The role of Zeta Masculinity in the face of escalating Masculine Disenfranchisement
I am routinely asked by women if I’m married. Women I meet through my work ask me this, women I meet socially ask me, married and single women both field this question with equal regularity. Sometimes they assume – and ask “where is your wife?” or they assume fault with the question “why aren’t you married?”
I’m a professionally employed 41 year old man, and I’ve been single all my life. I like it, and I have no plan to marry, ever. The reason for my singularity is that as a man, marriage offers me nothing except sacrifice and servitude. This is partly due to the modern convention that old family-forming social construct has become, and partly due to what I understand about women in my culture, their expectations, entitlements, and qualities.
I’ll state my position again, this time explicitly so that there can be no misunderstanding. I am not single-and-lonely. I am not a man who “missed out” on marriage. I saw, early in my life that marriage was a construct affording advantages to one sexual demographic, and nearly unlimited social, legal, and financial liabilities to the other sexual demographic.
I love being single. I love the personal autonomy, the financial freedom, and the fact that I answer to nobody but myself. As a man in his early 40’s – I also enjoy a level of social prestige and personal power which has been rising in my life since I hit about 28 years old. Women’s personal, sexual and social power has always been tied to their youth, and reaches an apex somewhere in their early twenties. At that age, I was more-or-less at the complete mercy of my female contemporaries, and being a typical “nice guy,” found myself sexually invisible and socially powerless.
No longer, in fact – as I mentioned already, the question from females about my marital status is a matter of routine. In addition to the natural magnification of male social power as a factor of age, I am also increasingly disconnected from the psychological pressure of male conformity. This is a product of my own cheerfully belligerent personality, but also due to embrace of a new model for masculine self identity, which is discussed later in this article.
Correlating to the elevation of social prestige of self-collected men in their mid thirties and onwards is the glaring fact that among single women in of this age group, and younger – there’s a real dissatisfaction. This often takes the form of the rhetorical question “where are all the good men” or “why aren’t there any good men.” The answer being what happened to them is women, but not just women in the sense that “women are bad,” I mean women in the system of law and custom we presently enjoy.
This is a feminist society which treats men as walking cash and sperm dispensers, and whether most men characterize the situation in the stark terms I’ve used, they increasingly understand it. The characterization most often repeated in print media uses the phrase “fear of commitment” and is clearly intended to shame noncompliant men into stepping up like good little beasts of burden and assuming their station as the self-sacrificing protector, provider and enabler of a woman who, in the present zeitgeist regards (compliant) men as domesticated animals.
Some kool-aid drinking social commentators have taken to characterization of male independence as arrested adolescence. Micheal Kimmel, the renowned apologist for female supremacy and denigrator of men recently published a condemnation of male self-actualization using this shaming characterization with the title Guyland.
Kay Heimowitz, published “child man in the promised land” another mis-aimed attempt to equate “correct” male adulthood with servitude to a women, and self actualization in men as irresponsibility.
Traditional adulthood for men used to encompass starting a family, fathering children, purchasing a home, and other markers of social respectability. Modern men are increasingly avoiding this path, and social commentators condemn this choice, but those who would call men opting out of the traditional markers of respectable male adulthood have completely missed the point.
There is nothing left for men. For a growing number of men waking to the reality of life in a feminized society, there is nothing attractive and much that is repellant in “manning up” to be a good little husband, father, provider, protector, and beast of burden. Even men raised by single mothers and fed a lifetime diet of the now mainstream feminist zeitgeist are rejecting the harness and cage that masculine adulthood offers. The mainstream, feminist-normalized version of a real man reads like the technical specification of a servant-robot from a science fiction novel. Service, self sacrifice, altruism, selflessness, but no self actualization. Despite the endlessly droning message that men are dumber than dirt, men do get the picture, and are rejecting it.
This obviously has some serious long term economic and social consequences. The social sidelining of men is a non-trivial loss to a nation’s economic competitive advantage. It is men who work the vast majority of jobs based on producing natural resources, as well as manufacturing. The shift from resource and manufacturing based economy to financial and service based economy has never in history, preceded anything except national economic collapse.
However, this is not even the most worrisome outcome of the real disenfranchisement of men in western society. A simple economic sidelining of men would be recoverable within a human lifetime. What’s actually happening as result of the social marginalization of male identity is the autonomous re-definition of self identity among the most alert and psychologically strongest men in our society. This has been discussed within the men’s rights community under the still loosely defined term zeta masculinity.
Zeta masculinity is not the sour grapes redefinition of mainstream social rejection with a reality denying label. Such as rebranding the word “slut” from its traditional definition of “sexually irresponsible jackass” to the feminist preferred meaning of “empowered woman.” No, the emerging identity of zeta masculinity is a wholly new social construct, and it is increasingly providing a pathway for male self actualization and measurable social, and economic freedom for men embracing and defining it. Zeta masculinity is a model for male identity in which men can succeed, self actualize, and prosper – and in the escalating mainstream of male disenfranchisement, that makes the zeta male highly dangerous to feminist ideologues.
In the world of physical reality, society runs on male innovation, male labour, male stamina, and male protection. Political and social realities operate to bury this uncomfortable truth from view, and the increasing feminization of society requires that men, marginalized and criminalized, continue to provide the heavy lifting that a functional society relies on. The emergence of the zeta male threatens this orderly exploitation of men by a society which increasingly holds male identity in contempt. The shaming language employed by mainstream commentators against men “failing to man up” is based on an incomplete, but worried recognition of this fact.
Previously, my writing as an MRA had the goal of averting or slowing the real damage to society resultant from the removal of men as self-actualized and enfranchised members. This has changed, and in a society which increasing treats identity as a man – as if it is definitionally criminal, my social motive has changed as well. The critics of male self-actualization, berating men for failing to conform to female expectations recognize the hazard of men opting out and going their own way. They’re right to see this trend as socially corrosive.
Where I differ from these critics is in investment in the modern status quo. It is not worth preserving.
A system sufficiently corrupted is not salvageable, and not worth investment of resource to repair. Zeta masculinity increasingly provides a viable option for male personal freedom. As an MRA, I am a strong critic of present feminized social convention. Rather than working to correct or avert the socially harmful consequences of male disenfranchisement, I am amused to watch a society relying on men while criminalizing male identity crumble under its own false assumptions.
However, before some shrill and accusatory voice labels this view as antisocial, hateful, or whatever other pejorative phrase feminist thesaurus has for “masculine” ; I’ll point out that at the root of my own value system is order, nonviolence, and peace.
My wall is adorned with a copy of the Magna Carta – not because of an authoritarian love of rules, but because that document forms, in my own cosmology; the foundation of individual civil liberty for humans in the western world. That western systems of law have been perverted into a totalitarian tiered society along lines of the sexual grievance industry is tragic, but I won’t work to fix a system warped into perversion. I’ll laugh while I watch it burn. I’ll laugh because I know there’s a viable alternate path. The potential collapse of civil society doesn’t necessitate the universal poverty and brutality a world without the path to masculine zeta identity would require.
Of course, adherents of the present mainstream culture of denigration of masculinity are welcome to migrate their world view to one compatible with zeta masculinity, if they have the maturity and backbone for it. But the invitation should not be mistaken for a further free pass or for exemption from accountability. It also won’t be an open invitation forever.
