The archetype of the Strong Independent Woman® has been culturally reinforced over the last half century in virtually every imaginable media. Whether it’s Disney’s capable Princesses ready to save themselves from certain doom – as well as their quirky, hapless but handsome male heroes – or the now clichéd ‘tough bitch’ of action movies and video game protagonists who measures herself by how well she can kick ass and /or swear as the culturally contextual equal of “any man”. Her template-crafted character is strong, confident, measuredly aggressive, decisive (but usually only when shit gets serious so as to prove to the audience she’s ‘digging deep within herself to discover her yet unrealized resolve), judicious, loving to those loyal or dependent on her (immediate family, children and female friends), capable of solving problems with little more than the feminine intuition men magically lack – but above all, she’s independent.
As this cultural archetype is broadcast to society at large, the want then is to find parallels of this Strong Independent Woman® in the ‘real’ world. The media character is only marginally believable now thanks to endless revisions and replications, so we look for the examples of independent women equalling and exceeding the, paltry-by-comparison, achievements of the unenlightened ignorance of their male “oppressors.” High ranking company CEOs are usually the first rock star independent women to nominally shine (often undeservedly) in such a role, but then, by order of degrees, we can move down the economic social strata and cherry-pick or conveniently create the match of any mediocre man. As most men are, or have been conditioned Betas it’s not too difficult.
It really is the End of Men you see. You’re no longer necessary because, well now, there is nothing men can collectively and uniformly do that women cannot find some individual example of matching and / or exceeding. Women don’t need men anymore, they’re independent.
The Branding
If there’s one thing I know, it’s branding. The Strong Independent Woman® caricature has generously earned it’s registered trademark. I sometimes use that ® to emphasize a particularly long-evolved meme; social conventions so embedded into our cultural fabric that they literally have become their own brand. The Strong Independent Woman® is actually one the best examples of this branding. However, to really understand the gravity of so long a cultural branding, you must go to the root of how the brand of the independent woman was originally intended to evolve by the 2nd wave cultural feminists who spawned it. In a way it’s succeeded far better than any feminist of the period really had the foresight to expect.
An Independent Woman was to be independent of men.
While a lot of feel-good aphorisms like confidence, determination, integrity, and the like became associated with this desire for independence, make no mistake, the original long-term feminist goal of fostering that independence in women was to break them off into individuated, autonomous entities from men. That individuation needed to be as positive and attractive to women as possible, so a social pairing of that independence from men, with a sense of strength and respectability, had to be nurtured over time.
Since the beginnings of the sexual revolution, women were acculturated to believe they could ‘have it all’, career, family, a husband (of her optimal hypergamous choosing) and, if she were influential enough, leave some indelible mark on society to be remembered by for posterity. To achieve this she’d need to be an autonomous agent, strong, and above all independent of men. Women would embody and perfect the maverick individualism that men seemed to enjoy throughout history. If she couldn’t manifest ‘having it all’ then she was still, by male force or by personal choice, not independent enough to realize it. Of course, the irony of all this can be found in the marriages of virtually every ‘high profile’ feminist luminary of the time (all the way up to our current time) to the very powerful and influential types of men their stated independence was to emancipate all women from in order to truly be independent.
The Case Against Male Self-Esteem
Matt Forney’s lightning rod post, The Case Against Female Self-Esteem drew a frenzy of internet hate, but at the core of that post was a question that Strong Independent Women® and their male identifiers don’t like be confronted with; do they truly want independence from men? Do the men they want to be independent from even exist, or are they conveniently useful archetypes; vaudevillian chauvinist cartoons from the 50’s, planted in their heads, courtesy of the feminine imperative?
While I can’t endorse a message that would diminish anyone’s self-esteem, male or female, Matt’s post, even so much as suggesting the idea of limiting female self-esteem, uncomfortably turns a cultural mirror back on over 50 years feminist and feminized social engineering. For over the past 50 years the case against male self-esteem, with the latent purpose of emancipating women from dependence on men, began in earnest — not with some anger inducing blog post, but as a progressive social engineering that would run the course of decades to effectively erase men’s inconvenient masculine identity, or even memory of what that identity ever meant to men. The case against male self-esteem has been the social undercurrent of popular culture since the early 1960’s.
I think it’s important for red pill men to internalize the popular idea of feminine independence. The true message that the Strong Independent Woman® brand embodies is independence from you, a man.
Its latent purpose isn’t the actual empowerment of women, or efforts to bolster self-esteem, strength (for whatever loose definition seems convenient), confidence or any other esoteric quality that might flatter a feminine ego. Its purpose isn’t to foster financial or economic independence (as evidenced by ever evolving fem-centric laws, educational and financial handicaps), or religious social parity, or even efforts to achieve its vaunted social equalism between the sexes. What feminine independence truly means is removing the man – independence from men. Feminine independence’s idealized state is one where women are autonomous, self-contained, self-sufficient and self-perpetuating single-gender entities.
If that revelation seems aggrandized and over the top, it should. It’s extreme, because the purpose itself is extreme. When you consider that the sexes have coexisted in relative gender complementarity, to produce our very proliferate species, for a hundred thousand years, the idea and implementation of separating the sexes into independent and solitary entities is extreme. Obviously effecting this independence is an impossibility for a race of social animals like human beings. We’ve relied on cooperative efforts since our tribal beginnings and the species-beneficial psychological hardwiring of that cooperation is one trait that made us so successful in adapting to changing, dangerous, environments.
For most manosphere readers (especially MRAs) I don’t think I need to illustrate the many manifest ways that women are dependent upon the men; if not men’s generated resources and provisioning, then certainly their parental investment, companionship, emotional and sexual interest. We’re better together than we’ve ever been apart – even when the ugly mechanics of hypergamy, or male aggression, or any number of negatively perceived gender dynamics prove useful survival traits for us, there is no true independence between the sexes. There is interdependence.
This is what equalism makes a mockery of. In its striving for a homogenous goal-state of androgynous gender-parity it fails to account for where the species-success that the complementarity of the past 30,000 years has brought us. From a heroic male perspective we generally accept that no man is an island, but feminism and equalism disagree – a Strong Independent Woman® is an island,..or she will be just as soon as a man gives her her due to become so.
December 17th, 2013 at 4:45 am
@ Dr. Jeremy;
“Personally, I don’t expect to dissuade you from seeking a system that prioritizes your own needs (and power). I’m not sure that is possible. I just hope others are intelligent enough to see the self-serving nature of your argument and not buy into the persuasion – sacrificing their own needs and the needs of the majority in the process. Frankly, we have already gone too far down that road…and the majority of society is suffering for the comfort of the few already.”
I have often seen you make the argument that the manosphere complaint with feminism/hypergamy/feminine imperative is rooted in the concept of power and an imbalance in favour of women compared to men in modern society.
I also often wonder if you believe in the existence of objective morality/natural law that itself would be rooted in an evolved set of psychological mechanisms made for determining what is moral, (i.e. cheating detection mechanisms and so forth), and if so, would it not be best for the manosphere to push for an elucidation, propagation and implementation of such an objective morality/natural law, rather than relating all our problems back to the concept of power and who has it and who doesn’t?
December 19th, 2013 at 4:40 pm
[…] sexual partners, advanced sexual skills, her reliance on her IUD form of birth control and her Strong Independent Woman mentality do not deserve courtship or marriage, and probably not even any type of long term […]
December 23rd, 2013 at 12:26 am
[…] many American women currently have to some degree and she was brought up by her beta father to be a Strong Independent Woman®. As I incorrectly assumed that my wife would assist me in getting back on track, I also […]
January 22nd, 2014 at 1:30 pm
I’m way late to this party, but I had to share this:
The Navy Corpsman
January 29th, 2014 at 2:35 pm
[…] was the first institution, legalized and normalized that laid bare feminism latent purpose – strong independent women® could remove the man from the equation of effecting an optimal hypergamy, while at the same time […]
April 8th, 2014 at 12:10 am
[…] hear a woman complain about “men’s fragile egos”, men being threatened by ‘strong independent women®‘ or some other frustration about men not cooperating with their rapidly decaying, dualistic […]
April 13th, 2014 at 7:52 pm
[…] more palatable. ’40 is the new 30′, “you still got it”, and of course the strong independent woman® brand offers a plan for […]
May 6th, 2014 at 11:03 pm
[…] weren’t things women or children had the capacity to reciprocate. The advent of women’s independence, real or imagined, has served to strip men of this core understanding of the differences between […]
July 3rd, 2014 at 2:24 pm
Become Happier By Avoiding Sex, Marriage, Fatherhood, And Parental Alienation Syndrome.
[Introduction]
My information is a combination of three stories. The first story describes one of the most important books that I have ever read (Adult Children of Parental Alienation Syndrome by Amy Baker). The second story uses information from online articles to reveal events that are enormously influenced by family problems (like Parental Alienation Syndrome). Parental Alienation Syndrome is probably the worst family problem because it can last for decades after the relationship with the spouse or the lover has ended. The other family problems can be eliminated when the couples divorce or when the unmarried couples separate. The third story explains why parental alienation methods were used against me by an unexpected group of people.
[Book Summary]
Forty adult participants were interviewed for Adult Children of Parental Alienation Syndrome (by Amy Baker). The book has a lot of long and informative quotes from those interviews. During childhood, each of the 40 adult participants had an alienating parent (usually the mother) that manipulated them into unjustly hating (or pretending to hate) the targeted parent. Many participants said that they were frequently forced to make hateful or belittling comments to the targeted parent even though they secretly loved the targeted parent. The book gives a detailed explanation of each method the alienating parent used to manipulate or brainwash their children. The United States would become a better country if every targeted parent made their children read and talk to them about this book.
[Married Life With Children]
Many alienating parents manipulated their children into hating the targeted parent even though the married couple lived in the same home. The targeted parents are usually unaware of this hatred because the alienating parents and their children decide to keep their hatred a secret as long as the targeted parents (usually the father) stay in the marriage. One child secretly wanted his father to die. The targeted parent thought that his spouse and child were at home in another part of town, but the child was watching him (probably through a window) because the alienating parent told her son to secretly spy on his father. As an adult, the child finally told his father about the childhood spying, the secret hatred, and the other secrets.
In some marriages, the alienating parent made hateful or belittling comments to the targeted parent. In some of the openly hostile marriages, the children also made hateful or belittling comments to the targeted parent. During the marriage, children saw the alienating parent abuse the targeted parent (verbal abuse, emotional abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, or a combination of abuses). The author believes that many of the alienating parents had a personality disorder like narcissism (other disorders were named in the book). Family problems (including Parental Alienation Syndrome) affected the children. “Nearly half of college-age adults [19-25 year old students and non-students] struggle with a mental health disorder, from alcohol dependency to depression and anxiety. But only a quarter seek” treatment (“Young Adults Hit By Mental Health Issues,” BaltimoreSun.com).
One reason marriage rates are decreasing is because more people are witnessing the divorces and the unhappy marriages of numerous family and friends. People that were older than 20 and had divorced parents were 33 percent less likely to ever get married (“Research Suggests Children Of Divorce More Likely To End Their Own Marriages,” UNews.Utah.edu). The percentage of people older than 18 that were currently married was 72 percent in 1960 and 51 percent in 2010 (“Marriage Rate In America Drops Drastically,” HuffingtonPost.com). “According to U.S. Census Bureau statistics, in 1980 only 6 percent of men between 40 and 44 had never been married; in 2008 it was 16 percent (“The Stigma Of The Never-Married Man,” Details.com).” Fifty-six percent (56%) of all men and 65 percent of men with bachelor degrees remained in their first marriage for at least 20 years (“Only Half Of First Marriages Last 20 Years,” Today.com). “Two-thirds of all divorces are initiated by women (“Debunking 10 Divorce Myths,” Health.HowStuffWorks.com).”
[Child Support And Child Visitation]
Fifty percent (50%) of the children born to married parents will see their parents divorce before they reach the age of 18 (“Statistics on Children of Divorce in America,” About.com). Custodial parents (usually the mother) can ignore child visitation orders because there is usually no punishment (“Visitation Rights Must Be Enforced,” Cleveland.com). One father was divorced, he had child visitation problems after the divorce, and he remarried the alienating parent because he wanted adequate contact with his child. Some mothers will ask the family court for an increase in child support payments if the father’s income increases significantly. A few websites like LegalZoom.com answer the question: “Can I go after my ex-husband’s new wife’s income for more child support?” The answer is that in “limited circumstances” the ex-wife would get an increase in child support payments.
“Our [1997] data show that 4.5 million [56% of non-poor] nonresident fathers who do not pay child support have no apparent financial reason to avoid this responsibility. None of these fathers are poor (“Poor Dads Who Don’t Pay Child Support,” Urban.org).” In 2008, nearly 25 percent of parents did not pay any court-ordered child support, and another 30 percent did not pay the full amount (“Most Child-Support Payers Stiff Their Kids,” CBSNews.com). Twenty-four percent (24%) of custodial mothers did not receive any court-ordered child support from fathers, and thirty-seven percent (37%) of custodial fathers did not receive any court-ordered child support from mothers (“Child Support for Custodial Mothers and Fathers: 1991,” page 6, Census.gov).
The primary reason for child support delinquency is child visitation problems. Another reason is a “vindictive or unjust” divorce process (“The Family; Why Fathers Don’t Pay Child Support,” NYTimes.com). “Men Who Broke” (FathersForLife.org) has many stories of men that committed suicide because of enormous child support arrears or child visitation problems. Some fathers that are victims of Parental Alienation Syndrome pay the full amount of court-ordered child support, and some fathers that were treated well by their families do not pay the full amount of court-ordered child support. Father’s family court problems were explained extremely well in A Promise to Ourselves by Alec Baldwin (book) and Divorce Corp by Joseph Sorge (book and DVD).
When the children became adults that no longer lived with either parent, many alienating parents (usually the mother) would continue to prevent their children from establishing a relationship with the targeted parent. Many adult alienated children eventually had a positive relationship with the targeted parent. Many children will be permanently alienated from their fathers. Single divorced men with permanently alienated children and never-married men that never had children will be in a SIMILAR situation in their old age.
[Old Age]
“In-Home Care For Frail Childless Adults” (Urban.org) reveals the percentage of frail older men (age 65 and older) living in the community that receive in-home care from paid help and unpaid help (family and friends). The information excludes men living in nursing homes and assisted living facilities. Frail unmarried older men with no children received help 50.4 percent of the time (37.9% unpaid help and 20.3% paid help). Frail older men (both married and unmarried) with two children received help 59.8 percent of the time (58.4% unpaid help and 9.3% paid help).
Nursing homes and assisted living facilities are alternatives to in-home care. “Ohio nursing home and assisted living facility residents rated their overall satisfaction with the care they receive in the ‘B+’ range, according to a statewide survey by the Ohio Department of Aging (“Ohio Nursing Home Residents Rate Facilities Well In State Survey,” Cleveland.com). During old age, the entire Social Security payment of some fathers is confiscated by the government to pay child support (current and past-due). It does not matter if the child is an adult, if the debt was created decades ago, or if the father does not have another source of income (“Child Support vs. Social Security,” BankRate.com).
[Share The Wealth]
The emotional harassment that I experienced from an unexpected group of people (since 2001) is very similar to the parental alienation methods described in this book. Before I joined the Navy, I almost always worked minimum wage jobs (mostly in Atlanta, GA). My female Navy enlisted recruiter encouraged me to become a Navy Officer because she saw that I had a bachelor’s degree. I was too old to qualify for most officer job categories as a civilian. The age limits were higher for Navy enlisted personnel. I was interested in the officer program during my first several months of active duty, but I decided not to apply. For ten years (2001-2011), I was a Navy enlisted sailor on active duty in San Diego (CA). My significantly improved financial status caused women and society to change from not caring about my personal life to using emotional harassment to demand that I get a girlfriend and become a father.
I live alone, I have never been married, and I do not have any children. I used to have sex with women before I began practicing sexual abstinence. “Effectiveness Of Family Planning Methods” (CDC.gov) and “Contraception” (CDC.gov) reveal that the “typical use failure rate” for condoms is 18 pregnancies per 100 women per year (18 percent). Some single condom users want to wear two condoms at the same time. A few women that want to get pregnant will lie and say that male contraceptives are not needed because they are sterile or because they are using female contraceptives. I am happy practicing sexual abstinence and avoiding having a girlfriend because both plans allow me to avoid marriage and fatherhood. The percentage of women at the end of their childbearing years (the 40-44 age group) that have never given birth was 10 percent in 1976 and 18 percent in 2008 (“Childlessness Up Among All Women,” PewSocialTrends.org).
For the first time in my life (starting in 2001, when I was 32 years old), there was an extreme and coordinated effort to emotionally harass me at work and near my home. The emotional harassment continued after I moved from Atlanta (GA) to San Diego (CA). When I was near my home, strangers that I saw only once would either emotionally harass me or spy on me (child spying is described in my third paragraph). A hacker could spy on my laptop or smartphone (“WiFi Snooping: Who’s Spying On Your Laptop?,” KMOV.com). Company employees can view customer information like my online email account, my bank account, and my brokerage account (“Employees Snoop On Customer Data,” ABCNews.Go.com). My harassers often have information (negative and positive) that I did not reveal to anyone.
[Doctor’s Visit]
I was VERY ANGRY at the beginning of the emotional harassment (in 2001), but I got used to it. In 2010, my Commanding Officer (O-6 rank) forced me to see a psychiatrist even though I felt fine. I learned that the Navy does not need a very good reason to make a service member see a psychiatrist. I took a psychological test, and I talked to the psychiatrist. At the beginning of the session, I put a tape recorder on the table. I told the psychiatrist that I will record the entire session. I did not tell her that if I received an unfair diagnosis, then I would have used the tapes to get a second opinion from a psychiatrist that I would have hired. One year after I left the Navy, I destroyed the tapes. The psychiatrist decided that I should live at a Navy mental hospital for three days for observation. The Navy mental hospital told me that I did not have any mental disorders.
The psychiatrist said that information from my session would be revealed to my high-level supervisors (E-9 rank and above). Even if I was not warned, I would not have told the psychiatrist anything that I did not want the entire world to know. The harassers at my new job location and near my home knew specific things that I told the psychiatrist. The harassers were unable to get any damaging information. Before my 2005 re-enlistment, I knew that I would leave the Navy in 2011 (Honorable Discharge as an E-5). The emotional harassment will last for the rest of my life because I will not become an ATM machine (paying child support for my alienated children that I am rarely allowed to contact). “’In the 1950s, if you weren’t married, people thought you were mentally ill,’ said Andrew J. Cherlin, a Johns Hopkins University sociologist who studies families (“Married Couples At A Record Low,” WashingtonPost.com).”
[The Boycott]
The emotional harassment increased my desire to do research on marriage and fatherhood. The more research I did, the worse marriage and fatherhood looked. Marriage and fatherhood is much worse than the emotional harassment that I frequently deal with. I am used to the emotional harassment. The only major problem that I have is unemployment. Avoiding sex, marriage, and fatherhood means that I solved my future problems with family court and the unfair fatherhood laws BEFORE it was too late. If a large percentage of men boycotted family court and the unfair fatherhood laws for their entire life, then society would eventually be FORCED to create a better system. MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way) in the United States and Herbivore Men in Japan are large groups of men that are avoiding sex, marriage, fatherhood, and Parental Alienation Syndrome.
A Promise to Ourselves by Alec Baldwin (book) and Divorce Corp by Joseph Sorge (book and DVD) exposes a broken family court system that frequently does not care about “the best interests of the child.” Any solution to family court and the unfair fatherhood laws should have the goal of preventing unfair changes to the improved system after the children are born. One possible solution would be to pass laws that create “parental contracts” (similar to prenuptial agreements) that cover child custody, child visitation, and child support payments. The “parental contract” could require both parents to allow yearly “parental alienation awareness training” for their children.
The “parental contract” laws would reduce the number of unfair negotiated contracts. The law would have mandatory minimum child support payments. The “parental contracts” would allow both parents to avoid paying child support if both parents have an equal amount of child custody. If the custodial parent refused a non-custodial parent’s child visitation, then there could be a two-part punishment in the “parental contract” (a “flow reversal” punishment). In the first part, the permanent non-custodial parent would get temporary custody of the children for at least one month. In the second part, the direction of the child support payments would reverse during the temporary custody period. The permanent custodial parent would have to pay child support. A fair system would mean that fewer non-custodial parents would have child support arrears. Allegations of child abuse would have to be proven in a CRIMINAL court. A conviction would authorize the criminal court (not the family court) to punish the defendant by canceling or by modifying their “parental contract.” Parents (married and unmarried) without a “parental contract” would be in another system. [Written by Michael Anthony Hill in Miami, FL (07-01-14)]
September 10th, 2014 at 12:18 am
[…] The Brand of Independence […]
September 15th, 2014 at 1:23 pm
[…] struck me as the type to ‘settle’ on a Beta provider because she was too headstrong and independent® for that – she was certainly hot enough to attract the Alphas and independent enough to never […]