative egalitarianism, something which itself prevents hypergamy from running amok. So, rather than a redux of the hunter-gatherer past, what we have today is something new — it’s the creation of the female sexual utopia in the present tense, something which never really existed before –> for good reason, mind you, because it can’t form the basis for continual societal and civilizational development. So rather than a back to the future, it’s the creation of an extremely lop-sided present that represents the height of female sexual emancipation and choice — something which isn’t functional in the long-term on the macro level, but for the average and above attractiveness woman at the height of their attraction (i.e., between 16 and 28) works just peachy thank you very much. That is the problem — we’ve indulged the sexual whims of this cohort of women, at the expense of everything else.
Elusive Wapiti February 8, 2010 at 03:06
“Is that so much to ask?”
It is if you are a woman. LOL! Just don’t pay for them.
The conservatives can see and describe the problem, but they always think that by sticking with conservative people, or getting married with an old-fashioned woman untainted by feminism, things will magically change for the better.
Nope. The problem is much deeper and wider in scope. The only way out is for society to ‘hard reset’ itself. I will go my own way, and if I’m lucky enough, I may yet witness it within my lifetime. Get the popcorn ready.
Except that ‘Wait and See’ isn’t a solution at all – It’s a delaying tactic. The conservatives may not be trying for the ‘Hard Reset’ you fantasize about, but by attempting to reverse the process, even on a small scale, they serve as the catalyst for the larger transformation.
Just to set the record straight on the Romans (I’m a professor of Roman History): the Romans would never have been so foolish and craven as to give voting rights to women. Women could not vote and could not serve in office. Women were citizens, but had many legal disabilities. They were under the legal power of their fathers till marriage and their husbands afterward. Widows had to have a guardian appointed in their husbands’ wills. The guardian had some control over women’s legal rights, especially regarding property to make sure that any property she owned stayed in the family and was available for her children.
As for the unattractiveness of marriage in the late Republic (1st century B.C.), it was not that women were more shrewish. It had more to do with men (in the upper classes) not wanting to be saddled with children and their financial requirements. This led to a falling birthrate (again, only among the upper classes) and prompted the first emperor Augustus (30 B.C.-A.D. 14) to pass marriage legislation imposing penalties on bachelors and the childless. In all other periods of Roman history there was no need to take this step.
On the whole, we would be lucky to return to Roman attitudes toward women and marriage. An additional benefit: if a married woman were caught in the act of adultery, she and her partner could be killed on the spot with impunity. The only limit on this was that you had to kill both of them, you couldn’t just kill your wife.
Cato was talking about something far less serious than giving women any sort of political rights.
An interesting article. I was only able to get through the first few pages but will be reading the rest later.
I would like to see this too. Both socons and feminists encourage women to be children who cannot handle the bumps of life, nor take responsibility for their own actions and this needs to end, more sooner than later.
@3D shooter,
“you must be in the Northwest”
Close. I hail from Wyo.
@ Randian,
“I don’t see a link from the blog entry to this discussion thread. “
Sorry. I’ll fix that next time.
Antiphon,
I seem to recall from reading the background info surrounding that Cato quote that he uttered those words in response to giving women what amounted to suffrage…and that his warning was ignored.
Do you have a reference handy that I can correct my mistaken mental model? Apparently I need to read up some more…
@Nova,
“So rather than a back to the future, it’s the creation of an extremely lop-sided present that represents the height of female sexual emancipation and choice”
What I was getting at with “hunter-gatherer” was that we’re headed that way, that the female sexual utopia is not self-sustaining.
“but by attempting to reverse the process, even on a small scale, they serve as the catalyst for the larger transformation.”
Yes. I don’t know if the situation is reversible, but I do know this: upright-living guys with honorable, hard-working women of integrity outbreed their more secular brothers and sisters. Given that the single biggest predictor of one’s politics is the political alignment of one’s parents, this means that over time, the future belongs to us, not the fembots.
That assumes, of course, that our culture isn’t subsumed by another more vital, more fecund one, one that hasn’t lost its collective will to live. Such as an Islamic one.
This is the clarion call to action!
Somebody should do something.
In 215 B.C., during the dark days of Hannibal’s invasion of Italy, a Roman tribune (a mid-level, but very powerful, political office) named Gaius Oppius passed a law (lex Oppia) restricting female luxury. Women could not own more than half an ounce of gold, wear multi-colored dresses, or ride in two-horsed vehicles in Rome. In 195, a few years after Hannibal’s defeat, many upper-class women began to pressure their politician husbands to repeal the lex Oppia. They even took to the streets demanding that the men of Rome vote to repeal the law. Marcus Porcius Cato was consul (Rome’s chief magistrate) that year and he opposed the repeal. The notion that women were reaching for suffrage is an exaggeration employed by Cato himself, though the suffrage that he decried was indirect. If men voted, but women controlled men, then women controlled the state through proxy-suffrage. The story and Cato’s speech can be found in Livy, Book XXXIV, Chapters 1-4. (Trade editions: The Dawn of the Roman Empire, (Oxford World’s Classics), pp. 141-145; Rome and the Mediterranean (Penguin), pp. 141-146)
Some highlights from the speech (quoting the OWC translation):
“My fellow citizens: had each of us, individually, resolved to preserve our rights and standing as a husband with his own wife, we should now be having less of a problem with women as a whole. As things are, our autonomy has been ground down in our own homes by female emotionality, and here, too, in the Forum it is being crushed and trodden under foot. Because we have not been able to control our women on an individual basis, we are now frightened of them as a body.” (Hear, hear!—This is why I advocate traditional marriage as a better cure to feminism than chasing women.)
“To be honest, I was blushing somewhat a moment ago when I came into the Forum through the midst of a crowd of women. I was held back by my respect for their status and for their modesty, as individuals rather than as a group—they should not be seen being taken to task by a consul—or else I would have said: ‘What sort of conduct is this, all this running out into public view, blocking the streets and accosting other women’s husbands? Could you not all have asked your own husbands the very same thing at home? Have you more seductive charms in public than in private, and with other women’s spouses more than your own?’ And yet not even at home should the proposing or repealing of laws in this place have been any concern of yours, not if their modesty kept married women within their proper limits.” (An interesting item in connection with a recent, long discussion regarding female posters at The Spearhead.)
“Give free rein to their emotional nature, to this unbroken beast, and hope that they themselves will impose a curb on their licence! If you do not impose it yourselves, this curb on them is merely the least of the restraints which women resent having imposed upon them by convention or the law. If we are willing to speak the truth, what they want is freedom—no, complete licence—in everything. If they win on this point, what then will they not try? Consider all the laws pertaining to women which the ancients employed to curb their licence and make them subject to their husbands—though they are restricted by all of these you are still barely able to keep them in order. Suppose you allow them to pick away at these laws one by one, to tear them from you, and finally to put themselves on a par with their husbands. Do you believe you will be able to tolerate them? As soon as they being to be your equals they will immediately be your superiors.” (Livy wrote in the late 1st century B.C.—how clearly he understood the method that feminists would use two millennia later!)
“My fellow citizens, is this the kind of rivalry you want to incite among your wives, with rich women wanting to have what no other woman can, and poorer women extending themselves beyond their means in order not to be looked down upon for not having it? The woman able to buy from her own means will buy; the one who cannot will ask her husband. And what a sorry man that husband is—whether he accedes to her wishes or whether he refuses—for then he will see what he has not given himself given to her by another man! At the moment they are petitioning other women’s husbands in public and, what is worse, petitioning them for a law and for their votes, in some cases with success. Acceding, you are as an individual working against yourself, your own interests, and your children: once the law ceases to curb your wife’s expenditure, you will not curb it yourself.” (Interesting thought on the economics of women.)
Wouldn’t it be nice to hear our politicians saying such things? Maybe we should vote Republican and Sarah Palin will take up the banner of men’s rights.
Thanks Antiphon!
Antiphon – thank you for your insightful comments.
A professor of Roman history with the alias Antiphon? I had to ask.
Charles Martel:
I teach both Roman and Greek history. Though the primary focus of my research is Roman, I much prefer the latter for teaching (and for reflection). “Antiphon” is a good name for two reasons: the leader of the oligarchic revolution in Athens in 411 and the meaning of the Greek word (“speaking against”). These days things are getting so bad, though, that I have contemplated changing “Antiphon” for “Critias”.
Antiphon:
Speaking for myself, it is a real pleasure to see you here at The Spearhead. I am sure many others feel the same way.
One of the foundation stones of feminism is the fictionalized history of women’s oppression until they were “freed” by second wave feminism. I’m an amateur historian at best, but I know this to be untrue. For example, John Glubb wrote of feminism in the tenth century Arab empire.
I’m sure Welmer won’t mind if I ask if you’d consider writing an article for The Spearhead. I would very much like to read a historical overview of women’s roles and influence in ancient Greece and Rome and in other notable cultures and civilizations. Is feminism a repeating phenomenon, a symptom of declining empire? It doesn’t need to be a magnum opus, nor academically respectable. There’s no peer review, here. What do you say?
Charles Martel:
Thank you for your kind words. I might indeed contemplate taking you up on your invitation, though right now I am buried under book revisions and article writing (I’m still on tenure-track). Maybe once this summer rolls around I can get a little something together.
My initial thoughts on feminism and civilization: I think the notion that the great states and empires of human history were weakened and ultimately failed because of the increased participation of women is dubious.
This is certainly not the case for Athens or Sparta, both of which failed with their women kept safely locked away. In the Roman Empire there were certainly some powerful empresses, but not many and even they had very little real control. Livia, Augustus’ wife, was one of the most powerful, but he kept her well in hand.
The historian Tacitus criticizes Claudius for being too much under the influence of his wives and freedmen (ex-slaves), but his reign was certainly one of the better ones. The influence of women tended to be stronger in palace politics than public.
Christendom certainly had some queens who caused a great deal of trouble, but again it is easy to exaggerate their role. The only truly awful one who had a major impact for the worse on Europe was Elizabeth I.
I think the modern day and the regime of Liberalism is the first to put women in positions of such power. Other societies have kept their women under wraps with marriage and children and political/legal disabilities.
Charles Martel:
One more thing: I read your interesting article about Glubb–added his work to my reading list. Thanks!
Before I become enamored, and approve this article as maybe some trend for “our” side, I’d like to know how many people read this magazine.
I’d need to know how many subscriptions it still has.
For just a short time ago, on the eve of Obama’s Coronation, it was foretold that “we” were obsolete.
Something on which I’d like to hear Antiphon’s clarification: I’ve read that at some point in ancient Rome there was a bachelor tax imposed on single men. I’ve got a few references that I haven’t pursued that supposedly reveal the motivations behind this. But entertaining just for a moment that it’s true…
I wouldn’t at all be surprised to see, at some point in my lifetime, a similar bachelor tax imposed, or at least lobbied, in certain western countries as well. The ostensible reasons are obvious: a pro-bachelor tax argument could be made if marriage rates continue their downward trend, if immigration restrictions become so tight that native population growth alone fails to meet replacement rates, or even if (though this one’s unlikely) society dares to admit the disadvantages borne by children raised by single parents. But know that these three would merely be the most ostensible reasons. The real or more forceful catalyst would come if a large enough body of “post-empowered” women–the kind mentioned in the Standard article–who, after wildly playing the field to satisfying their urges during their first two reproductive decades, find it difficult to attract a mate once they’re alone in their mid-30’s or 40’s and stuck with their cats. These women, and their male supporters, might then seek relief in the place they’ve always found it previously: through legislation. Think about it: compared to VAWA, laws preventing or making it difficult to find foreign brides, and a male-perverse family court system, is such a misandrist bachelor tax really so far-fetched? I don’t think so. Just know that if you indeed see such a tax levied against men only (and not on women during their “empowerment” years), and if it is indeed a tax and not merely a tax break or credit awarded to both parties filing jointly through marriage, then you’ll know the true genesis.
You heard it here first, folks. Again, it wouldn’t arrive without historical precedence.
The article in The Weekly Standard, this post, and the great comments that follow make it imperative that I post now. I started out at Roissy’s blog and I migrated over here, where I’ve been reading for many months now. At this point it’s obvious that, as is occuring with me, the views of many contributors to this community are growing and evolving as we share information and ideas, and that’s a great thing. In this forum and others, the ideas we’re discussing are becoming more and more robust. For the first time in a long time, I feel a sense of hope that things could get better for “beta” men and non-feminist women. We have a long way to go to be sure, but this kind of discussion is the only way we’ll see a genesis of a better future. If we exert a sustained effort this must be the result, because we have the force of history and the truth on our side. That aside, I have two points I hope will constructively add to the debate:
1) Novaseeker made a great point about the fact that the situation we find ourselves in today is not really “back to the future”, but is a totally new phenomenon based on unique circumstances existing in the modern world. I agree with him completely. Another commenter in another post made the point that women wouldn’t have what they have today if many men hadn’t willingly helped them to get it. Again, I agree completely. It’s no small point to realize that men went along with this, because the inevitable question becomes, “Why?”. Put more elaborately, what was so special about the late 19th/early 20th centuries that make men finally acquiesce to giving women the freedom and power they eventually got? This is important to ask, because the conditions that led to this acquiescence haven’t necessarily gone away, so we should try and pin down what it is in order to determine what we need to change. In service of this effort, I submit to you the following. In addition to the real (for alphas) and perceived (for betas) increase in access to sex, I submit that men got something else out of letting women off the leash, so to speak, and it was huge. And, like novaseeker suggested, what men came to desire was a direct response to conditions that first came to exist in the 19th and 20th centuries. Before I describe what men got, I have to describe what led them to want it, i.e., the motivator, if you will. That motivator was the brutal, soul-crushing, individuality-destroying, and frequently deadly factory jobs of the early and middle industrial revolution, coupled with the wealth it produced. Before that time life was a brutal slog for most people to be sure, but it was a brutal slog for everyone, and there was no escape from it. In pre-industrial agrarian society, men married and had lots of children, because if they didn’t, they didn’t have people to work the fields and ran the risk of starvation. High mortality rates made it necessary for women to be baby making machines, and various religious and non-religious customs and mores came to be to encourage this. But with the industrial revolution came the possibility of greater wealth and free time, albeit at the expense of a man’s dignity, his health, and even his life as he worked in dangerous factory conditions to support his family. Think about Carnegie’s steel plants or Henry Ford’s automobile factories as examples. I read that loggers in the Pacific Northwest in 1920 actually had a higher chance of dying on the job than did soldiers who had served in World War I. (as an aside, I use that fact when I’m debating Seattle nazi feminists who make the ridiculous claim that men led lives of luxury while women toiled away in the home. In comparison, the home gig doesn’t sound too bad!) So men worked their tails off at work, then had to come home and do work there as well. Over many decades into the 20th century, this led men to desire something their increasing wealth made possible, but their endless responsibilites and obligations made a distant mirage of a dream: the ability to goof off, and be lazy. I’m only partly joking when I say that, given my own proclivities and those of most men I have ever known, the desire for men to have easy, carefree lives is almost as great, if not as great, as their desire for sex. So that’s what I think the other strong motivator was for giving women their freedom. By the time women finally started pushing for the vote, then sexual liberation and everything that came after, men were so sick and tired of being obligated to their families and their terrible jobs that they let women slip away in favor of the stuff they could do on their own in simpler, more carefree lives. What we have today is the most extreme manefestation of that – guys who don’t have any desire to marry or have kids, who play video games, hang out, and do their own thing. Our society’s great wealth and a highly specialized division of labor makes this possible, and more-than-adequate nutrition, medical care and immigration makes the demographic implications of this a lot less noticeable, since the population is not crashing.
So how does this relate to all of us here? I would assert that each and every one of us, myself included, need to do some soul-searching to determine the extent to which we are attached to what used to be called “the life of leisure”, which many decades ago was another way of saying someone was a lazy bum. Such a life has some disadvantages (lack of regular sex, lack of companionship, lack of purpose) but it also has some advantanges (lack of conflict, lots of free time, few obligations) In comparison, marriage, kids and women are hard work. They always have been, and always will be. There’s been plenty said about how women need to change if we’re going to make things better, and I agree with most of it. But what will motivate millions of men to leave their comfortable but boring and pointless carefree lives and return to the ring as fathers and husbands? I don’t have an answer to that, but I look forward to talking about it. Incidentally, I’m a conservative and I believe in capitalism, but even I must admit that the capitalist system has contributed in no small measure to the weakening of the family and the subsequent marginalization of men. No, I’m not turning communist or giving up on capitalism. But I acknowledge that there needs to be a countervailing societal force to keep that force in check. Which brings me to my second point:
2) Though there are quite a few people here who already seem to get this, there are many who do not, so it needs to be said. For all its faults, and all its warts, and there are plenty to be sure, the conservative approach, politically and socially, is the only way to make things better regarding the mess we’re in. Liberalism as it exists in the U.S. now is a road to moral relativism, nihilism, and oblivion. So I respectfully suggest that those posters who have a desire to reject conservativism outright because of specific instances in which conservative politicians have screwed up or failed need to remember that people fail and fall short, but that doesn’t mean their ideas weren’t good – it just means they didn’t live up to them. Liberal utopianism has never worked and will never work, so it isn’t even worth considering.
Thanks for reading.
Here is the feminist counter-strike against Ms. Allan’s Weekly Standard article:
hxxp://www.huffingtonpost.com/caryl-rivers/the-new-dating-game-not-s_b_456892.html
Antiphon
Ah well, that’s disappointing. It’s a drag when the facts disagree with cherished preconceptions.
Not to be contentious, but it has been my impression that Spartan women had a great deal of economic power in the brutal, militarized Spartan culture.
I’ll ask a related question. The written histories you and I read and learn from were written by male historians. Is it possible that male historians have a cognitive bias that causes them to overlook or underrate (feminine) social and cultural issues in favor of (masculine) political, military and economic factors? In other words, have male historians overlooked the important role of women on the success or failure of past civilizations?
I guess I’m skeptical of this.
On the one hand, I understand the idea: unless men and women alike embrace stable marital relationhips, our societal goose is cooked. That makes some sense to me, because I agree that stable family life is the basis for a stable and healthy culture and society.
The problem for me, however, is why I should care about that, as an individual. As an individual, I am better off doing my own thing – it’s far easier, and far safer, and really quite enjoyable. In a sense, personally I get to skirt the issue, because I do have a son, and I have done the marriage thing. So I get some of the personal benefits of being a parent/father while no longer having to deal with the pain in the ass aspects of being married. Everything in life is a cost/benefit analysis, in the end, and the cost/benefit analysis of marriage, on the personal level, doesn’t pencil very well. If the good bits of marriage don’t justify the effort – either because the good bits are rarer, the women are not worth the effort, or the effort is just unappealing in general – I can’t see why getting married is a good call. And that leaves aside the entire family law circus, just for the sake of argument.
The reality is that the freedom given to men by the post-feminist culture is not a bad thing at all for men. It may not be the best for society as a whole, but as Keynes famously once said, in the long run we’re all dead. If there aren’t enough goodies from marriage to justify the real costs of getting and being married, I honestly can’t get behind an effort to encourage men to take on the effort, work and responsibilities of marriage – again, leaving aside the family law risks. As a 42 year old guy who’s been through that institution, I can say that from my perspective it’s quite overrated from the male point of view, and flying solo has many more positive aspects to it than being married does.
So, no, I can’t really sign on to an effort to get men to return to the ring as fathers and husbands. Not enough bennies in there for the men in the picture, and many men would be happier and more stable being unmarried, I think.
To answer why men went along with feminism… yes, perhaps there are (or were) some social or economic benefits to men–at least in the short term–as a result of more “empowered” women. But a get-out-of-jail-free card as it relates to fatherhood or to traditional head-of-household responsibilities doesn’t strike me as being one of them. This role (apart from it being fairly recently devalued by feminism) is rather what we, as men, like doing. Speaking personally, and even as hard as it is to raise a family, I wouldn’t trade these male responsibilities for a feminism-enabled Xbox subscription and life of porn and leisure. (But maybe I’m old school?)
No. When I ask myself what men REALLY got from feminism, what rewarded them for abetting it, or at least standing idly by without interfering too greatly, I think the answer is simply the prospect of more pussy. Plain and simple. Recall that the feminism grew hand-in-hand with the sexual revolution. As feminism gained female adherents, it gained more women willing to become “empowered” by relaxing their sexual standards and spreading their legs. In short, when women in the 1960’s decided to remove their bras and burn them to demonstration against traditional female roles, there were plenty of men willing & eager to reach up and help unfasten the bra straps behind their backs!
Even today, there are a great many male sexual benefits as a result of feminism. As someone over at Sailer’s blog commented just recently:
And I think there’s some truth to that. For those who can surf upon third wave feminism (rather than get ground into the sand by it), it offers an unprecedented level of myopic opportunity to plant your seed. But all this is not support for feminism per se. It’s merely support for the horse feminism rode in on.
The more direct male beneficiaries of feminism are a much smaller group. Digging deeper, I think that male politicians seeking a stronger support base, higher education institutions seeking greater enrollments, or western governments seeking a larger, taxable workforce have all directly benefited from feminism and changing sex roles.
So, feminism is not something that snuck in the door entirely un-noticed or un-invited on the part of men. Moreover, and on the face of it, initial feminist pursuits sound entirely natural, inalienable even. After all, who could possibly be against denying someone education or career opportunity because they lack a Y chromosome (provided the person has merit along all the other dimensions that matter). Rather, it’s the more complete feminist agenda, the active family-destroying, misandrist-seeking darker side of feminism that we could all do without. One wishes women had left that aspect of feminism–along with their bra straps–at the door.
Men didn’t go along, only the ruling elite for which this whole scam was mighty fine. The rest of us got shafted. We didn’t go along, we were dragged through all this by force. (laws, etc)
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