Summary: An expert discusses women’s responses to men’s counter-strike to feminism (Game and MGTOW). It is the next round in the gender wars, with no end in sight. He speaks about the experience of young men and women individually trying to cope with the gender revolution. This is part two of his three-part analysis. Links appear at the end to the rest of this series about solutions to the gender wars.
Introduction
Enough analysis. This series is about solutions men are devising to the revolution in gender roles as the gender wars continue with no end in sight. My first two posts were about men as individuals finding their own solutions. Some learn Game to get casual sex. Some Men Go Their Own Way (MGTOW). Both feel good for a while. I doubt either will work for men or America over the long-term.
Here is the second of Dalrock’s reactions to those posts. He is a married man living with his wife and two kids in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. He uses his website to explore how the post-feminist world impacts him and his family. It is essential reading for anyone interested in these issues.
(4) Dalrock’s comment: women respond to men’s response to feminism
It is subtle now, but the panic has begun. We saw an early form of this in the “Marry Him” craze of articles at elite organizations around 10 years ago. By this I mean not just the article and book by Lori Gottlieb, but the related pieces by Bolick and others that also spawned books. Even Hannah Rosin’s The End of Men: And the Rise of Women
They seem to have collected themselves after that wave of panic, but the sentiment is still there if you are looking for it. See Wilcox toy with the idea of rolling back the worst excesses of the family courts here, before nervously asserting that there really isn’t a problem after all: “The state of matrimony” in World Magazine, 2017 — “What’s helping and hurting marriages in the United States?”
The secular left has begun to toy with the idea that feminism and the destruction of marriage may have gone a bit too far, while it is Christian conservatives who remain the real true believers. This appears in interesting ways and places, like this from the NY Times arguing that the key to lifelong marriage is to suck it up and not divorce: “The Wedding Toast I’ll Never Give” by Ada Calhoun in the NYT, 2015.
See also this by Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic. She is oddly nostalgic for traditional marriage and argues for “The Wifely Duty” (2003) — “Marriage used to provide access to sex. Now it provides access to celibacy.” Another example is the movie Divorce Corp: links to trailers here.
These are subtle in the grand scheme of things, but they show the pattern that I think we will see slowly grow.
My reply
Feminists are both pro & con for marriage!
There are two contrary threads to modern feminists’ beliefs about marriage. First, some feminists believe that it is unnecessary. As Irina Dunn said, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” Kate Bolick is an advocate of women going their own way. Here is the introduction to her Vogue article “Why Having an Affair Was the Best Mistake I Ever Made.”
“At 28, Kate Bolick was a serial monogamist who couldn’t tell a lie. Then came an affair that set her on a completely different path.”
The article is a promotion for her best-seller, Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own
“{It is} a revelatory and slyly erudite look at the pleasures and possibilities of remaining single. Using her own experiences as a starting point, journalist and cultural critic Kate Bolick invites us into her carefully considered, passionately lived life, weaving together the past and present to examine why she – along with over 100 million American women, whose ranks keep growing – remains unmarried.”
The “100 million” unmarried women is a bogus number. As of 2015, Census data shows that there were only 131 million women who were 15 years and older. Of those, 67 million were married, 11 million were widows, and only 52 million were divorced or never married.
The other school of feminism is “Marry Him”, advising women to “settle” rather than remain unmarried. Lori Gottlieb kicked off this movement with her 2008 article in The Atlantic: “Marry Him! The case for settling for Mr. Good Enough“, later expanded into a book with the same title
“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.”
— Sheryl Sandberg (COO of Facebook) in her best-seller Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead
For more about settling, see A look at America’s future after marriage becomes rare. There is an important point never mentioned in the articles advocating that women “settle”: how does this work for the man? Dalrock explains Why we need to stop telling women to settle.
Women’s response to men’s response to feminism.
Dalrock’s last line nails it. The panic he describes is already visible to those that look at media marketed to women. There are three common responses by women.
First, there are those complaining that men won’t marry them. Such as “Peter Pan Syndrome: A Man’s Fear of Commitment” at the Self-Love-Beauty website — “This is when a man is afraid to grow up. They usually put themselves first and do not want to commit to anything. They are unable to face adult feelings and responsibilities.” Even better is “Where have all the good men gone?” by Alana Kirk in the Daily Mail. {Editor: The answer is “They’re back in your 20s where you left them.“} My favorite is this statement by Marcia Inhorn, Professor of Anthropology at Yale University and former President of the Society for Medical Anthropology (her website), in The Telegraph.
“These are highly educated, very successful women and one after another they were saying they couldn’t find a partner. How could it be that all these amazing, attractive intelligent women were lamenting about their ability to find a partner?”
She does not ask any men if they consider these women “attractive” and amazingly good way.
Second, there are women seeking help to get their men to marry them. Articles such as “Learn how to make him commit: The Secret Lives of Men” by Joel D. Amos. Expect to see much more of this as girls transition from their party-hard 20’s and attempt to marry those betas they long ignored or despised. This a problem unique to women; there is no similar large literature asking how to “get my woman to marry me.”
Third, there are rationalizations. Lots of rationalizations. This might be the genre with the greatest growth in the next decade. Expect to see many more stories like these.
“Women tell us frequently that they are freezing their eggs because the men they meet feel threatened by their success and so unwilling to commit to starting a family together.”
— Professor Geeta Nargund, Medical Director of U.K. clinic Create Fertility (bio here). From The Telegraph. See this for more about freezing your eggs for feminism!
“One hot summer day a Fox found a bunch of grapes ripening on a vine. ‘Just the things to quench my thirst!’ She ran and jumped, but missed the bunch. She tried again and again, but at last had to give it up. She walked away with her nose in the air, saying ‘I am sure they are sour.'” {By Æsop.}
Tomorrow: Dalrock looks at the gender wars and sees wonders ahead!
See the other posts in this series
- A return to traditional values.
- Men finding individual solutions.
- Part 1 – An expert discusses individual solutions.
- Part 2 – Discussing women’s responses to men’s solutions.
- Part 3 – An expert looks into the future and sees wonders ahead.
- Part 4 – An expert: respect is a key battleground in the gender wars.
- Part 5 – An expert Game is toxic to feminism.
- Part 5 – Rebuilding men’s self-respect is a solution to the gender wars.
- A counter-revolution in society.
Some posts by Dalrock about the death of courtship
- Why men are withdrawing from courtship.
- SMP searching costs and the unmourned death of courtship.
- Women should reduce their expectations of courtship.
- How should women respond to men withdrawing from courtship?
For More Information
Ideas! For shopping ideas, see my recommended books and films at Amazon.
If you liked this post, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. See all posts about society and gender issues, about feminism, about marriage, and especially these…
- A look at America’s future after marriage becomes rare.
- Misadventures of a young woman in modern America.
- The disastrous results of trying to “have it all”.
- The coming crash as men and women go their own way.
- Modern women say “follow the rules while we break them.”
- “Celebs Go Dating” shows young women in action – and Game.
- Why women use cosmetics (the answer reveals much).
Books about the new era of marriage
Men on Strike: Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream – and Why It Matters
The Privileged Sex
Conspicuously missing from this article: any mention of Hypergamy. This is a huge omission.
Correction:
Feminism are both pro & con for marriage!
Incorrect grammar, “Feminism” in this sentence is singular rather than plural. Either rewrite this as “Feminists are both pro and con” or “Feminism is pro and con”. Radical feminists tend to be opposed to marriage, conservative feminists not so much. This is just basic, it’s been known for decades.
Sheryl Sandberg simply lays out the “Alpha F**ks, Beta Bucks” dual mating strategy that many women now follow: ride as many different bad boys as possible in their 20’s then marry a more boring but stable man after 30. It’s commonly referred to as the “Cock Carousel”. It increases the chances of a married woman in her 30’s with 1.9 children becoming bored and unhaaaapy, leading to her misery, a dead bedroom and eventually divorce. Manosphere 100, basic stuff.
Sandberg’s babble about an “equal partner” is just 1970’s feminism. It’s also becoming dated as women begin to display their hypergamy more openly.
It will be interesting to see your suggestions for the future such as how you propose dealing with Duluth and VAWA just for a start.
Anon,
(1) “Conspicuously missing from this article: any mention of Hypergamy. This is a huge omission.”
Generic criticism: articles are either comprehensive (“shallow”) or detailed (“omit key things”) or both (“too long”). This post is one of three discussing Dalrock’s comments on the two posts about some of men’s responses as individuals to the gender revolution (Game and MGTOW).
(2) “Incorrect grammar”
Thanks for catching that. Fixed!
(3) “Sheryl Sandberg simply lays out the “Alpha F**ks, Beta Bucks” ”
That has been extensively discussed in other posts (see these posts). More importantly, anyone interested in this subject is probalby familiar with that. This series has a different subject. As the opening of this series said:
Anonymous:
Do you know what my favorite line is from that Sheryl Sandberg diatribe??
“When it comes time to settle down, find someone who wants an equal partner; Someone who thinks women should be smart, opinionated and ambitious”.
Translated: “When you have done riding the cock carrousel and ruining your beauty and youthfulness, find a patsy who wants an equal partner, until you get to divorce court; someone who thinks women should be entitled, bitchy, and unbearable”.
Any takers?! lol Only the Bluest Pilled amongst us today will fall for that.
—
As for dealing with Duluth model of arresting men for crimes women commit in DV cases and VAWA, these are “small potatoes” compared to the issues of:
*Systematic judicial abuse in family courts;
*Zero courage in Congress or State Legislatures to fix male-female inequalities in criminal sentencing, divorce, child support, abortion/parental rights, and legal liability – just to name a few;
*Christian churches failing to provide moral clarity;
*Christian churches adopting feminism into their pews;
*Fraud in the inducement crimes committed by women who knowingly defraud men in paternity cases;
*Domestic violence against men;
*Open discrimination against males in hiring, college admissions, and many other institutions;
*Forced ADD/ADHD medicating of young boys in school for normal young boy behavior;
*False rape accusation crisis, including laws in CA, NJ, and NY that promote “yes means yes” types of laws where male guilt is always assumed until proven otherwise;
Just to name a few.
Yes. Pretty much agree with everything in this and previous posts on this subject. Ironically, after years of men being told (by women) that they fail to understand or care about their Hopes, Ambitions, Dreams, women are demonstrating that they’re just as blind to the HAD of men. But for some of course it’s a *fault* of men for having entirely the wrong HAD set that doesn’t coincide with theirs.
As Joe Satriani said (in a song, somewhere) – “I don’t want what you want, I want what I want”.
Thanks for the links to Dalrock, its a blog I’ll be following from now on.
Steve,
That’s a great insight! One theme of these (mentioned but not explicitly discussed) is the parallelism of men’s and women’s responses to the gender wars. Yours is another.
“I don’t want what you want, I want what I want.”
That’s nicely expressed by Selena Gomez in “The Heart Wants What It Wants.”
“Women tell us frequently that they are freezing their eggs because the men they meet feel threatened by their success and so unwilling to commit to starting a family together.”
I’m always fascinated by that particular “argument”/rant that has gone to become systematic: it seems to be a tailor-made feel-good formula for a certain brand of women that do not tolerate any other possible explanation for their pligh. A woman has a career, or more probably a good or decent job (I subscribe to Jordan Peterson’s conception that most people have jobs: careers -in a full meaning of the word- are for a very small minority)? She’s “highly successful” and, therefore, “threatens” the men that don’t want to commit to her, or even date her. A woman does a little sport, keeps in shape? She thinks men around her feel “threatened”. She takes to a little krav-maga? Men, supposedly, feel diminished and, you guessed it, “threatened”, emasculated even (personal experience: I have 25 years of experience in martial arts and close combat methods: never seen anything more cocky than 20 something girls with 2-3 light lessons a week, who think they “intimidate” men because they can mimic simple combos).
I digress (sorry), but the use of that particular formula (among a few others) seems to have become such commonplace that it strikes me as an automatic response, a knee jerk reaction from the type of newspapers and magazine writers that is so often quoted (and rightfully criticized/mocked) by Dalrock and this site. In France, this is called the “Pensée Unique” (“single thought”), sending back to the single operating system that is nowadays shaped not only in pop culture and the media in general, but also in ever increasingly ideological universities and schools.
Tancrede,
Nicely said. As a character says in Robert Heinlein’s Assignment in Eternity (1953):
Let them rationalize..let them weep. Let them pour tears out like rain from the sky. Still not buying it. But it makes me smile cause its a War and they are the Enemy. And men smile when the enemy is suffering. All this talk of Peter Pan, unwilling to face adulthood. I faced adulthood. Here is how I faced it. Abortion is vile. Divorce is vile. I will not be involved, willingly or unwillingly, in either. Since abortion is heinous and vile thus men have two choices, celibacy or sterilization. (And the third option of commitment is not actually an option..it involves trusting the untrustworthy).
Divorce is heinous and vile thus men have only one certain option..never marry (unless murder/suicide is somehow on the table – not for me thanks). Never marry, and use only celibacy or sterilization as birth control. There will never be a day I trust the aborters and divorcers. There is no counterstrike to this, unless the feminists want to start a shooting war.
Also I don’t mentor, teach, train, help, mold and invest in young married men. They have chosen death. Poor lads. I have pity on them. But nothing else. But even that is far more than I have for the Enemy. Let’s do this. I wanna hear the lamentations Conan was talking about.
Did your rascal scooter run out of batteries again?
ratatatat,
For those of us who never heard of a “rascal scooter”, I added a photo to your comment.
Just as an even briefer summary, men’s response to the carousel has been
-PUA/Game/Seduction
–The Red Pill (actually build the better man through integration of Game concepts and masculinity instead of fake tips/tricks/routines)
–MGTOW (avoidance of marriage, fatherhood and relationships with women; in some cases, continued sexual relationships with women without commitment; in other cases, complete avoidance of women either by force or by choice
–minimalism (working as little as possible, earning/producing just enough for himself to live and enjoy casual sex with women, pastimes, and hobbies)
Women’s reply to men’s response has been
–shaming (immature, irresponsible men playing video games and refusing to grow up, i.e. get “real jobs”, get married and have kids)
–complaining (where are all the good men; why can’t I find a good man to marry)
–“man up and marry the sluts”
–“I am a reformed slut; I’m not like that anymore; I’m tired of the games and the players, I want a real man to marry me and take care of my kids”
–doubling down on the C*ck Carousel and the shaming (#metoo, #timesup, Tinder, online dating)
Some people think #metoo is feminism jumping the shark. That feminism, finally, at long last, has gone too far. I’m not so sure of that. I think more and more people are going to push the concepts even further. The effect will be to squeeze out more “bottom 80% ” of men. They just won’t be able to risk entanglements with women.
Feminism is in a “mop up” operation now. Nearly all of the major battles have been won. Feminism and feminists, have gotten everything they’ve asked for, agitated for, and demanded. #metoo is designed to remove the last vestiges of “the old guard” and usher in a Brave New World of grrlpower. They’re “mopping up” the leftovers to prepare for the “new world.”
This is going to stop eventually, and it will crash. But it will keep on going for a long time before the money and the manpower runs out.
+1
Hey Women: “You don’t need no man” —> “where are all the good men” —> “you don’t need no man (again)
Hey Men: “One day she will notice you” —> “Man up and marry that slut” —> “Shut up and pay your taxes”
Apex Fallacy: “Player” —> “Peter Pans” —>”Mr. Big”
Apex women: “You can have it all” —-> “Never settle” —> “Single is Awesome!”
Vehicles: Tinder/Snapchat —> Bumble/Match—>Facebook/Nextdoor
Venues: Da Clubs —> Brewpubs & Kickball —> Tuesday night wine bar
Results: Netflix & Chill —> Netflix and boxed wine —> Netflix and cats
I also wanted to put this here. This is a comment by Novaseeker at another blog. I think this perfectly encapsulates how women, and feminism, view men and their responses. It also shows how men have responded to the changes and perhaps a glimpse of the future.
TLDR: Men are thirsty and they’ll do whatever it takes to get sex. Women know this, and have used this to their advantage in pushing through “reforms” and “changes” – “we have the p*ssy, and we know you want the p*ssy, so you’ll do what we tell you to do and give us what we want. And men, by and large, have fallen in line and done exactly what women predicted – they’ll do what it takes to get sex, including making radical changes to their own lives.
But no one really foresaw how casual sex would shake out and how “bottom 80%ers” would get squeezed out, and how that would affect marriage.
There isn’t that much resistance to the current state of affairs. The manosphere makes it look like there are more male resisters than there actually are. In reality the manosphere is a tiny part of the larger whole, and most men are Blue Pill, and are going along with the status quo.
_______
I think that the idea behind the current system is that men will do whatever the system asks them to do when it comes to women because they have no choice due to the very strong sex drive that most men have. That was clearly the idea behind second wave feminism, and it has drifted into 3rd and later waves, too — women can be running around with hatchets ready to castrate every man in sight and men would still be doing whatever women require them to do in order to get sexual access because of the “the thirst”, which is much higher on the male side than on the female side in terms of constancy (women also have a very high sex drive, but it is situational and responsive rather than constant, and that makes all the difference).
That isn’t generally wrong, it seems to me. Men have adapted, by and large, to the changes. Most men don’t avoid women. Most men still get married, to whichever woman will marry them regardless of “n count”. Most men will date whichever girl will date them, over a certain threshold (which for many men, looking around in the real world, isn’t that high, folks). Most men will go along with work husbands and GNOs and wife and friends only vacations and daughters with BFs that sleepover and on and on, as long as the sex spigot stays somewhat on, and they have access to some live sex. Men are extremely, extremely easy to manipulate by their sexuality — extremely easy. And women have evolved to be the absolute masters of this, again, precisely because their sex drive is situational and not constant, meaning that it is easy for most women to manipulate most men sexually, most of the time. So generally the idea that the feminists had that most men would go along with whatever they wanted from them due to sexual desire and need was basically right — at least it has been so, so far.
What wasn’t anticipated by feminists (some of them were anticipated by others) were the following:
– Women’s freed-up sexuality going largely to the benefit of the most sexually attractive men (because these men trigger women’s situational sex drive, which turns the tables on who can manipulate/control whom when it comes to sex)
– Some men at the lower ends of the scale dropping out altogether (not just from the relationship market, but from striving and succeeding in life) due to high definition broadband porn being available on demand for free, and the internet in general
– the divorce of conception from sex resulting in a proliferation of casual sex (where, again, the most sexually attractive men rule the roost as noted above), a reduction in family formation, and an explosion in single motherhood.
Pope Paul VI foresaw some of this in Humanae Vitae, and was laughed at, for the most part, because at the time people thought he was catastrophizing. As hard as it may be for some to imagine now, at the time most people saw contraception as being primarily for sex between married couples, and so it was evaluated mostly in that light. People didn’t foresee the 1970s coming (Boogie Nights era), never mind the Tinder/Bumble era.
But despite everything, most men do toe the line, and the reason is that their sex drive is constant, and therefore makes them subject to easy manipulation, and muddled thinking, often, when it comes to matters pertaining to women and their relationships with them. The exceptions to this are generally the following: religious men who have discipline (admittedly this is a very small number of men), low totem pole men who have little to no sexual opportunity and live in a world of porn, low testosterone men who have a naturally lower libido, and are therefore checked out to some degree from the sexual market place ratrace. Otherwise, men will do what women want to get sexual access because of their sex drives. It is only the men who are in one of the exceptional categories who will not, and they are not numerous enough to cause social changes.
It often looks on the internet, especially in the manosphere, that there are more male resisters than there really are. The manosphere overstates the case, I think, in terms of how many of these men there actually are, because it tends to attract them, and so if you hang out here you begin to think such men are fairly common, when they are in no way fairly common in real life. In real life, most men tow the line because they prefer that to going sexless.
The Deti,
That comment is almost a thousand words. That’s the length of a post, not a comment. I have stats on 51,000 comments here. They show that few read comments of that length. Worse, such long comments are bombs that kill a thread.
Comments should be a few hundred words. If you have that much more to say, start your own blog.
OK. I thought it added to the conversation. If you think it doesn’t, go ahead and delete it.
The Deti,
I don’t delete comments, unless they violate policy (language, etc). Your comments are interesting. But you are making them too long for this format. Comments are a discussion, like we’d have over drinks. Interactive and brief. A thousand word comment is a lecture.
You have things to say. I recommend expressing them in a way that will get the maximum attention.
It’s the same way with posts. Five hundred words is ideal. A thousand words is OK. When they get to 1500 I break them up. Posting Dalrock’s comments and my replies was originally one post. I broke it into three, to increase the audience.
Fair enough. Thanks.
The Deti,
Also, my apologies. My initial comment was too terse. I do comments in spare minutes, with spare cycles of my mind (with fewer brain cells every year). So these are seldom artfully written.
— thedeti
Well, unlike Larry, I did not find this too long – on the contrary, its of a length to make the point. And I think the point is very insightful. What you are suggesting is that popular opinion has got the nature of the problem wrong. That there is an underlying issue which is determining how the story is going, and that is the difference in sex drives of men and women. Your argument is that this will lead to men just going along with whatever the demands from women are, because basically they are powerless against desire.
What you are then arguing is that appearances to the contrary are misleading, there is not and cannot be any real and general dropping out or refusal by men to participate, they are in fact in general going along, because its the only way to meet their sexual needs.
I don’t know if this is right or wrong, but its a very interesting argument. I’m reading these posts and comments and the links with increasing puzzlement. Its a sort of jigsaw, there are lots of pieces but figuring out how they all fit together is pretty hard. And there are lots of inconsistencies, both of data and argument using it.
Unlike Larry I do not feel I have any systematic understanding of what is going on. I do see that there is a sort of intellectual ferment among a lot of people about it, that there are some very clear and well established facts and also large gaps where things may or may not add up.
Anyway, thanks for a very thought provoking comment, and I didn’t mind the length at all!
Simon,
Roughly speaking, readership is inversely proportional to length. Short tweets are read more than long ones. Short posts are read more than long ones. Short books are read more than long ones. It’s an iron law.
It’s certainly true on this website. I have tracked this carefully back to our start in 2007. That’s 4,300 posts and 52 thousand comments.
I try to keep posts at about one thousand words (it should be shorter, but that takes more time and skill to write than I have available). I and others who have looked at the data believe that comments of about 200 words get the most attention, which falls off quickly above 500 words (very roughly).
“Pope Paul VI foresaw some of this in Humanae Vitae, and was laughed at, for the most part, because at the time people thought he was catastrophizing. As hard as it may be for some to imagine now, at the time most people saw contraception as being primarily for sex between married couples, and so it was evaluated mostly in that light. People didn’t foresee the 1970s coming (Boogie Nights era), never mind the Tinder/Bumble era.”
I think I’m going to repost that.
Gaiko,
“at the time people thought he was catastrophizing.”
I’d like to see evidence of that. Condoms were a commonplace in the US, widely used by single people before the pill became popular.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_condoms#World_War_II_to_1980
http://www.mackenziekincaid.com/writing/research/condoms-in-wwii/
https://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/getting-it-on-the-covert-history-of-the-american-condom/
I think you’re right that men are uniquely manipulated by sex, and why. So I don’t have any disagreements with you there, but there are some caveats to this model I would like to bring to your attention.
1. If it weren’t for daddy deep state granting special privilege to women 100% at the expense of proletariat men, there would be no place for wives to sexually manipulate husbands, because they would have no unearned power to breach contract and deny sexual access to their husbands.
2. If men weren’t inherently good, godly people (to some extent), we would simply rape women, bypassing all of their “manipulations.” It’s not difficult to do and get away with. But we don’t. I think this is a good thing, not a “weakness” that makes us manipulable.
The pro/con, or contrary position on marriage may seem inconsistent or counter productive on the surface. But that is because we rationally fixate on marriage as the crux, as what is valued. But marriage is a facade; it is not what is valued. What is valued is optimizing her options. Specifically, female optionality in the pursuit of status within the leftist/progressive hierarchy. Progress!
If the value was marriage, then the achievement of this would be pushed early and often. Women would desire it when their options were greatest and those who were left behind would assume their place in the hierarchy – but marriage would still be at the top. There are echoes of this, but it is not “mainstream” in our culture. Young women who desire to be a wife, who value marriage and reflect this value through their choices tend to end up married young to their mostly natural counterparts.
But since the dominant culture does not value marriage beyond its utility as a vehicle for female status, they have to accommodate the various arbitrary, shifting, subjective, and relative contexts and identities that are inherent in leftist thinking and ideology. Her entitlement to choose is the highest value, any value of marriage is downstream of her choice, based on her desire, and is ultimately arbitrary.
The megaphone’s contrary positions on marriage reflect what is actually valued within the underlying primacy of female sexuality. The narrative pushers need to provide validation for both ends. But they are not truly opposing ends because they are united in one thing: the superiority of female choice.
So when they simultaneously exclaim, “You don’t need no man” and “where are all the good men”, they are appealing to what is really important, female optionality, the only difference being where the individual woman resides on the axis of Time.
What the feminist (progressives) are really saying is: “You are entitled to pursue your dualistic sexual strategy as you see fit”.
The problem they have – and we all pay for, is that in pushing this entitlement, they marry (heh) it with the big lie, which is that in her pursuit of her dualistic sexual strategy she is righteously liberated from the downsides or negative outcomes as a result of the inherent tradeoffs of life.
The longer she waits to consolidate her power of optionality into marriage, the more fragile the lie becomes (cue anxiety pills). The costs of that lie accrue over time. The rising red tide of her own hypergamy smashes against the rocks of reality that men don’t value the leftist hierarchy in terms of mating and so somebody must pay. The fact that the majority of those costs are pushed onto men is also proving to be problematic for them. So they double-down on the lie while also repackaging those costs (liabilities) as benefits (assets) for men in order to get them to facilitate her desire to marry. She’s experienced! She (finally) knows what she wants. Kissed all the frogs. Good in bed. Has her own career. Whatever. If a man doesn’t value this relational equity, he is flawed.
This is also how the “conservatives” get coaxed into supporting the leftist narrative. The first part appeals to fairness (egalitarianism). When the inevitable badfeels happen as a result of ignoring those trade-offs, the white-knighting instinct to protect is triggered. The real value of marriage is also reflected in how conservatives will encourage the same pursuit of status, experience, accreditation, and accumulation of perceived options over those things that support the natural hierarchy of god-man-wife-children, all while ignoring the costs of those same trade-offs. Watch what people do, not what they say is broadly useful in this exercise.
So when the subordinated male sexual priorities (based on their unique biological preferences and occasionally rational choices) fail to comply with the lie or accept their subordination with grace, those same voices seek to shame, manipulate, and coerce men into valuing marriage. Delaying marriage is making this job much more difficult. Men are wising-up. If for no other reason than watching the behavior and choices of their female counterparts over prolonged periods of time.
Marriage as we like to think of it, is dead. It has been ceded to the left. The social mechanism of marriage is now hollowed-out, a fiat currency of status that is vested for women as an option to be exercised at her discretion. It holds value not in of itself, but based only on her perspective over time, a function of her desire. Much like life itself is defined through female desire. If she is not “ready” for a baby, her pregnancy is rendered a non-entity. If she desires that baby, then every mechanism of the State and other social forces are marshaled to validate that choice, and pass the tab onto men.
Perhaps marriage is like Shrodinger’s cat. If enough time passes, it is both alive and dead. So for men, how much are you willing to pay for that cat?
It’s interesting to note that women, at least as represented in popular media, have not yet developed any real counterstrategy.
Claiming that they never wanted to be married in the first place may be true for some women, but that’s not the case for most women. These women are at the denial stage.
Shifting blame onto men is wishful thinking. These women are at the anger stage.
Settling is simply an acknowledgement that your previous strategy was a failure. These women are at the bargaining stage.
I guess the depression stage is coming next. We should expect to see articles about women mourning their poor choices, though how long the wait will be, I don’t know.
Purple Tortoise,
These things take time. The Observation – orientation – decision – action loop runs slowly for groups of people.
Not disagreeing — just my way of pointing out we are at the beginning stages.
I do believe effective counterstrategies will largely involve turning back from feminism, and thus there will be reluctance to adopt them.
Purple Tortoise,
I agree. As for the future, this series reviews the current dynamics. As for outcomes, I have no idea.
It’s interesting to note that women, at least as represented in popular media, have not yet developed any real counterstrategy.
That’s because women are one-trick ponies with regard to controlling male behavior, which involves using female sexuality as a trump card to cajole and coerce men. What happens when that trump card no longer works like it did before? We’re starting to find out.
Or at least mourning the poor state that marriage has come to, but without laying the blame on Peter Pan men.
Big changes coming soon. Here in Spain 1 in 4 women born in 1975 will go childless. This is not only due to the sexual revolution, but also because housing is unbelievably expensive. Rents are hitting €1000 a month in Madrid and Barcelona, which also happens to be the median salary. It is true that girls want to have fun first and delay motherhood, but in their defense it is quite a financial gamble.
For us, spending almost our entire 20s with our parents has been pretty typical since the 1980s. Now it is expanding into your 30s. I understand the American shock at this, but trust me, it will become your new normal up to a certain degree. Only massive public investment in housing would mitigate it… and that would be anathema in a country still without paid maternity leave.
Marriage will thus progressively become less and less relevant, no longer that key milestone in life. For men, this opens a possibility of keeping life-long friendships, which traditionally did not survive past age 30. I certainly welcome that possibility, which I think can do a lot to mitigate the effects of the lack of intimacy. Women will continue to enjoy easy sex when young, but later it will become harder to get (even if “The Wall” is not necessarily a reality for all women) and basically pointless, since after 30 most will be tired of hooking up anyways and wanting something more.
Both men and women will have to adapt psychologically. For many men like me, it will mean less sex. For many women, their equivalent in terms of unhappiness, i.e. not having children and/or a mate they deem worthy. Personally, I have never been interested in marriage or a family of my own, so I am not particularly fazed by this. I find it terribly difficult to get a girl to have sex with, but the “old order” would have been unsatisfying for me as well.
I guess intellectual and outspoken women are the big winners. They no longer have to put up with the drudgery of family life. Feminism is after all the brainchild of women such as Simone de Beauvoir or Betty Friedan, well educated due to their bourgeois upbringing and bored to death by their assigned social role. However many average girls still dream of the big fat wedding and the kiddos… they have it harder now.
I feel like playing “Looking For The Next Best Thing” by the late great Warren Zevon. That’s pretty much what a lot of people are doing as a result of sufficiently delayed marriage. My only comment about the women’s response is that becoming aware now of the opportunity costs of the decisions they made then is no guarantee that a sudden outbreak of better decisions is coming.
For the women, the men, and anyone seeking social or group solutions, the most important thing may be realistic expectations. For society, I think that means that some policies beloved by feminists are going to have to be reversed. That means, among other things, reform of divorce law and family courts, and that’s going to be met with resistance. I don’t know how long it might take, but we don’t have unlimited time any more than some of the men and women and men we’ve been discussing did. We’ll see what we see. They say despair is a sin, so I approach this with hope, if not quite with expectation.
So where have all the good men gone? Best answer I ever heard to that one was “Honey, they’re married to women who, when they asked them out, said yes.”
“Don Quixote had his windmills
Ponce de Leon took his crew
Took Sinbad seven voyages to see that it was all a ruse.
“That’s why I’m looking for the next best thing
Looking for the next best thing.
I appreciate the best, but I’m, settling for less.
I’m looking for the next best thing.”
– Warren Zevon
I meant to say married to women, not guys. It’s been a long, day, and my brain is frizzle fried.
There’s a branch of feminism that thinks male violence is all about upbringing and that, reared in the right way, boys will grow into men who’re only forceful when women want them to be and are also capable of intuiting when that might be. To this end there was a move to ban toy guns, games that involved violence or competition for prizes.
A few years back I was walking in a park and saw a group of juniors playing under the supervision of their teachers. They had all sorts of toys available to them, bat, balls, hoops and some jumbo size Stickle Bricks. Three or four of the more enterprising boys had used the Stickle Bricks to make futuristic guns and were chasing each other around shooting and pretending to die spectacularly… But they’d moved away from the main group to be out of line of sight of their supervisors (who were all women of course).
As an aside on the intuition thing, I’ve heard a number of the #metoo brigade suggesting that men are really perfectly intuitive about ‘what women want’ but are either too lazy, awkward or selfish to follow that intuition. #patriarchy I suppose. Oh dear, they *really* don’t understand at all.
What I find most interesting is probably the minority response – the 20% of women not celebrating triumphantly in the feminist end zone with the rest, but are instead muttering quietly to themselves that “Oh shit!” epiphany.
Like the overmatched team that suddenly realizes they may have scored the go ahead touchdown a little too early, when there is actually plenty of time left on the clock. And men still have all of their options and timeouts remaining.
Sure. In the hot, lathered, thoughtless and loud-mouthed environs of social media and the press, you can convince most women out there that they should be spiking that football as hard as they can, and bathing in the glory of male schadenfreude for all that it is worth. It’s your time! “In yo’ face assholes!”
But make no mistake about it, when the lights are down and the attention is off, Monday rolls around again, and it’s time to get up at 5 a.m. and hit that 50 hour work week once more – our own sisters, daughters and female colleagues are facing a very different reality than what their own mothers experienced in terms of sexual marketplace dynamics and the prospective outcomes for marriage and family.
Women changed the rules years ago. And men have taken decades to slowly, gradually respond in kind until now, when what we see is men simply holding up a mirror.
Most of the young women we all know today want to get married and have a family. But they know that they may never marry and may never form intact families of their own. And then we are to believe that this reality does not affect women at all mentally. We are to believe that women grow up fantasizing their entire lives about weddings and rings and ceremonies and dresses and parties and babies and jealous girlfriends and crying fathers, but are actually indifferent to the decisive death of this dream. Her personal choreographed screenplay will never be shown or known.
I think this is very painful and underestimated reality, creating a lot more anger and bitterness than perhaps most women would ever choose to admit, even to themselves.
Constrained Locus,
Nicely said. I too have wondered about the reaction of women to these changes. We hear about the reaction of the educated women who have access to the media. What about the others? There probably are surveys. If they don’t have feminist-friends results, they don’t appear in the news.
Perhaps even women who don’t like these changes are socialized to consider them right and proper. Realizing that their mothers or grandmothers had better lives would be a bitter pill. Perhaps delusions about the benefits of liberation – and a feeling of superiority — are preferable.
We’re just guessing, of course. Perhaps almost all women consider independence the highest good, and so their either dominate their marriage or divorce.
Constrained Locus,
Administration note: The WP software puts your comments into moderation. I don’t know why. I check the bins several times a day and pull out anything wrongly flagged. Like yours.
There is a software bug, which I’ve reported. Very intermittent. Some valid comments go into moderation. Some go into the trash. Comments are impossible without the anti-spam software, so we have to live with its idiosyncrasies and bugs.