| 1. GYNOCENTRISM (Greek: γυνή, “female” – Latin: centrum, “centred”)
■ (a). n. Dominant or exclusive focus on women in theory or practice; or to the advocacy of this. Often practiced to the detriment of non-females. |
PragerU are being very intelligent about how they peddle their version of chivalry and service to the damsels. Some years ago, they approached us on face book to run some of their “Man up and get married” material.
Blunt and rude story short, we said “No!”
They now have a much more insidious program going forward to incentivize young boys to run to the plantation in gynocentric service.
It is our belief they intend to make good gains for traditional gynocentrism out of the work of the men’s rights movement and antifeminism over the last decade and that is definitely not in the best interests of men and boys.
In this recent video by PragerU we have a neotenous blonde pearl-clutching over violence against women as if she was a feminist… but coming at it from the traditionalist perspective. Listen for the incongruous statements, opening with, “It is now OK for a man to hit a woman!” appearing on to the screen calling you to fight to protect the ladies.
Core to making this approach work is the highlighting of the differences between men and women and blaming feminism for the similarities argument. “The sexes are different. Marvel at it, enjoy it.”
We all know that feminism is unbridled gynocentricty and that’s a bad thing right? We all know they like to talk about fish on bicycles and fantasize that women can do anything a man can do, better, backwards and in heels.
Men and women have similar talents is the theme.
So it must follow that any argument describing the obvious differences between the two genders must be a good thing right?
Well, not so fast pal. While Occam’s Razor is a very useful tool, it’s not a universal law and reality is often a good bit more complicated than our initial summation of it.
The map is never the territory.
Men and women are far more alike than they are different, a no-brainer when we consider that around 99% of our genetic code is identical. Humans however seem to highlight and at times exaggerate gender differences, which may be an evolutionary strategy to get us to notice potential mates.
To be clear there are important differences between males and females, but there is no incompatibility between the idea of low sexual dimorphism and data we do have on the differences. Male variability is real for example but most noticeable at the extremes of any data set, and more broadly noticeable in physical and hormonal differences.
At the more subtle level minor biological differences between the sexes could give rise to significantly different results (emergent behaviour). Men and women tend to seek out different types of work. The underlying differences that cause this may be slight when compared to the set of motivations that drive a person but it turns out to be significant to us when we look at societies.
The occasional feminist can be seen to propose that there’s no such thing as sexual dimorphism, arguing instead that gender is only a social construct. But to place all feminists into this category is to create a strawman, one frequently appealed to by those who would have us return to a more traditional gynocentric vision of “biology based” gender roles – he labors outside the home, she bakes apple pies in the kitchen. While the overly-simplified charge that feminists “promote sameness” may be seductive, it likely comes with the entrapping antidote of traditional gynocentric gender roles.
To be sure feminists have played the debate both ways – sometimes arguing gender is a result of social construction, and just as often arguing for biology as the basis for our differences. The undeniable fact is all three waves of feminism have evoked women’s smaller physical size, lower strength, pregnancy and lactation, unique endocrinology, reproductive system, menstration, breast health, vagina health etc as reasons for special dispensations (chivalry) in the form of less labour, more comfort, more protection, and more health services (eg. the many ‘women’s hospitals,’ safe-spaces, special seating at venues, financial considerations, and so on). Feminists have always promoted biological differences, or rather exploited them, and their more recent infiltration into the feild of Evolutionary Psychology will only serve to strengthen that trend.
The point we are making is that whether they are biological, sociological or both in origin, the laboring of difference has allowed feminists to win the day because difference garners chivalry – sameness garners no chivalry. Chivalry got us into this goddam mess.
Difference garners chivalry – sameness garners no chivalry
Let that sink in. If we are ever to defeat gynocentrism, it will require a weakening of the appeal to chivalry, which will require a weakening of the appeal to difference by both feminists and traditional gynocentrists alike. If we ever succeed in that goal it will make room for the reality of equality. Equality of opportunity, not the equality of outcome that the feminists so often push for.
And true equality means a step down for women.
Chivalry must die. Entirely.
For chivalry to die, the mechanism for it must be recognised and replaced. And the underlying mechanism for chivalry is the difference between the sexes.
Marc Rudov, one of the most powerful voices ever to speak on gendered issues, was very clear on this as he understood it implicitly:
I’ve recently published a book about women and know them well. My true education in all things feminine began almost 12 years ago, when I became reimmersed in the single world after my divorce. During this post-marriage odyssey with the “opposite” sex, I learned that women are not so opposite and are, in fact, much like men. To me, this is no longer a debate; it is fact. Now, we hear almost daily from anthropologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, licensed psychotherapists, so-called life coaches, movies, books, magazines, TV, radio, parents, friends, lovers, and standup comics that men and women are wired differently and hopelessly incompatible. We are coached to accept, embrace, and gingerly navigate these differences. Nonsense, I say. If you believe this propaganda, you are part of the problem.”
“If you’re honest with yourself, you cannot find many real differences between men and women. The differences you’ve always thought about are socialized differences based on myths. If women were as different and mythical as the so-called experts would have you believe, they’d never be able to run major corporations, cities, states, and nations. When we stop behaving according to our socialized programming, our stereotypical roles, we are surprisingly similar. This behavioral shift is the solution for making our romances more harmonious and successful.1
The primary difference we regularly point to in justification of chivalry is physical size and strength. But man created hydraulics for a reason.
The image below was once the way a man compacted soil in the construction of roads.
Today we use these pad foot roller things.
Women can drive these things.
Women can now construct roads.
Women are the same as men.
Women are equal.
Yes, buttercups, you do have to get up in the cold and dark and go outside to work in the dust and flies, eat your lunch in a construction pit and come home in the dark.
Welcome to equality.
Mind your step down.
Here’s an example of a woman that understood better than any woman we’ve ever met. Her name was Toot’s Holzheimer and she lived and died in the man’s world of disposability. She had no truck with a badge of feminist power princess, wonder woman, or traditional victim damsel being pushed by PragerU. Just straight up equality.
Feminism and chivalry have always functioned as a gestalt, as Ernest B. Bax observed over a century ago when he referred to first-wavers as “chivalry feminists.” The feminist emphasis on gender differences, especially those implying weakness and vulnerability, evokes chivalry which is then used as a leverage point to secure multiple varieties of power from men in positions of power. The win gained by this ruse ensures feminists and traditional gynocentric women enjoy a quasi-aristocratic status above the rest of society – hence why feminists are usually seen to be comfortable middle to upper-class white women.
Discussions about differences will always result in special treatment for women, and that always means disposability for men. Alternatively, when we discuss that men and women have a massive overlapping area of shared humanity the discussion potentially changes to one of equal value, concern and empathy for men.
The Men’s Rights Movement
Neither AVfM nor Men’s Rights in general is about promoting traditional gynocentrism. Anything that is based in the statement, “Women will pay an especially high price,” is not central to the AVfM mission. Our mission is centered on the male price being paid in an essentially misandric, gynocentric world.
That does not mean we deny that women have issues that stem from their gender nor that those problems should be bereft of compassion. Rather we recognize that both sexes have their own issues that must be addressed in human terms and compassion rather than through a sexist and mono-gendered paradigm as guides the current misandric system of male disposability, absent of compassion for men and boys.
At AVfM we do recognise many men will always seek the companionship of and sexual contact with women, no matter how much bleating the monk MGTOWs want to do to berate us for recognizing it.
And that’s the danger of Prager and their slippery sales pitch to traditionalist-leaning men.
It’s too deliciously small of a step to gain recognized “manhood,” along with admiration and perhaps sexual intimacy for many to resist jumping on the wagon back to the plantation where they will gain their social value and identity in service and sacrifice to the women folk – women who long ago shucked some if not all of the traditional roles that might have gone part of the way to creating a reciprocal exchange.
After all, what more noble cause is there for a man to take? Indeed, what nobler path is there to real manhood? Our answer to that is one where you’re not selling your soul in the hope of sexual gratification and a Pyrrhic validation of your masculine worth.
Try some service where you’re not trading in the shallow hope of being paid in sweaty endorphins while attempting to force all other men into this deal with the devil and a straight jacket definition of masculinity.
There is no nobility there at all.
They will do nothing for men and boys beyond erecting monuments to those who died in service to women. What they mean to take from those males has no limit. All for a social construct of what it means to be a man. A real man.
And this epitaph will be used as a weapon of shame against any boy with the intellect to question the paradigm of Mayan sacrificial service.
To ensure the sun rises, you must die! Your beating heart must be torn out! Man and boy!
Male disposability as an artifact of the past
Male disposability has a basis in evolutionary theory. When the females of a species invest significantly more energy in to gestation than males, as is the case for humans, then the size of the next generation is largely constrained by the number of fertile females. As a result of this a species can generally tolerate the loss of males more easily than the loss of females. The loss of females will constrain the size of the next generation, the loss of males will constrain genetic diversity.
We humans are now a special case. The Earth carries more than 7.5 billion people today and could be carrying 10 or 11 billion within a few decades. We no longer need the ability to rapidly recover numbers, thus any presumed bias towards male disposability that existed in the past no longer needs to apply. Likewise encouraging women to have babies is an equally retrograde message to those who are making the conscious decision to stop overpopulating the planet.
There are numerous other differences. For example women retain more neotenous characteristics from their childhood than do men. The reasons for this are outside the scope of this article other than to point out that the “reproductive bottleneck” mentioned earlier shows that men benefited from protecting women in pre-modern times. That women would retain child-like characteristics that encouraged men to do this seems self-evident.
To put these sex differences in context we can say that men and women have, as outlined above, more in common than they have in difference, a fact which makes the PragarU-style obsession with difference look all the more pressed. The gender similarities hypothesis as defined by researchers holds that males and females are similar on most, but not all, psychological variables. That is, men and women, as well as boys and girls, are more alike than they are different. A gender similarities hypothesis does not assert that males and females are similar in absolutely every domain. The exceptions—areas in which gender differences are moderate or large in magnitude should equally be recognized.2
While the ‘gender similarities hypothesis’ reviews meta-analyses of multiple studies on gender differences, it is prone to methodological biases like any other research. For example proponents of the hypothesis sometimes understate the extent of gender differences when they do appear,3 or may otherwise omit factors such as gender differences in the human brain; gender and sex hormones; or gender differences in physical health/illness in their analysis. By and large though it is usually easy to separate the baby from the bathwater.
On the subject of differences, the biological necessity of male disposability is an artifact of the past and that’s where it should stay. PragerU has no urgent basis to encourage a return to the plantation for species survival, nor to promote the associated grinding of male lives to dust in the service of the uterus that involves the consequent, necessary lack of compassion for male pain and loss that characterized early hominid societies.
Watching the slickness of their operation, they don’t strike me as being slow between the intellectual wickets. It’s not in the scope of this article to enter the field of global conspiracies, but suffice to say, where many of you see countries, we see farms with human livestock.
Disposability does require a solid breeding program. There’s money in them there breeders.
So who wants to man up?
References:
[1] Marc Rudov, Five Myths About Women
[2] Janet Hyde, The Gender Similarities Hypothesis (2005), and Gender Similarities and Differences (2014).
[3] Alastair Davies & Todd K Shackelford, An evolutionary psychological perspective on gender similarities and differences (2006)
Further reading: Feminism, sex-differences and chivalry
