The Misandry Bubble

[Melancton]

The Misandry Bubble

- by Imran Khan (01/2010)

Why does it seem that American society is in decline, that fairness and decorum are receding, that mediocrity and tyranny are becoming malignant despite the majority of the public being averse to such philosophies, yet the true root cause seems elusive?  What if everything from unsustainable health care and social security costs, to stagnant wages and rising crime, to crumbling infrastructure and metastasizing socialism, to the economic decline of major US cities like Detroit, Cleveland, and Baltimore, could all be traced to a common origin that is extremely pervasive yet is all but absent from the national dialog, indeed from the dialog of the entire Western world?
Today, on the first day of the new decade of '201x' years, I am going to tell you why that is.  I am hereby triggering the national dialog on what the foremost challenge for the United States will be in this decade, which is the ultimate root cause of most of the other problems we appear to be struggling with.  What you are about to read is the equivalent of someone in 1997 describing the expected forces governing the War on Terror from 2001-2009 in profound detail.

This is a very long article, the longest ever written on The Futurist.  As it is a guide to the next decade of social, political, and sexual strife, it is not meant to be read in one shot but rather digested slowly over an extended period, with all supporting links read as well (if those links are still active after years pass).  As the months and years of this decade progress, this article will seem all the more prophetic.  

Executive Summary : The Western World has quietly become a civilization that has tainted the interaction between men and women, where the state forcibly transfers resources from men to women creating various perverse incentives for otherwise good women to make extremely unwise life choices, destructive to both themselves and others.  This is unfair to both genders, and is a recipe for a rapid civilizational decline and displacement, the costs of which will ultimately be borne by a subsequent generation of innocent women, rather than men, as soon as 2020.  The primary culprits in perpetuating this injustice are not average women, but radical 'feminists' and an assortment of sinister, dishonest men who variously describe themselves as 'male feminists' or 'social conservatives'.  

Now, the basic premise of this article is that men and women are equally valuable, but have different strengths and weaknesses, and different priorities.  A society is strongest when men and women have roles that are complementary to each other, rather than of an adverserial nature.  Furthermore, when one gender (either one) is mistreated, the other ends up becoming disenfranchised as well.  If you disagree with this premise, you may not wish to read further.  

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The Cultural Thesis

The Myth of Female Oppression : When you tell someone that they are oppressed, against all statistical and logical evidence, you harm them by generating discouragement and resentment.  This pernicious effect is the basis of many forms of needlessly inflicted female unhappiness, as well as the basis for unjustified retaliation against men.  

All of us have been taught how women have supposedly been oppressed throughout human existence, and that this was pervasive, systematic, and endorsed by ordinary men who did not face hardships as severe as what women endured.  In reality, this narrative is entirely incorrect.  The average man was forced to risk death on the battlefield, at sea, or in mines, while most women stayed indoors tending to children and household duties.  Male life expectancy was always significantly lower than that of females, and still is.  

Warfare has been a near constant feature of human society before the modern era, and whenever two tribes or kingdoms went to war with each other, the losing side saw many of its fighting-age men exterminated, while the women were assimilated into the invading society.  Now, becoming a concubine or a housekeeper is an unfortunate fate, but not nearly as bad as being slaughtered in battle as the men were.  To anyone who disagrees, would you like for the men and women to trade outcomes?

Most of this narrative stems from 'feminists' comparing the plight of average women to the topmost men (the monarch and other aristocrats), rather than to the average man.  This practice is known as apex fallacy, and whether accidental or deliberate, entirely misrepresents reality.  To approximate the conditions of the average woman to the average man (the key word being 'average') in the Western world of a century ago, simply observe the lives of the poorest peasants in poor countries today.  Both men and women have to perform tedious work, have insufficient food and clothing, and limited opportunities for upliftment.  

As far as selective anecdotes like voting rights go, in the vast majority of cases, men could not vote either.  In fact, if one compares every nation state from every century, virtually all of them extended exactly the same voting rights (or lack thereof) to men and women.  Even today, out of 200 sovereign states, there are exactly zero that have a different class of voting rights to men and women.  Any claim that women were being denied rights that men were given in even 1% of historical instances, falls flat.  

This is not to deny that genuine atrocities like genital mutilation have been perpetrated against women; they have and still are.  But men also experienced atrocities of comparable horror at the same time, which is simply not mentioned.  In fact, when a man is genitally mutilated by a woman, some other women actually find this humorous, and are proud to say so publicly.  

It is already wrong when a contemporary group seeks reparations from an injustice that occurred over a century ago to people who are no longer alive.  It is even worse when this oppression itself is a fabrication.  The narrative of female oppression by men should be rejected and refuted as the highly selective and historically false narrative that it is.  In fact, this myth is evidence not of historical oppression, but of the vastly different propensity to complain between the two genders.  

The Masculinity Vacuum in Entertainment : Take a look at the collage of entertainers below (click to enlarge), which will be relevant if you are older than 30.  All of them were prominent in the 1980s, some spilling over on either side of that decade.  They are all certainly very different from one another.  But they have one thing in common - that there are far fewer comparable personas produced by Hollywood today.  

As diverse and imperfect as these characters were, they were all examples of masculinity.  They represented different archetypes, from the father to the leader to the ladies man to the rugged outdoorsman to the protector.  They were all more similar than dissimilar, as they all were role-models for young boys of the time, often the same young boys.  Celebrities as disparate as Bill Cosby and Mr. T had majority overlap in their fan bases, as did characters as contrasting as Jean-Luc Picard and The Macho Man Randy Savage.

At this point, you might be feeling a deep inner emptiness lamenting a bygone age, as the paucity of proudly, inspiringly masculine characters in modern entertainment becomes clear.  Before the 1980s, there were different masculine characters, but today, they are conspicuously absent.  Men are shown either as thuggish degenerates, or as effete androgynes.  Sure, there were remakes of Star Trek and The A-Team, and series finales of Rocky and Indiana Jones.  But where are the new characters?  Why is the vacuum being filled solely with nostalgia?  A single example like Jack Bauer is not sufficient to dispute the much larger trend of masculinity purging.

Modern entertainment typically shows businessmen as villains, and husbands as bumbling dimwits that are always under the command of the all-powerful wife, who is never wrong.  Oprah Winfrey's platform always grants a sympathetic portrayal to a wronged woman, but never to men who have suffered great injustices.  Absurdly false feminist myths such as a belief that women are underpaid relative to men for the same output of work, or that adultery and domestic violence are actions committed exclusively by men, are embedded even within the dialog of sitcoms and legal dramas.

This trains women to disrespect men, wives to think poorly of their husbands, and girls to devalue the importance of their fathers, which leads to the normalization of single motherhood (obviously with taxpayer subsidies), despite the reality that most single mothers are not victims, but merely women who rode a carousel of men with reckless abandon.  This, in turn, leads to fatherless young men growing up being told that natural male behavior is wrong, and feminization is normal.  It also leads to women being deceived outright about the realities of the sexual market, where media attempts to normalize single motherhood and attempted 'cougarhood' are glorified, rather than portrayed as the undesirable conditions that they are.

The Primal Nature of Men and Women : Genetic research has shown that before the modern era, 80% of women managed to reproduce, but only 40% of men did.  The obvious conclusion from this is that a few top men had multiple wives, while the bottom 60% had no mating prospects at all.  Women clearly did not mind sharing the top man with multiple other women, ultimately deciding that being one of four women sharing an 'alpha' was still more preferable than having the undivided attention of a 'beta'.  Let us define the top 20% of men as measured by their attractiveness to women, as 'alpha' males while the middle 60% of men will be called 'beta' males.  The bottom 20% are not meaningful in this context.

Research across gorillas, chimpanzees, and primitive human tribes shows that men are promiscuous and polygamous.  This is no surprise to a modern reader, but the research further shows that women are not monogamous, as is popularly assumed, but hypergamous.  In other words, a woman may be attracted to only one man at any given time, but as the status and fortune of various men fluctuates, a woman's attention may shift from a declining man to an ascendant man.  There is significant turnover in the ranks of alpha males, which women are acutely aware of.

As a result, women are the first to want into a monogamous relationship, and the first to want out.  This is neither right nor wrong, merely natural.  What is wrong, however, is the cultural and societal pressure to shame men into committing to marriage under the pretense that they are 'afraid of commitment' due to some 'Peter Pan complex', while there is no longer the corresponding traditional shame that was reserved for women who destroyed the marriage, despite the fact that 90% of divorces are initiated by women.  Furthermore, when women destroy the commitment, there is great harm to children, and the woman demands present and future payments from the man she is abandoning.  A man who refuses to marry is neither harming innocent minors nor expecting years of payments from the woman.  This absurd double standard has invisible but major costs to society.

To provide 'beta' men an incentive to produce far more economic output than needed just to support themselves while simultaneously controlling the hypergamy of women that would deprive children of interaction with their biological fathers, all major religions constructed an institution to force constructive conduct out of both genders while penalizing the natural primate tendencies of each.  This institution was known as 'marriage'.  Societies that enforced monogamous marriage made sure all beta men had wives, thus unlocking productive output out of these men who in pre-modern times would have had no incentive to be productive.  Women, in turn, received a provider, a protector, and higher social status than unmarried women, who often were trapped in poverty.  When applied over an entire population of humans, this system was known as 'civilization'.

All societies that achieved great advances and lasted for multiple centuries followed this formula with very little deviation, and it is quite remarkable how similar the nature of monogamous marriage was across seemingly diverse cultures.  Societies that deviated from this were quickly replaced.  This 'contract' between the sexes was advantageous to beta men, women over the age of 35, and children, but greatly curbed the activities of alpha men and women under 35 (together, a much smaller group than the former one).  Conversely, the pre-civilized norm of alpha men monopolizing 3 or more young women each, replacing aging ones with new ones, while the masses of beta men fight over a tiny supply of surplus/aging women, was chaotic and unstable, leaving beta men violent and unproductive, and aging mothers discarded by their alpha mates now vulnerable to poverty.  So what happens when the traditional controls of civilization are lifted from both men and women?

The Four Sirens : Four unrelated forces simultaneously combined to entirely distort the balance of civilization built on the biological realities of men and women.  Others have presented versions of the Four Sirens concept in the past, but I am choosing a slightly different definition of the Four Sirens :

1) Easy contraception (condoms, pills, and abortions): In the past, extremely few women ever had more than one or two sexual partners in their lives, as being an unwed mother led to poverty and social ostracization.  Contraception made it possible for females to act on their urges of hypergamy.

2) 'No fault' divorce, asset division, and alimony : In the past, a woman who wanted to leave her husband needed to prove misconduct on his part.  Now, the law has changed to such a degree that a woman can leave her husband for no stated reason, yet is still entitled to payments from him for years to come.  This incentivizes destruction because it enables women to transfer the costs of irresponsible behavior onto men and children.

3) Female economic freedom : Despite 'feminists' claiming that this is the fruit of their hard work, inventions like the vacuum cleaner, washing machine, and oven were the primary drivers behind liberating women from household chores and freeing them up to enter the workforce.  These inventions compressed the chores that took a full day into just an hour or less.  There was never any organized male opposition to women entering the workforce (in China, taxes were collected in a way that mandated female productivity), as more labor lowered labor costs while also creating new consumers.  However, one of the main reasons that women married - financial support - was no longer a necessity.

Female entry into the workforce is generally a positive development for society, and I would be the first to praise this, if it were solely on the basis of merit (as old-school feminists had genuinely intended).  Unfortunately, too much of this is now due to corrupt political lobbying to forcibly transfer resources from men to women.

4) Female-Centric social engineering : Above and beyond the pro-woman divorce laws, further state interventions include the subsidization of single motherhood, laws that criminalize violence against women (but offer no protection to men who are the victims of violence by women, which happens just as often), and 'sexual harassment' laws with definitions so nebulous that women have the power to accuse men of anything without the man having any rights of his own.

These four forces in tandem handed an unprecedented level of power to women.  The technology gave them freedom to pursue careers and the freedom to be promiscuous.  Feminist laws have done a remarkable job of shielding women from the consequences of their own actions.  Women now have as close to a hypergamous utopia as has ever existed, where they can pursue alpha males while extracting subsidization from beta males without any reciprocal obligations to them.  Despite all the new freedoms available to women that freed them from their traditional responsibilities, men were still expected to adhere to their traditional responsibilities.

To be continued...