It would appear that over this (and last) week the manosphere topic du jour has been defining the Feminine Imperative. Sunshinemary started off the hit parade with her post The feminine imperative, fact or crap? and then followed up How doth the feminine imperative grow and then this week’s seminal effort in redefining the Feminine Imperative into more fem-friendly terms with The Feminine Imperative vs. the Feminist Imperative. All of this is amounting to what’s really the feminine equivalent of a circle jerk debate over semantics.
The recurring theme in all of these posts isn’t a want for a concrete definition of what the feminine imperative is, but rather an effort to dissociate the uglier aspects of the imperative away from blaming women for the negative consequences that result from the feminine imperative. Both for Aunt Giggles and Sunshinemary the overarching concern is the default scapegoating of the feminine imperative for any inter-gender woe a man might complain of.
If this feminine ‘concern’ sounds familiar it should; it’s just a new derivation of the “Devil biology made me do it” Red Queen / Selfish Gene biological determinism reasoning they feared would end up being men’s go-to explanation for excusing their bad (i.e. non feminine compliant) behaviors. Only now the narrative isn’t about the worry of men saying “my selfish genes made me cheat on my wife” the message they hope to control is men complaining “the feminine imperative is what makes me a sexless loser.” That control comes in an interesting form of blaming the victim for his lack of performance in the face of the feminine imperative. The Feminine Imperative can’t be held responsible for men’s social ineptitudes so the Male Catch 22 is effected – as a man you’re a whiney beta if you complain, but you’re less than a ‘man’ if you don’t stick up for yourself by saying something.
While I will admit that Sunshinemary’s point of origin probably started as an honest inquiry into the nature of the feminine imperative, her want of a feminine friendly definition stems from the same desire Aunt Sue or any other female writer in the manosphere seeks when confronted with the harsh truths of Game, Hypergamy, the Feminine Imperative and contemporary understanding of intergender dynamics – feminine absolution of acknowledgement of them.
The solution to acknowledging the Feminine Imperative follows the same formula as with other aspects of men becoming aware of intergender dynamics; dissociate (or dilute) feminine accountability, redefine terms and sanitize those redefinitions to fall back into accordance with the Feminine Imperative. I predicted exactly this process of Game sanitization when I wrote Could a Man have written this? Only women are allowed to be self-critical, which of course is yet one more social extension of the feminine imperative.
Suck It Up Guys
The primary fear Sunshinemary has is that men will see the inherent amorality of the Feminine Imperative (hypergamic warts and all) from both an evolutionary and social perspective, and that this would become some self-defeating source of anger for them.
The feminine imperative isn’t something to be angry about, it’s something to be aware of and planned for accordingly. Up until recently the issue has been about the awareness part of that equation, now it’s the contingency part that men are having to deal with, and by extension so are women. The real fear isn’t about anger issues, it’s about the contingencies men will develop with their new awareness to circumvent the more egregious aspects of the Feminine Imperative, and its effect on women. Some men, understandably, get mad for having invested themselves for so long in a set of social rules they believed everyone was (or should be) playing by, only to become aware that the game’s been rigged all along. No one’s actually been playing by the “rules” that the imperative sold them and they’ve lost a lot of personal investment as a result.
Hypergamy and many other evolved aspects of the feminine imperative are (or were) certainly instinctual, largely unlearned, survival factors that contributed to our species’ success. However, the uglier, intrinsically unfair, dynamics like concurrent cuckolding, violent mate guarding, the War Brides dynamic and even women’s inborn sexual pluralism (rooted in her menstrual cycle) are aspects most men wouldn’t voluntarily sign on for if they knew the machinations behind them, or they had an inclination of how their SMV will progressively mature.
Solution? Develop feminine operative social conventions to ensure those unpleasant realities become more palatable duties for men.
For Feminine Imperative redefiners, the basic confusion stems from separating the feminine imperative from the social conventions that evolved to better effect it. They don’t see the fundamental separation of the two. Simply put, the feminine imperative is the totality of the framework – social, biological, personal, etc. – that implicitly benefits the feminine. And while they are correct that the social conventions of the feminine imperative are (for the greater part) learned and acculturated, they are the social tools used by the imperative, not the motivating imperative itself.
To Serve and Protect
Sunshinemary, in her effort to dissociate feminine accountability to the overall Feminine Imperative, attempts to separate the social implements of the Feminine Imperative from the naturalistic (evolutionary) side of the imperative. Thus she attempts to split the definition into two camps; one the good, natural, sometimes ugly, but species beneficial Feminine Imperative, the other, a monstrous social reengineering push responsible for the evils men endure under the Feminist Imperative:
The feminine imperative: protection and resources are preferentially and willingly provided to females by related males (related by family or by marriage), which benefits both sexes due to the increased survivorship of offspring; this is primarily an evolved biological construct. Resistance is useless due to differential survivorship of offspring.
The feminist imperative: protection and resources are preferentially but unwillingly provided to females by all males regardless of relationship, with no concomitant benefit to males; this is primarily an artificially imposed social construct. Resistance is useful.
Beyond the fem-positive spin of Mary’s redefinition here, the problem is that feminism is itself a social extension of the Feminine Imperative. Feminism is essentially a social reengineering project with the express purpose of benefiting the Feminine Imperative. On a base level hypergamy IS the feminine imperative. Hypergamy and women’s sexual pluralism is literally written into women’s genetic code. In her proliferative phase, women’s hormonal predisposition is for Alpha seed, after ovulation and menses the hormonal predisposition is for Beta need. Feminism, and all of the operative social, political and psychological conventions that are derived from it serve a solitary purpose – the advancement and consolidation of the Feminine Imperative as the dominant socio-sexual frame for our species.
All one need do is consider the socio-sexual effects of feminism over the past 40+ years. Remove the necessity for male provisioning, remove the pre-sexual revolution resource dependency, enable women with unilateral control of their birthing schedule through hormonal birth control and what do women default to? Their innate Hypergamy, the prime directive of the Feminine Imperative.
Hypergamy, while inherently cruel, is in fact a proven species survival schema. However, because of women’s place in our biological order, they must be the filters of that hypergamy. Ergo, the necessity of a dominant socio-sexual framework defaults to the feminine.
By sheer force men can and have taken control of that dominant framework, by rape or religion or any other moralistic social constructs, but women’s fluid, social reengineering of those constructs circumvents and repurposes them. If you need an example just study the history of western civilization; we’ve ‘progressed’ from a society that owned women as property to women’s default ownership of men’s progeny, property, their future property and even the means for them to acquire it all through the same social convention (marriage) that was intended to prevent women from engaging in their evolved propensity for sexual pluralism and proactively or retroactively cuckolding men.
Sunshinemary’s hope is that men will refocus their (perceived) anger on the evils of the Feminist Imperative as a distinct and separate force, and accept (preferably embrace) the Feminine Imperative for being “it is what it is”. Her impression is that the Feminine Imperative is amoral while the Feminist Imperative is immoral – an impression, I might add, that trad-con feminized-church women would like to perpetuate – focus on those deplorable feminists while we functionally serve the same purpose they do. The main disconnect here is that there is no Feminism without a Feminine Imperative. Feminism doesn’t exist without a Feminine Imperative to serve.
December 31st, 2012 at 12:50 pm
“We’re friends, so you’re supposed to love me unconditionally!!”
Translation…you should love me like your mother.
and that would be a good response.
her: we’re friends, so you’re supposed to love me unconditionally!!!
you: ok mom
December 31st, 2012 at 2:13 pm
T & A: “Would the desire to be loved unconditionally always be part of the feminine imperative, and only amplified within an individualist culture, and/or supressed within a collectivist culture? Or would it be entirely cultural conditioning?”
The desire among women to be loved unconditionally exists in all cultures, but such desires are AMPLIFIED in a collectivist culture, or at least under a collectivist government.
A woman always wants whatever she can get. However, in a culture that values individualism, any extra princessness she may feel is counteracted by the emphasis on the individual freedom of any man in her life.
She might feel entitled to the universe, but if the guy she’s with doesn’t want to give it to her, or she doesn’t earn it on her own, she won’t get it. She can try to get what she wants by being exceptionally valuable to the man, effective on her own, or through being manipulative, but there are individual wills at work. She can persuade or cajole, but she can’t coerce. This limits her power.
Conversely, in a more collectivist culture, there is no individual will to counteract her desires, only the will of the collective. Instead of having to appeal to any individual’s sense of value she can work within the political system to make sure she gets hers.
Therefore, instead of a girl trying to get her boyfriend to chip in for birth control (or even being a manipulative bitch about it), she votes for the collective will to OWE her birth control just because she wants it. Not only that, the collective OWES her access to abortions, child care, special rooms for lactating, maternity leave, welfare and/or food stamps if she chooses not to work, most of her husband’s earnings if she decides to leave him, and God only knows what else.
The feminine imperative works on every level. In the cultural sphere it’s manipulative, but in the governmental sphere it’s downright coercive. This amplifies FI exponentially.
There are also cultural factors at work. Christianity used to emphasize our fallen nature which had a limiting effect on anyone’s sense of entitlement. If didn’t eliminate it, of course, but even if a woman felt like the world owed her, she used to have to be circumspect about it because society frowned on being a spoiled brat.
Now it’s “I am independent Woman, watch me take all your shit.”
January 1st, 2013 at 2:48 am
KingA is a funny kind of Christian:
(My bolds added to King A’s quotes)
So you are here to help people, but are indifferent to their possibly burning in Hell, which can only mean that you also don’t really care about unplugging men from the fembo Matrix. Such charsima! Such leadership! No wonder people are flocking to your brand of tough love *sound of crickets*
That’s how you picture yourself, but you seem to spend much more time and energy flapping your gums at people who you characterize as NOT worthy of fighting. They’re bores, mongoloids, etc. as you say. Your procedures could be most charitably described as puzzling.
You’re surprised that a bunch of obviously secular commenters, who don’t give a flying damn about religion, know little about it, and simply mock anyone who tries to convince them that religious knowledge is important or relevant in 2013 — you’re suprised that their ideas about religion are, erm, unorthodox? Then why bother? Oh right, I forgot — you’re trying to ‘baptize them with fire.’
News flash: Most secular people don’t give a damn about religion. If you think they should, why do you do your best to further alienate them from it? ‘Baptism by fire’ or ‘trial by fire’ works in certain contexts to inspire positive spiritual or character development — but I hardly think that being furiously typed at by an anonymous, eloquent kook has anyone singed and shaking in his godless little boots.
I suspect you really get off on being abused and flamed in this manner. Bill Hicks said something funny once to the effect of someone (Rush Limbaugh?) looking like the sort of man who sits in a bathtub while other men pee on him.
(All right, that’s going a bit far. Only joking and all that. You’re a Christian, so I expect you to turneth away abuse with soft words, so to speak, and then forgive me.)
Seriously though, isn’t there a large group of men out there who are much more likely to benefit from your advice? I refer to Christian men who need to start taking Red Pills, because so many of their churches now march to the feminist tune. Unplugging them would be a much more efficient use of your time and you would significantly raise your chances of doing some good in the world. I say that because though we secularists and Christians disagree on the religion thing, we can surely all agree that unplugging Christian men from the fembo matrix is a good thing.
But you won’t be doing that, will you? It’s because you’re perfectly indifferent to seeing even Christian men live the steadily-worsening Hell of a steadily-feminizing state; you MUST be, because you spend all your spare time castigating infidels! Christian men don’t need you to win them over to Jesus; so as far as you’re concerned, they could all rot to death in concentration camps, because they’ve got the real priority straight, and you’d rather spend your time fighting to ‘save immortal souls’ than trying to help alleviate ANY suffering undergone by actual living human beings.
I haven’t read much of your web-wide posting career actually, so the above may be only partially correct. But it’s totally correct based on your quoted comments, which, you apparently wish us to believe, constitute your credo.
And so, I can only end with the internetly devastating judgement and condemnation that as far as religion or Game or any important issues at all are concerned, “I recommendeth not KingA.“
January 1st, 2013 at 4:20 pm
I ran across this about the FI in a book I was reading:
While the behaviour of the men on the Titanic represented to the popular imagination the ‘natural’ order confirmed by the sea, Inez Milholland was a symbol of the increasingly unnatural order of things on land. Aged eighteen, she had made four militant suffrage speeches on a soap box in Hyde Park and paraded the streets of London with a banner emblazoned with ‘Votes for Women’. In 1911, Milholland appeared in barely disguised form as the passionate heroine of Isaac Stevenson’s novel, An American Suffragette. Her presence at the inquiry today was a reminder of the ‘Votes or Boats’ debate which had been ignited by the Titanic disaster: women in the lifeboats had refused to return to rescue the men whose gallantry they had been only too pleased to accept on the sinking ship. ‘What do women want?’, the newspapers asked. It seemed that chivalry at sea was considered chauvinism on land. ‘I suggest, henceforth,’ said a man from St Louis, ‘when a woman talks women’s rights, she be answered with the word Titanic, nothing more – just Titanic? ‘The heroism of the men on the Titanic,’ wrote the Baltimore Sun, shows ‘that women can appeal to a higher law than that of the ballot for justice, consideration and protection.’ A writer calling himself ‘Mere Man’ asked if ‘the suffragette would have stood on that deck for woman’s rights or for woman’s privileges?’
Wilson, Frances (2011-10-18). How to Survive the Titanic (Kindle Locations 2252-2254). Harper Perennial.
January 1st, 2013 at 8:09 pm
I doubt that this would be the case if the guy had a debilitating mental illness.
http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2013/01/how-i-fell-in-love-with-schizophrenic.html
January 1st, 2013 at 11:32 pm
A little new year light reading –
http://www.torontosun.com/2012/08/21/semen-can-affect-a-womans-brain-study?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=recommend-button&utm_campaign=Semen+can+affect+a+woman%27s+brain%3A+Study
Hmmm, could this explain FI? :)
or;
http://www.torontosun.com/2011/07/19/buddies-in-bed
Oh it’s the ladies that become emotionally attached?
and;
http://www.torontosun.com/2011/05/24/smiling-men-less-attractive-to-women-study#
The old Alpha rears its’ head again.
Happy New Year All.
January 2nd, 2013 at 1:13 am
@treylesnorth
In both cases her cheating was motivated by needing to get a reaction out of the guy lol
In my experience I think for the girls who cheat carelessly and basically want to get caught, a lot of the time they just need their guy to react. Jealousy, rage, hurt, it’s all good, as long as he reacts instead of being a monotone opinionless spineless beta like a lot of long-term relationship guys become. They need to see that their lazy lion laying (lol) in the sun can roar. It’s almost more for the guy’s benefit than her own as weird as that sounds…like she’s saying “c’mon grow a fucking spine!! Go ahead get mad at me, do SOMETHING, be a fucking man not this lame beta you’ve become!!”
I find that the girls who cheat secretly are generally still in love with their guy or WANT it to work with him but he just doesn’t give them the tingle anymore or he’s shit in bed. But they don’t need a reaction out of him. Often these are guys who are situationally alpha (at work or with friends etc) so they know he can roar and the cheating is more selfish-motivated (“I need a good lay until he sorts his shit out”).
In this chick’s case she has a guy who cheats so he’s probably pretty apathetic about her and an emotionally unavailable guy who’s probably pretty apathetic about her. So in both cases she’s trying to hurt them so they’ll react and she can assuage her fears that she’s irrelevant to them in the long-term. I’ve faked being jealous now and then in LTRs because I know it’s important to a girl sometimes lol
A game related Q here is: if you wanted to fuck and keep that girl, would you be the attentative type guy? Or the aloof asshole who’s apathetic about her? Notice that she goes into a big rant about how she wants to be treated nice, but is she chasing any of those guys? Or is she still ranting about the “assholes” who didn’t give her their full attention?
This is one of those things where the girl doesn’t realize she’s telling you her “blueprint”. What she thinks she wants and what she actually responds to are two entirely different things. It’s a fascinating bit of cognitive dissonance to me.
January 2nd, 2013 at 3:46 am
Want to know what the manosphere thinks of Yoko Ono. I saw her live at Arthurfest when I was 16. As far as I know she’s the Andy Warhol of Feminism.
January 2nd, 2013 at 7:48 am
“Hypergamy, while inherently cruel, is in fact a proven species survival schema.”
The irony is that with a lack of marriage (partly due to women refusing to settle down with ‘Joe Average), fertility rates are dropping across the Western world. Hypergamy is turning on itself. The dramatic decline of birth rates will result in great struggles for Western civilisation.
January 2nd, 2013 at 12:10 pm
Females want what is advantagoues to them, and not to males.
Not surprising.
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June 9th, 2014 at 1:28 am
Very pithy article, although I’m not quite sure I’m following your equating the Feminine Imperative and the Feminist Imperative.
“… only to become aware the game’s been rigged all along.”
Tell me about it. Being a dyed-in-the-wool white-knight beta most of my adult life, I didn’t come to this realization until my late 50s after a major breakdown. Now I’m just trying to communicate this to my son, but he is having a hard time accepting it.