Blog status update: I apologize for the infrequency of my posts of late. I’ve been in the Netherlands and Belgium doing distillery stuff most of last week, but I’ve used my downtime to finish the final draft stages of the book which (I hope) should be on Amazon and other self-publishing venues about mid-March. I’ve never published anything before so it’s a learning process to be sure.
Reader Eric, again, made a revelatory observation in Soldiers:
I get the feminine imperative is what it is. I’m still coming to grips with it on a gut level, but I understand the concept. What I meant with ‘parasitic on masculine values’ was less about judging the nature of FI and more about the extent of its reach into our domain.
Robert highlighted the stark difference. Where I see the military as a repository of masculine values and culture that should be paired with the red pill, he sees a prime example of FI control of men.
The topic du jour at Dalrock’s blog this week is (yet again) the validity of the feminine imperative as a concept. What I find exceptionally ironic about the conveniently christianizing manosphere is this ceaseless droning from holier than thou white knights bemoaning how the feminine imperative is corrupting what the church traditionally should be, but are unable to look beyond how it affects what used to be their comfortable domain.
For all their kvetching they refuse to accept the feminine imperative as a concept. I realize the importance they put on having to reconcile a red pill reality with their faith, but they refuse to look beyond the narrow scope of the effect of the FI on their solitary religious institution. The Soldiers comment thread is an excellent example of another, and much broader, social institution, the military, the FI has both projected feminine primacy on, while ensuring that the beta chumps it depends on stay pliable, ignorant of, and useful to, the feminine imperative.
Reinvention
In Dal’s post Rebuilding the Mound he takes to task a commenter on his blog and deconstructs her reframing of his argument to better align with her feminine-primary interpretation of the feminine imperative. One of the prime successes of the feminine imperative is its ability to reinvent itself to jive with the present environment it finds itself in. The FI has a refined ability to evolve around not only changes in cultural shifts, but also around the the resulting failures it was responsible for.
There are many illustrations of the self-correcting, revisionism of the feminine imperative. Post-Wall spinsters re-imagine the desperation they often find themselves in by making men the culprit of their condition; never is the feminine imperative considered to be the cause. Sexual fluidity is another revisioning that absolves the FI from being the source of a woman’s condition:
The advent of embracing sexual fluidity in women is an attempt by feminized culture to put a bandaid on a lingering problem. As western feminized culture progresses onward from the late 60s, more and more women are awakening to the disillusionment that the choice they made to participate as an ‘equal’ in a masculine world required sacrifices of her femininity. Sacrifices that most come to regret later in life. Between 35 and 45 women are increasingly feeling the repercussions of their attempts to ‘have it all’ or have HAD it all, yet are left wondering why they’re not satisfied in sublimating their expectations – betraying their uniquely female biomechanics – to play the role of the New Woman.
That consensus is growing, even in Oprah-world, so what to do? What feminism has always done, move the goalposts and redefine the game. Men, for any variety of shameful reasonings, are cast as incapable of living up to the standards of being powerful, accomplished, and appealing, but even if you regret having married one, and possibly brought children into the world, you can still have a second chance at ‘having it all’ thanks to sexual fluidity. It’s not him, it’s the undiscovered homosexual you that’s been repressed all this time. Never mind that those infantile men are too preoccupied with youthful sexuality to appreciate your post-wall physique, there’s a world of lesbian women out there ready to deliver on the promise of powerful, accomplished, and appealing masculinity that your man is incapable of. It’s not that neo-feminism was wrong in promising you a satisfying life, it’s just that you were really a lesbian all this time and either didn’t know it, or were a victim of the Patriarchy and were repressed from it.
This is an excellent example of the FI’s unique capacity to morph itself to accommodate changes in culture, even when it was responsible for the negative outcomes. Another example is in Diane Mapes retrofitting her Choreplay message to align with the negative outcomes of a feminine imperative social push that it created for itself only five years earlier:
I can’t end this article without drawing attention to what I’m sure most of my readers are getting about the 5 year shift in attitude with regards to these articles. It’s easy to pass these off as some flighty progression in feminine self-understanding, but remember Diane Mapes draws a paycheck for writing these articles in well read media sources. She’s a media arm of the feminine imperative.
What we’re graphically witnessing is the fluidity with which the feminine imperative can realign itself socially to better effect its propagation. You see in 2008 the message to men (that resonated with women) was Fem-Up; stop being so insecure in your masculinity and do the dishes and laundry – the payoff will be more sexual access. In 2013 the message to men (again resonating with women) is Man-Up; stop being such a house frau and get out int the yard and mow – the payoff will be more sexual access.
In Choreplay the feminine imperative exercised a self-correction for a deleterious outcome of its own creation. Feminism, as a social impulse of the FI, is always a work in progress; it’s always a social experiment, but the Feminine Imperative being the socially correct default gradually evolves the failures of the feminist experiment into revised, intended successes.
People who can’t wrap their heads around the totality of the feminine imperative often conflate it with feminism. This is an easy mistake in light of the social upheaval that feminism has been responsible for since the sexual revolution. It’s easy to point to the glaring evidence that an acculturated feminization has worked into our collective consciousness, but I would argue that feminism is simply the latest, and most aggressive, social effort the feminine imperative has put forth in the last millenium. Feminism is the latest result of an ever reinventing, ever evolving feminine imperative.
If traditional femininity better served the feminine imperative (as it has in past generations) we would see a return to that social paradigm. As it stands in our contemporary conditions, a hybrid social utility of traditional femininity and aggressive feminism are now interchangeable to serve the FI. If gentille charms and a pandering to masculine courtesies serve best, that will be the expectation; if conditioned feminist social doctrines work better, that is what will be employed.
Further reading: The Feminine Reality and Fem-Centrism.
February 17th, 2013 at 5:30 pm
Back to the op-ed.
“For all their kvetching they [Christians] refuse to accept the feminine imperative as a concept. I realize the importance they put on having to reconcile a red pill reality with their faith, but they refuse to look beyond the narrow scope of the effect of the FI on their solitary religious institution.”
@Rollo
This is close but not fully true. Presuming you’re not a believer in the saving Grace of Jesus Christ, this position you’ve taken is common amongst those whose grasp of biblical principles is weak. The truth is that the FI is a very well known biblical concept – i.e. a woman’s greater susceptibility to trust in her own knowledge instead of God’s instructions, and then to solicit male compliance in this grab for absolute power. It is also a poorly understood one in Christianity.
Until the suffragettes started their campaigns in Europe in the late 1800’s, the FI concept was both understood and accepted in principle as Eve’s original sin. However, since there was Adam’s sin to contend with also – which was his failure to maintain spiritual frame in the face of Eve’s sin – the church also understood and accepted that both Adam and Eve were equally culpable. They also taught that after Christ’s anointing as the Messiah, marriage and non-marriage were equally acceptable to God but that married women were to submit to their husbands and husbands were to lead their wives towards God (there is no mention of the husband being the CEO or the administrative head of the household). When the suffragettes found that their radical ideas were gaining traction, Eve’s original sin went into overdrive and they decided to attack the church for biblical teachings that they thought were oppressive to women. This is when the feminist construction called The Patriarchy was born.
Western churches have changed a lot in the last hundred years. Because of the class wars resulting from WW1 and WW2 and the surge in Darwinian thinking and scientism, churches are no longer seen by broader society as the crucible for a righteous life. As a result, there has been a steady loss of financial and material support, which has forced them into corporate survival mode. Obviously, when the focus shifts from God the almighty to the God the CEO, a steady erosion of values must surely follow (the Bible also warns of this). From corporate survival mode, it’s just a hop, skip and jump to corporate expansion mode, in which churches become competitive places that adopt the mores and influences of the communities in which they’re planted to attract the most people or poach them from other churches, rather than the faithful representations of God’s kingdom they ought to be.
Combine this with the growth of feminism and you have a Christian church culture that has drawn away from Father God (how things ought to be) and towards Mother Goddess (how things are). A sort of moral Nurture-to-Nature transition, if you like. Men tend to think to the future health of society as a whole, at their own expense if necessary, while women tend to think in terms of free expression and living life to the full for themselves and the people they love, and in Church this has been given a scriptural polish and been elevated to a spiritual norm. The result is that churches are less about moral rectitude or the Biblical truth and more about freedom of choice and the emancipation of all who believe themselves to be oppressed. They’re like greenhouses for budding young solipsists, so it’s no wonder they’re dominated by feminine sentiments.
The truth is that true believers know this has happened to the church and are desperately trying to change it. Unfortunately, since the church must remain a sanctuary for the downtrodden and dispossessed, most of which are men, the male congregation tends to be more vulnerable than the female congregation and feminine sentiments have an easy path to the pulpit. What is happening in Christian circles is not so much a refusal to “look beyond the scope of the FI on their own institutions” but a conflict between what men are drawn towards, which is servant leadership, and what women are drawn towards, which is submission to the Alpha. It’s a case of two entirely opposite imperatives vying for control of the church. Virtually all churches are microcosms of the broader Church, so when Christians talk about their own religious institution (and they do mimic each other) you can be sure most of their laments apply to the broader Church.
February 18th, 2013 at 2:29 am
Talked about some of this and female promiscuity on some other forum. Some guy’s reply:
“Worrying about women’s promiscuity is a time-honored mechanism for keeping women down and making them responsible for all evil. When someone raises that, it’s a big red flag.”
The feminine imperative rearing its head?
February 18th, 2013 at 9:27 am
@Jacob, I think the problem evangelicals have with the manosphere identifying the FI is that it steals the biblical thunder they used to be able to claim about it and want back now that people outside the church have seen the effects of the FI and feminization in the church that they themselves have been blind to for several generations.
It’s like the message is “don’t tell us churchians about the FI, we’ve been on top of that shit since the garden of eden”, but the thorn in their side is that it’s the manosphere who’s graphically been showing them the error of their ways.
Evangelicals don’t like being called pussies by secualrs because they ought to know better about the FI given their divine wisdom which they’ve ignored, apparently. So feminism and liberal ideologies, their favorite foils, become their go-to excuses of convenience. That is until they read an excellent article explaining that feminism cannot exist apart from the FI:
http://veritaslounge.com/2013/02/09/the-super-norm-and-feminism-is-there-a-difference/
This is long, but well worth the read. By the end of it you’ll change your mind about conflating the FI with feminism. Don’t make the mistake of thinking it’s an apologetic article, it’s an excellent deconstruction of exactly your reasonings above.
And for the record, while I don’t consider myself an evangelical or churchian by any measure, I do consider myself a Christ follower. I don’t go into issues of religion unless they are part of the broader scope of gender issues. I get a lot of grief for being some backslidden heretic, but I do so in my best attempt to preserve the neutrality of my analysis:
https://rationalmale.wordpress.com/2012/03/23/moral-to-the-manosphere/
February 18th, 2013 at 5:36 pm
@Rollo
This statement takes an unnecessarily adversarial view of the church. THe Church isn’t blind to feminism or the FI, it is trying to resolve them into a biblical context. For the last half century or so, this has been difficult because women dominate the congregations and the fundie rolls. This statement also presumes that the Church claims ownership of secular revelation. This is simply not true of the Church. There’s no shortage of fools and tyrants who presume to do this but for the most part, the broader Church tries to resolve all new perspectives into a biblical context and then teach them in that context. That’s precisely what the church was designed to do. Maniacal evangelists may have other ideas, admittedly.
I can appreciate how this might apply to the CHurchians, but the Church itself is not like this. Churchians be damned – they’ve been the thorn in the side of true believers since the first Church was established. Putting it into a better perspective, I alluded to earlier that the Church has a mandate to place everything in a biblical context for the purpose of teaching the faithful how to live in the world without falling victim to it. Its purpose is to reflect God’s deep and abiding love for all people, especially the downtrodden and dispossesed, even those women in whom the FI has gained dominion. The truth of the FI is indeed embedded in Scripture (I’ve been an avid reader and contributor in the Manosphere for three years and could see the biblical parallels very early on). It is true that everyone wants to own new revelations but no one has a right to them, not even you, Roissy, Angry Harry, Paul Elam or anyone else in the avant garde of what we’re calling the the Manosphere. The Manosphere is just an internet term for “men”, men who have been acting on God’s revelations since Adam, whether they correctly attribute the source or not. Neither the Manoshpere nor the Church owns these ideas, but God surely does.
If by “pussies” you mean evangelicals seek to be self-abasing and averse to direct and open conflict, then I agree – it is after all how they’re taught to in Scripture to behave. I’d avoid the derogatory term, hoever, especially in the feminist era, as “pussies” are far from meek or mild. It needs to be stated that EVERY church-goer ignores Divine wisdom as God is the keeper of wisdom, not Man. Every single person in the Church is a fool to some degree – better not to condemn the Church for the foolishness of its people.
I think I’d agree with Novaseeker that feminism and the FI are separate (I only skimmed through his article in order to respond to your comment but it deserves a more careful reading), although at this stage I’m more comfortable calling them different manifestations of the female demi-urge – i.e. handmaidens of the Mother Goddess on one hand and her praetorian guard on the other. The Christian message is essentially a methodology by which both women and men can escape the biological tyranny of the Mother Goddess but since the Church needs to cater to all people, this depth of examination is not something church-goers would ever experience from the pulpit. These ideas take a long time to pass through the doctrinal filters and get to the people in the pews.
I don’t see you in this way at all. I’ve read your writing almost since you started and I hear God’s voice in your work. Not always on surface issues but always in the undercurrent of feeling. I also sense a lot of hurt and resentment aimed at the church for needing to get it right but failing. I feel this too. Can I encourage you to look at the church as a place that is in need of men like you (and other in the Manosphere) to get it back on track, rather than as an open target for all and sundry negative emotion?
I’d love to hear you speak in church – as long as the resentment is gone, I think you’d get a great deal more support than you believe you would. It’d be tough initially, though.
August 19th, 2013 at 4:26 pm
“I realize the importance they put on having to reconcile a red pill reality with their faith, but they refuse to look beyond the narrow scope . . .”
Well, that is, after all, what faith is.
June 18th, 2014 at 7:27 pm
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