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.