Yes I know my enemies, they’re the teachers who taught me to fight me.

Today’s picture comes to us courtesy of popsugar – h/t heartiste and Zelscorpion.

In honor of International Men’s Day, this picture serves as a grim reminder that boys are often pressured to succumb to gendered expectations. Last year, a group of fourth grade boys was asked to list what they don’t like about being male, and the sad results were projected in the classroom. It’s important to consider what we are teaching young boys about what it means to be a man or masculine. How do you approach gender expectations with your children?

I’m leading off with this for the weekend’s discussion post because it encapsulates precisely what I was describing towards the end of my post on Vulnerability, that our modern normative social consciousness is one that is defined by a female-correct, female-beneficial experience. Bear in mind that this projection is from the collected, learned experiences of a group of 9 year old boys who have been conditioned to a self-loathing of masculinity in a feminine-correct social order.

The question, “What I don’t like about being a boy” seems fairly innocuous, but in a feminine-correct social awareness it becomes a litmus test to gauge how well these boys have internalized feminine-correct, conditioned beliefs. Read the list of offending grievances:

• Not being able to be a mother
• Not supposed to cry
• Not allowed to be a cheerleader
• Supposed to do all the work
• Supposed to like violence
• Supposed to play football
• Boys smell bad
• Having an automatic bad reputation
• Grow hair everywhere

The list reads like the table of contents from the textbook of exactly what I’d expect from an organized feminine-primary conditioning, however we need to look deeper. It’s important to bear in mind that these uniquely male attributes are grievances these boys wish they could alter about themselves. These boys believe their lives would be improved (perfected) if they could be less like boys and more like girls. Masculine incorrect, feminine correct.

I’m often criticized of being conspiratorial for my assertion that the Feminine Imperative conditions men from a very early age to accept their eventual Beta supportive role later in life. While this masculine grievance list from 4th grade boys is a good illustration, it’s simply one example of the earliest parts of the feminine-correct landscape men are raised not just to internalize, but to evangelize about to other boys / men as well.

The Patriarchy

Amongst the crown jewels of the most useful of feminine operative social conventions is the meta-contrivance of an ever present, omni-oppressive state of masculine social control – the Patriarchy. The term was coined by the luminaries of second wave feminism to give name to an otherwise ambiguous enemy. That ambiguity was a necessary buffer to mask the real focus of feminism’s intended destructiveness – masculinity.

If you read between the lines of Sarkesian’s tweet here you can see the presumption of experiential feminine-correctness that is her mental point of origin. Her presumed context for all her public interactions is that any normal male reading it, what she believes is logic, will already be prepared to accept that what is in women’s best interests is necessarily what is in men’s best interests.

Thus, deductively, what is perceived by women to be harmful to women is necessarily harmful to men – all because the concept of what is harmful or beneficial to either proceeds from a conditioned understanding of ubiquitous female-correctness.

Hardline feminists, female and male, will rattle this trope off in different varieties, but the message is the same, “the Patriarchy hurts men too.” The reason this is standard boilerplate is because it presumes a shared state of feminine-correctness, and a shared state of mutual oppression whether a man is aware of his Patriarchal oppression or not.

This social convention is really a form of marketeering; selling a solution to a problem it created itself. The true focus isn’t about solving problems created by an imagined male-social dominance, nor is it about marginalizing the less palatable aspects of masculinity. Rather, the true objective is a wholesale elimination of any semblance of conventional masculinity in men.

This learned feminine ‘correctness’ began with the 4th grade (actually before then) boy’s conditioned self-loathing of their masculinity.

“I find myself increasingly shocked at the unthinking and automatic rubbishing of men which is now so part of our culture that it is hardly even noticed.

We have many wonderful, clever, powerful women everywhere, but what is happening to men? Why did this have to be at the cost of men?

I was in a class of nine- and 10-year-olds, girls and boys, and this young woman was telling these kids that the reason for wars was the innately violent nature of men.

You could see the little girls, fat with complacency and conceit while the little boys sat there crumpled, apologizing for their existence, thinking this was going to be the pattern of their lives.

Lessing said the teacher tried to catch my eye, thinking I would approve of this rubbish.

This kind of thing is happening in schools all over the place and no one says a thing.

It has become a kind of religion that you can’t criticize because then you become a traitor to the great cause, which I am not.

It is time we began to ask who are these women who continually rubbish men. The most stupid, ill-educated and nasty woman can rubbish the nicest, kindest and most intelligent man and no one protests.

Men seem to be so cowed that they can’t fight back, and it is time they did.”

– Doris Lessing

While this account is an indictment of the Feminine Imperative, the irony of Lessing’s shock and disgust is that in the feminine-primary social environment she’s contributed to, only a woman can authoritively observe and describe men’s debasement and be taken with any amount of seriousness. No man could’ve written this and been taken as anything but misogyny.
I received a pertinent email from a reader, Dan, this week:

Rollo, why do women raise their sons to be beta?

In my personal experience and from what many men who have made the red pill transition have said, most mothers seem to raise their sons to be beta. From an evolutionary prospective this makes no sense. It would be in the best interest of a woman’s genetics and future bloodline to raise alpha sons who can subsequently attract and impregnate more women, yet it seems women overwhelmingly raise their sons to be beta (“women want a nice guy”, “just be yourself”, and encouraging submissive behavior toward women). I could understand why society as a whole would promote this dynamic because it benefits the female Imperative, but at the individual level, evolution tends to be much more selfish. What gives?

Dan

A woman, your mother, sister, aunt, grandmother and every girl ‘friend’ you think you have are all in on a meta-shit test – they want you, and their sons, to Just Get It in spite of what they mistakenly believe are in your best interests as a man. You must embrace an Alpha mindset without a woman instructing you to be so or by definition you are not Alpha.

Women fundamentally lack an existential male experience, so the advice, the upbringing, to be more Beta, be more compromising of the masculine for the feminine, stems from women’s best guess as to what would make their sons into the best men they believe they themselves would like to pair and bond with.

Women’s sexual strategy is rooted in dualistic hypergamy – Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks. Women already feel the familial kin-affiliation with their sons (the comforting Beta bucks security side of hypergamy) thus the Alpha Fucks side conflicts with that investment.

In the case of most single mothers, the hindsight regret of having achieved her subconscious goal of securing the Alpha Fucks genetics in her prime fertility years may be distorted by her inability to adequately realize the Beta Bucks side of her Hypergamy when the Alpha father declines the parental investment she thought would be forthcoming from him. Thus, that Beta Bucks idealization gets transferred to her son(s) and is reflected in how she raises him.

Also remember, Hypergamy is based on two parts, sexuality and security. It also stands to reason that by ensuring her son is a good manipulable Beta provider (by both her and any woman he pairs with) that his provisioning would also extend to her in the event that his father dies or abandoned her.

One last thing, human parenting evolved from the parental investment of a complementary masculine influence to balance a feminine influence. When left to a singular feminine influence in upbringing, you’re correct, it makes no evolutionary “sense”. Thus we have our contemporary landscape filled with “men” who are overwhelmingly feminized and ill prepared to lead complementary relationships with women.

Towards the end of my Vulnerability post I tackled a documentary by Jennifer Siebel Newsom called The Masks You Live In. In that part of the essay I described how the Feminine Imperative coordinates social conventions which invalidates the male experience by fostering the idea that conventional masculinity is an act or a front men put on to distract from what really lies behind the mask – a ‘true self’ defined by feminine-correct sensitivities and emotionalism:

Perhaps more damaging though is the effort the Feminine Imperative has made in convincing generations of men that masculinity and its expressions (of any kind) is an act, a front, not the real man behind the mask of masculinity that’s already been predetermined by his feminine-primary upbringing.

You see, it’s not enough to simply raise generations of boys to question what it means to be male, the idea of a male defined masculinity is dangerous to a feminine-primary social order. Boys must be taught to be self-loathing of their maleness, to despise what it is to eventually be a man.

And even that’s not sufficient. Men must be continually reminded that masculinity is ridiculous, pitiable in it’s attempts to understand the feminine, and that men would already be feminine-correct beings if they’d simply drop the facade of their mask of positive masculinity.

Here’s the face of your perfected ‘adult’ male:

“When looking for a life partner, my advice to women is date all of them: the bad boys, the cool boys, the commitment-phobic boys, the crazy boys. But do not marry them. The things that make the bad boys sexy do not make them good husbands. When it comes time to settle down, find someone who wants an equal partner. Someone who thinks women should be smart, opinionated and ambitious. Someone who values fairness and expects or, even better, wants to do his share in the home. These men exist and, trust me, over time, nothing is sexier.”

― Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead

These are the men that the Feminine Imperative has created. The men who, “want an equal partner. Someone who thinks women should be smart, opinionated and ambitious. Someone who values fairness and expects or, even better, wants to do his share in the home.” The men the imperative must convince are ‘sexier’ at precisely the concurrent time that their provisioning and security are most important to women at their necessitous phase of life.

These are the men who made the list of things they were taught they shouldn’t like about being a boy when they were 9 years old.

So for this weekend’s discussion question I’ll ask the same thing popsugar did, how do (will) you approach gender expectations with your children?