“Men are to blame for women’s behavior. The Feminine Imperative only has as much power as men have allowed it to have. Hypergamy (open or otherwise) wouldn’t be the unrestrained social juggernaut it’s become without men’s complicity or accomplice.”
This quote is a go-to rationalization I read a lot from women just coming to terms with their first taste of the Red Pill. Unfortunately it’s also become a common refrain among certain sets in the manosphere; this rationale is usually particular to the moral absolutist strains of the manosphere.
When I read it from women it’s kind of ironic considering it usually comes from women who share in the same moral absolutism, who were “so different when they were in college”, but they’ve had their Epiphany and “got right with God.” They often cling to the Strong Independent® identity for themselves, but turn over a rock and show them the visceral, observable, ugly truth of unfettered Hypergamy and then, then it’s men’s partial or total responsibility for fostering women’s conditions.
It becomes men’s fault for not having the fortitude and presence of mind to correct them when they needed it – never mind the lifetime of Blue Pill conditioning that taught them judging women made them misogynistic assholes. I understand axiom that men and women get the men and women they deserve, but I wanted to explore this blame game dynamic a bit more.
From Validation Hunting & The Jenny Bahn Epiphany:
The Feminine Imperative relies on memes and conventions which shift the ownership of women’s personal liabilities for their sexual strategy to men.
When men are blamed for the negative consequences of women’s sexual strategy it helps to blunt the painful truths that Jenny Bahn is (to her credit) honestly confronting in her article at 30 years old and the SMV balance shifts towards enabling men’s capacity to effect their own sexual strategy.
As I was writing the Adaptations series it occurred to me that men on the ends of both the Alpha and Beta spectrum adapt their own sexual strategies in accord with the sexual marketplace and how that environment dictates the approach to what seems the most efficient.
As I stated in the last post, Hypergamy is nothing if not pragmatic, and efficient. However, men’s adapting to the “market” dictates of Hypergamy has to be equally efficient if that guy is to fulfill his own sexual imperative. Pragmatism doesn’t have time for how things should be. You make the best play with what’s in front of you.
Just to illustrate, for about 25 years or so, popular culture strongly pointed men towards a sexual strategy that could be defined as Beta Game. Play nice, respect a woman by default, be supportive of her self-image and ambitions to the sacrifice of your own, don’t judge her and do your utmost to identify with the feminine, was the call to action that, deductively, should make a man more attractive to a woman.
Furthermore, the intrasexual combat amongst men for sexual qualification was (at least ostensibly) focused on out-supporting, out-sympathizing, out-emoting and out-identifying with the feminine more so than other men. To set oneself apart from “other guys” the seemingly most strategic tact was to accept what women said they wanted from men. To pragmatically effect this men gladly joined the chorus of ridiculing conventional masculinity; denouncing and resisting the very element that would in fact have set them apart from the nebulous “other guys“.
So while this is an illustration of men’s deductive pragmatism in their adapting to the SMP, it’s also an illustration of how that adaptation can work against men’s best interests. Between the 80s, 90s and into the early 2000s this adaptation involved men following women’s lead to systematically turn conventional, positive masculinity into ridiculous or gay-associations of “macho-ness”. Later, defining the very idea of masculinity would progress from ambiguousness to women being the sole authority of what masculinity should mean to a man.
Women and Moral Agency
For as long as I’ve read and commented on Christo-Manosphere blogs a common thread has cropped up again and again; the debate as to whether women have the same moral agency or the same accountability for it as men. I’ve always found it fascinating because for all my dealing in cold harsh observable facts I’ve never paused to consider that women might have some excusable reason for their ethically challenged behavior. In my own estimate Hypergamy isn’t inherently bad or good – it just depends on whether you find yourself on the sharp end of it.
My point here isn’t to reheat that debate, but rather to see how it feeds into the rationale that men are in some way responsible for what contemporary women have become, and how they’ll progress if men don’t assume some responsibility for women’s behaviors.
Hypergamy is pragmatic, but it’s also inherently duplicitous. It’s unjust and unforgivable to a guy who doesn’t measure up to his burden of performance. When you consider the War Brides dynamic it’s downright reprehensible, but we have to also consider the pragmatism in that dynamic. From a male perspective we want to apply masculine concepts of honor and justice to women’s action – and in the past there was a high price to pay for infractions of it – but are we presuming our concept of justice is one that’s universally common to that of women?
Much in the same way we were Blue Pill conditioned to presume that our idealistic concept of love was mutually shared by women I would propose that men’s concepts of justice, honor, and (from an intrasexual perspective) respect are dissimilar from those of women.
For women, whatever actions serve Hypergamy are justifiable actions.
All that needs to be sorted out is reconciling those action with the concept of justice held by men. In the intersexual arena, what best serves men’s imperatives is justice. Up until the sexual revolution the balance between the sexes’ concepts of justice was mitigated by mutual compromise – each had something to lose and something to gain by considering the other sex’s imperatives.
For roughly the past 70 years this balance between the two concepts has listed heavily to the feminine. Our age has been defined by women’s unilateral and ubiquitous control of Hypergamy, and as such it is women’s sexual imperatives that is biologically and sociologically setting the course for future generations.
Along with that unprecedented control comes the prioritizing of women’s concept of justice above that of men’s. We can see this evidenced in every law, social convention or social justice movement that entitles women to rights and privileges that free them of any accountability for the negative consequence their Hypergamously based behavior would hold them to in a concept of justice that men would have.
I would also argue that women’s inherent solipsism reinforces this separation of concepts of justice between the sexes.
Rivelino had a good take on this on Twitter:
1 The woman is always the victim
2 Nothing is her fault
3 She is not responsible for her actions
4 A man is to blame
To which I’ll add a 5th: Any fault is always a ‘strength’.
The problem I see in assigning the blame of women’s behavior to men’s lack of control is that, presently, men have no real control nor does men’s concept of justice align with that of women. There’s a manosphere idiom that says women are the gatekeepers of sex while men are the gatekeepers of commitment. I’m not sure I completely agree with that.
That’s not to be defeatist, or an endorsement of a MGTOW course of action, but it is to say that if a man has neither the sex appeal to be a short term sexual prospect nor the provisioning appeal to be a long term investment, women feel entirely justified in acting in the best interests of Hypergamy and controlling his capacity for commitment as well.
And yes, that’s pretty fucked up if you, again, find yourself on the sharp end of it. Men’s adapting to the intersexual conditions set by women isn’t some deterministic prospect, but the idea that the mass majority of men would be responsible for the state women find themselves in is ludicrous. There will always be men willing to accept the sexual dictates of women because it serves their breeding imperatives. It’s good for him personally and it’s good for the species.
There will never be some global Lysistrata where men organize in solidarity, promising not to fuck another woman until they comply with demands that would place the Masculine Imperative above that of the feminine’s. Our own biology guarantees it.
Personal Responsibility
On a final note here, whenever I delve into the ethical implications of Red Pill awareness I invariably run into the personal responsibility equation. I do my best to make as coldly rational an observation of dynamics I see and allow my readers to make their own judgements. However, those observation are never intended to excuse the behaviors men and women find themselves prone to acting out.
There is always a want on the part of either sex to see their concept of justice enacted on those who would act against it. Thus you get honor killing in the Muslim world, and you have men’s access to the DNA testing of children they suspect aren’t their own denied in the “best interest of the child.”
So are men to blame for the conditions they find their women in? Are we our sisters’ keepers, hamstrung by our own culpability to actually help them be better women? Or do they bear the responsibility to conform to our perspective of justice and police the worst impulses of a Hypergamy most are only peripherally aware of?
