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.