Organized feminism as a movement is about 40 years old. It’s the same age that I am. During my lifetime, I’ve been told, various things, some true, many false. Among them is a message from organized feminism that rape is endemic in the society of which I’m a part. Further, that this rape is my fault, mine personally, for being a member of a class of oppressors, and violent, depraved, sub-humans.
Rape is actually defined by some of our social institutions as a crime which only one sex is subject to, and that fault for this belongs to the other sex, the one I’m a part of. Domestic violence too – another crime popularized as mono-directional abuse of the members of one sex, by members of the other. I will be citing research refuting this common knowledge as we go forward.
Although partner violence is committed by members of each sex, the legal system in the United States pretends that only women are victims, and only men are perpetrators. [1] A Harvard Study conducted in 2007 indicated that in nonreciprocal partner violence, women comprised 70% of the offenders in a sample of 11,000 individual surveyed. In reciprocally violent relationships, the same study indicated women are more often the initiators of violence, 25% versus 11% for men.
In spite of this, and similar research, the violence against women act in the United States fast tracks conviction for men in situations of domestic abuse, circumventing the due process required by legitimate criminal courts.
This law exists despite the fact that men are more likely than women to be victims of violent crime –including rape. According to the United states Department of justice, bureau of justice statistics [2], In 2008 21.4 violent crimes were committed against men for every 1000 individuals, while 16.7 were commuted against women. This difference in rates of victimization by sex has been diminishing for many years. In 1980, 68.3 male victims of violent crimes stacked up against 33.1 female victims of violent crimes per 1000 individuals.
How many times have you seen messages in corporate media addressing violence against men?
The answer is probably zero, while messages addressing the supposed epidemic of male-on-female violence permeate our media, creating a public perception sharply in contrast with research indicating that “women are as physically aggressive, or more aggressive than men in their relationships with their spouses or male partners”[3] .
As a man I am constantly told that because I am male, I’m a violent criminal, an abuser of women and children, and a rapist. I’ve also had drilled into me the knowledge that a simple accusation of rape, true or not, leveled against me by a woman will destroy my life, career, and family. I’ve seen the wreckage of other men’s lives following their destruction through false accusation.
I know how dangerous it is for me to be alone with a child, not dangerous for the child, but for me, based on the hysterical fear manufactured in our society that every adult male is a secret pedophile just waiting for opportunity.
This is the soup we all swim in.
Some men have reacted to this climate of fear and loathing by adopting a position of prostrate atonement. Women are angry, men are to blame, so an attitude of ritual male self loathing and self flagellation is assumed. By being more vocal and strident than their feminist counterparts, these males create themselves as honorary women, accepted conditionally on their continued self abasement. Some men simply try to keep their heads down, and avoid offending the women in their lives. Some men see this climate of vilification and reject it.
This is a tiny fraction of the male population, but a growing fraction. That these men are rejecting the mechanisms of control through social prestige and social shame is a topic I’ve discussed before. What I haven’t examined prior to now are some of the consequences of a growing fraction of the male population who make a thoughtful choice to overrule their own biological drives, which until now have been used to force conformity to behavioral norms.
Throughout human history, men have been disposable, this is the natural outcome of being the sex which doesn’t bear children. Unlike women, men do not have a factory for making new human beings within their bodies. Women’s bodies are less specialized than men’s. In addition to eating, moving around, performing work and so on, women’s bodies are also capable of fabricating tiny new human beings within them. This capability requires nutritional and metabolic resources as well as structural specializations.
Men, whose bodies don’t have this functional capacity are more specialized for high stress, high risk activities. This is why men are typically stronger than women and have different emotional needs and responses. This is basic sexual biology, no matter what the social constructionists say. Through the greater part of the history of our species, the physical strength and size of men compared to women has conferred on them the necessary prowess to be the protectors of the family units they were a part of.
Also to hunt, persistence hunting being the oldest known form of hunting, and the skill that places humans with their lack of claws or large teeth above all others in the food chain.
I’ll talk in more detail about persistence hunting in another discussion. But this social role, informed by biological differences also made males individually more disposable than women in the calculus of group survival. Feminist scholarship recognizes the continued disposability of males in high-risk jobs such as soldier, lumberjack, oil rig worker and so on, but characterizes these jobs as high status, or high pay, disguising the fact that they’re the jobs men die doing. [4] In 2009 in the United States, 93 percent of workplace deaths were male. This is not discussed in mainstream journalism, but organized feminism uses the media to continue to loudly push the discredited claim that the wage gap exists due to discrimination, rather than individual choice.
In fact, the [5] “wage gap is not proof of widespread discrimination, but of women making choices about their educational and professional careers in a society where the law has granted them equality of opportunity to do so,” according to Diana Furchtgott-Roth on April 12, 1999 in testimony given before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Throughout the history of the human species, men’s individual disposability was balanced by the tribal and familial necessity for the capabilities of men. That individual necessity for group survival increasingly diminished by advances in technology and the evolution of social institutions.
On the other hand, women’s reproductive and nurturing capabilities are the reason women form the core of human societies, starting from the family unit of mother, child, and then male protector. It’s the reason that in primitive societies, women of reproductive age were more individually valuable than males, and why in hunter gatherer societies a clan or tribe would survive the loss of many male members while a clan would not survive a similar loss of females.
Men and women were each valued for what they could do, but for women, the ability to bear children trumped all.
Does this mean that in a modern context women are of no value other than reproductive? No, but as the reproducing sex, women have always been the reproductive and sexual selectors, while men have always competed to be selected for sex and reproduction.
Technological innovation and population growth has, in the past several thousand years, radically reduced the need for highly dangerous and physically stressful work as a necessity for survival. Men as individuals are just as disposable as they’ve ever been, but are far less individually necessary in the calculus of group survival.
Radical feminism is the political and social manifestation of this cold reality. Women are just as necessary for human survival as they’ve always been, and so a redistribution of privileges, powers, and entitlements within human societies is a natural social adaptation to the underlying calculus of the reduced survival importance of the utility of males.
Women are still the social class around whom society wraps physical protection – as evidenced in mandatory military service for males, but not females, and evidenced in the socially normal expectation on men to provide physical protection to female companions, without a reciprocal expectation on women to protect their male companions.
This is further demonstrated in legislation like the Violence Against Women Act, a set of laws which flies in the face of law enforcement statistics demonstrating that intimate partner violence is coequally committed by men and women.
It’s evident in the differential treatment of men and women by the legal system. [6] As a New York family court Judge pointed out recently. Women are also the class to whom financial and material resources are allocated. This is demonstrated in the spending of disposable income in our society. Regardless of whether men or women spend –disposable income is spent mostly on women. Department stores know this, and devote 75% to 85% of their floor space and displays to women. [7]
In her 2007 book, the 51% Minority, Feminist author Liz Wiehl states truthfully that women control the economy, spending 80 percent of every discretionary dollar. In addition, women control the outcomes of elections outnumbering men as registered and participating voters. [8] According to the Centre for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, In 2004, 60.1% of women and 56.3% of men voted, while in 2000, 56.2% of women and 53.1% of men voted. But despite this preponderance of spending and political power, we are always reminded by organized feminism, that it’s women who are oppressed.
Let’s return for a moment to consider that torrent of accusation, vilification and manufactured blame against men that we know by the label of radical feminism. This seemingly new narrative of accusation is really just the amping up of the long established societal mechanism for social control of individuals through shame and prestige. It’s amped up because in a highly technological society, men, those specialized, physically strong, risk taking members of our human race are less individually valuable than they were in the less technological society of the past.
I mentioned that some men are choosing, consciously, to opt out of this game of social prestige and social shame.
These are the zeta males.
Why have men always been the class to assume the physical risk of being society’s protectors? Partly physical capability, but partly also a social contract in which men were valued for their role as risk taker, protector and provider. As masculinity is increasingly treated with scorn, derision and vilification, this old social contract is breaking. A man who doesn’t step up to protect a woman menaced by some kind of threat is, by traditional standards, not much of a man.
Accepted masculine identity requires risk and possible injury in defense of a threatened female. Refusal on a man’s part is treated by society as unmanly failure, a source for social shame.
The zeta male however is not playing that game, understanding as he does, that while he’s expected to assume that risk and damage, the side of the social contract compensating him and valuing him as a man is no longer operative. The zeta male’s identity is one developing around conscious evaluation of behavior’s risk and reward, and disparaging of traditional social control through shame or prestige.
A practical consequence of this is that a traditional, ingrained behavior – that of assuming personal risk in the protection of women; is being questioned by men.
Questioned and rejected.
To be sure, the onus to selflessly, thoughtlessly assume a position of self sacrifice and service is rejected by very few men, and the world is still populated by white knights eager to discard personal interest in the benefit of women. That’s the old biological balance of sexual power at work.
Men however, are increasingly waking up to the dystopia of a world governed by radical feminist ideology. Self sacrifice fails the simplest cost benefit analysis in a world where masculinity is increasingly the basis for social, political, economic and legal hobbling.
Manliness has always encompassed the assumption of self sacrifice, and traditionalists will be quick to call men defining themselves apart from it as unmanly, weak, selfish, along with many other pejoratives intended to shame these man back into compliance. To those detractors – I will pre-emptively offer the suggestion that they should worry about themselves and try to stay out of our way, because the zeta male is coming, in fact, some of us are already here in the future, and not waiting for the world to catch up.
Sources:
1. Domestic violence: Not Always One Sided, Copyright Harvard Health Publications – 2007 retrieved Dec 7 2010 from
2. Trends by Offending Rates by Gender of Victim 2009, Bureau of Justice Statistics, retrieved Nov 27, 2010 from
3. References Examining Assaults by Women on Their Spouses or Male Partners, July 2010, Martin Feibert , retrieved Dec 7 from
4. National Census Of Fatal Occupational Injuries In 2009, August 19, 2010 United States department of Labor, retrieved Dec 7 2010
5. Policy Debate: Does a gender wage gap still exist, ©2006 South-Western, Retrieved Dec7 2010 from
6. Judge bashes Probation Department, Dec 12010, Simone Weichelbaum and Thomas Zambito, retrieved Dec 7 2010 from
7. The 51% Minority: How Women Still Are Not Equal and What You Can Do About It, 2007 L. Wiehl, Retrieved 7 Dec 2010
8. CAWP Fact Sheet: Gender Differences in Voter Turnout, June 2005, The Center for American Women and Politics, Eagleton Institute of Politics, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Retreived Dec 7, 2010
