Hostility in the manosphere

In some parts of the manosphere being a traditionalist is considered a bad thing. Why the hostility?

It can be confusing at first glance, as the reasons aren't always stated openly. For instance, a recent post at a site called Pro-Male Anti-Feminist Technology (which I'll call PMAFT) claimed that "Trad-cons let feminists define their reality". But what is meant by this?

A lot of the comments at the site don't help - they are just wayward insults (trad-cons "submit to the feminine collective" or "They don’t seem to have any other values than misandry just like the feminists.")

I made some comments at the site in an attempt to tease out what was really going on and I finally had some success. The site owner stated his opposition to me as follows:

Your arguments against “autonomy” assume that feminists are living autonomously (or honestly trying to). You have let them define your reality as well. To those of us speaking in standard English, it sounds like you have a problem with “autonomy” as it is in actual reality. This doesn’t surprise me since traditionalism is a collectivist ideology.
 

That I get. He is someone who wants to stick with the liberal emphasis on autonomy. So when feminists use arguments based around female autonomy he has a problem. His way out is to claim that feminists are lying when they claim to be promoting autonomy for women.

But he has observed me doing things differently. My response to feminism is to criticise the overriding emphasis on autonomy, and to the PMAFTers that means that I am allowing feminists to define my reality.

Is the PMAFT approach the way to go? I don't think so. Let me point out just two immediate problems with retaining a modernist emphasis on autonomy. First, note the criticism made of traditionalism, that it is a philosophy that is "collectivist". Well, in an important sense that's correct. After all, the family is a collective. So is an ethny. And a nation. A church too is a collective institution.

If you think the individual is important you have to support the collectives which give the individual his significant social roles; which provide the stable social relationships that individuals are created for; which deepen the identity of individuals; which anchor individuals by providing a sense of belonging, attachment and connectedness; and which link an individual's nature (his essence) to a social function and to a set of higher values.

The PMAFTers apparently believe that you can think in terms of the individual alone, having abolished collective forms of existence. But that diminishes the individual rather than liberating him, and it allows social function to shift away from ordinary men and women and toward an elite class of administrators (i.e. the individual doesn't play such a role in society anymore).

Second, what does autonomy mean when it comes to relationships? The PMAFT site owner takes this approach:

It’s after Valentine’s Day so I have been on the lookout for a new woman. (I dumped my previous girlfriends before Christmas to avoid the Christmas, New Years, and Valentine’s Day holidays.)
 

It's similar to what college women are "supposed" to do in relationships with men: they are supposed to avoid entanglements by making sure relationships don't get too serious (by limiting themselves to occasional hook-ups, or by dating the wrong sort of men and so on).

That way you do get to preserve your independence, but you do so by degrading a culture of relationships. But if you think what matters most is preserving your own autonomy, that may not be such a concern.

I know some of my readers will react by dismissing the manosphere altogether. I don't think that's the way to go: it's a politically diverse movement and there are aspects of it we can support. Even amongst those who criticise trad-cons there are important distinctions (see here for an interesting comment on this by David Flory).

What is Charlie Teo's solution for Australia?

Charlie Teo, a leading neurosurgeon, gave the Australia Day speech this year. Teo was born in Australia to Singaporean Chinese parents. His speech caused a bit of controversy because it touched on issues of racism in Australia.

I recently saw a TV interview he did as a follow up. For the first four minutes things went much as I expected. Teo himself comes across in the interview as calm and well-spoken.

But then Teo claimed that assimilation went much better in America than Australia. The interviewer then asked "Why doesn't that happen here and what should we do?" What, in other words, is the solution to race issues in Australia?

Teo's reply hit me with some force:

If you go to New York you'll barely see a group of white Caucasians, whereas when you came here, 50 years ago, almost everyone was white and there was a very small minority group. I think things have changed in the last 50 years - the minority groups are almost the majority and I think people have to have a completely different mindset about that. You know the absolute typical Australian is no longer the white fella who's wearing a pair of boardies.

As I listened to this from a well-educated, thoughtful, Asian-Australian, I felt that I was being dehumanised. Teo, despite everything Australia has given him, looks to the future as one without white men like myself. He sees this melting away of whites as a positive development in New York and he wants the same here. And he said it not with venom, or as an emotional outburst, but casually, as if it could simply be assumed that white people did not count and that a world without white people would be better.

Which led me to another thought. It's possible, I think, that one of the reasons for the growth of a men's movement has been a similar sense amongst men of being dehumanised in modern society. Here is one example of such a view:

Men, argue McGill University professor Paul Nathanson and his colleague Katherine Young, suffer from the myth that they are the gender with the power and therefore cannot be damaged by criticism and ridicule. The physical, political and economic power that a small percentage of men do wield renders women, they believe, "either unwilling or unable to see men as fully human beings, people who can indeed be hurt both individually and collectively."

I think that helps to explain some of the sensitivities of the men's movement. For instance, many men's rights activists (MRAs) took the view in the case of the Italian liner that sank that men should not be expected to give up seats in the lifeboats for women. In particular, the argument was that women should not simply feel entitled as women that men should put themselves in harm's way for them.

My own view is that chivalry can be a higher part of a man's nature and so I'm less likely to attack it. But it does make sense, if you are reacting against dehumanisation, that you might kick back hard against the idea of male expendability.

Similarly, all this helps to explain why some MRAs pick on traditionalist critics of feminism. You would think that MRAs would identify feminism as the source of dehumanisation of men and focus their criticisms there. But often it is those traditionalists who are most opposed to feminism who get scrutinised negatively by MRAs.

Often, that's simply because many MRAs are liberals of some stripe who are taking the opportunity to marginalise conservatives in the movement. But I don't think that's always the case. Traditionalists see men as providers and protectors, and that can mean men making sacrifices for women. The danger is if traditionalists take the attitude that men should make those sacrifices regardless of circumstances.

There are some MRAs who are rightly critical of pastors who believe that men should be the fall guys, no matter what women have chosen to do. There are MRAs who are critical of conservative women who take it as a given, as an entitlement, that men will go on making sacrifices simply because they are men.

I'm not at all suggesting that traditionalists should give up on the idea of men as being protectors and providers. I do think that's significant in how men fulfil themselves as men. But we have to be aware that we are operating in a climate in which men are registering a sense of their dehumanisation. Such men will react negatively to anything that smacks of "men matter less" or "women get a free pass" or "women deserve benefits from men just for being women".

We need to be able to say clearly "no deal" when men are being asked to make one-sided arrangements with women, or when women are unwilling to contribute in a just and balanced way to relationships.

At the same time, we have to remind MRAs that it was clearly modernists, and not traditionalists, who brought about the changes to society which have dehumanised men. It was modernists who argued that men held an unearned privilege in society which had to be deconstructed. It was modernists who, seeing men as privileged, believed that all legislative efforts should be to the advantage of women.

MRAs might hear a conservative woman say "I want a man to go out to work for me" and react viscerally, but they should understand that what is added to this in a traditional arrangement is "and I will have his children, respect him as a husband and father, and work in a committed way as a mother and wife for our family".

Feminists might offer something blander "Men and women can do the same thing" and this might not hit the same MRA triggers, but behind this is the assumption that fathers are expendable within the family (no distinctly paternal role); that men won't get kudos as a breadwinner in the family; and that the aim is to deconstruct sex distinctions not to help men but because such distinctions are thought to uphold a male privilege which the state should deconstruct through legislation always favouring women over men.

Goldberg: feminism is a cure for the world

There is a lot for traditionalists to cheer on in the men's movement, but also ideas that we can't support.

Take, for instance, two recent posts at The Spearhead. One was a worthwhile criticism of Jonah Goldberg, the editor of National Review Online. NRO is supposed to be a conservative publication, but Goldberg has written a post that is remarkably uncritical of feminism.

Goldberg begins with a quote by Kay Hymowitz:

For the first time ever, and I do mean ever, young women are reaching their twenties with more achievements, more education, more property, and, arguably, more ambition than their male counterparts.

Goldberg treats these social trends as unproblematic. He writes,

These are the fruits of feminist success. And, as the father of a little girl, I’m grateful for many of feminism’s achievements.

He then goes on to argue that feminism has completed its mission in America and should now focus its efforts overseas:

The good news for those who want to continue the fight for women is that there is plenty of work left to do — abroad.

The plight of women in other countries is not only dire, it’s central to global poverty and the war on terrorism.

As The Spearhead post puts it, Goldberg is a kind of feminist imperialist, wanting to spread it from his own country to other lands.

Goldberg is extraordinarily complacent about feminism. It is naive to believe that feminists will suddenly declare their mission to be over in America. If a larger aim of feminism is to make our sex not matter, then feminism will always be at war with how society operates.

Goldberg is also blind to the negative consequences of the social trends described by Kay Hymowitz. Hymowitz herself believes that the male role in society has been undermined, with many young men now trapped in a pre-adulthood:

My book grew out of my observation that relations between the sexes during this protracted period I call pre-adulthood are, at best, very confused. I have tried to figure out why so many young women today complain about men being thoughtless, immature and boorish. I also wanted to know why large numbers of men have become so profoundly hostile to women.

...As a number of commenters have correctly noted, feminism celebrated women’s independence sometimes to the point of making men seem an expendable part of family life. Throughout the 1990’s when many of today’s pre-adult men were growing up, the entire culture turned into a you-go-girl cheering section...Boys might have also observed their uncles or fathers, perhaps good men, being taken to the cleaners by wives...

All of this seems to have passed Goldberg by. He complacently accepts the underlying assumptions of feminism and doesn't understand that once you endorse feminist principles you will want to see them implemented in society in ever more radical ways, even if this means coercive state intervention. Therefore, what is the point of being a Goldberg? What do you achieve? You cheer on left-wing changes to society whilst impotently arguing that things have gone far enough. History will inevitably record your failure to halt the onward march of a principle that you yourself endorsed.

The second post at The Spearhead begins well enough with an encouragement to men to act in a more masculine way to attract women. But it then urges on men a radical policy of self-determination. The author believes there are three important ways that men could become more self-determining.

First, by getting a vasectomy:

men are entitled to exercise discretion over their own bodies in the extreme. Advances in vasectomies have given men the option of having a vasectomy in their single years with the possibility of reversal later on. In this day and age of uncertain paternity and women who derive significant income from child support, my advice would be for men to undergo a vasectomy as a form of birth control.

The decision to do so is ultimately private and need not be shared with prospective sexual partners, girlfriends, or even wives. A woman is not required to notify her husband of an abortion, and her husband is not bound to notify her that he had a vasectomy before they got married. Additionally, having a vasectomy gives a man a degree of reproductive self-determination that a woman cannot influence...

Should a man choose a polygynous existence, he can do so knowing that he is free from the concern of impregnating any girlfriend or mistress he might have. He is free to enjoy sex on his own terms, to be affirmed by it as he sees fit without facing exploitation from a former lover.

Second, by replacing Western marriage with a more temporary Islamic version:

There are innovations from other cultures that we might import here as we restore our political power and voice. We might take the example of Iranian Muslims who enter into a contract called the sigheh, where a type of temporary marriage is entered into. The conditions are spelled out at the beginning, from the amount of support that will be provided to the amount of sex that will be given. The contract can be anywhere from a few hours to months or years in duration, and it is renewable.

This seems like a far more reasonable arrangement for men to pursue than the antiquated institution of full-blown marriage...Sigheh represents the best of what marriage has to offer without any of the finality or restrictions.

Third, by dating older women:

Simply put, a male in his twenties is better suited to pursue a relationship with an older woman. A woman hits her sexual peak in her thirties, and a man at that age ought to realistically assess what he wants from a relationship and pursue it without shame. Moreover, older women have their own means and their own status, and the introduction of a younger man into the networks they’ve already established can be important to later success in employment and business. Your peers in the same age group cannot offer you either the status, the connections, or even the same sexual competency as an older woman because they don’t have any of those things.

The economics of the matter do not lie. The older someone is, the more likely they are to have a better economic footing.

This is all justified in terms of male autonomy:

But most importantly, realize that the brotherhood you have with your own kind will be key to resurgence in male self-determination...

It’s time to ... take concrete steps to achieve sexual self-determination and pride for men on their own terms. It’s time to empower men to define their own lives however they see fit, to remove the institutional and social obstacles to men who seek to live life as an alpha male by their own merits.

I understand this response. Men grow up observing the attempt by society and the state to maximise the autonomy of women. So some men will inevitably argue that the same should be done for men. They will try to envisage what maximum autonomy would mean for men.

And the answer given above is that men should not have children; that they should marry on a temporary, contractual basis only; that they should marry for money and status; and that they should focus on removing obstacles to satisfying sexual desires.

But, as with any attempt to make autonomy the overriding value, this denies important aspects of our nature. The advice that single men should get vasectomies is particularly poor, given the importance to so many men of becoming fathers. The advice to marry older women for money and connections is also poor as it denies to men the kind of passionate relationship that is more likely to be found as a young man with a young woman.

It's a vision of society in which what matters is career and status and casual sexual relationships, with little concern for family or nation. It would inevitably be as corrosive to society as feminism has been, if not more so.

Male separatism is a wrong turn

You have to be very careful when you adopt political first principles. Inevitably, the logic of these principles gets played out.

That's why I'm concerned that a wing of the men's rights movement has decided on a separatist politics. The aim of these separatists is to reject relationships with women in general and Western women in particular.

Where does a politics based on separatism lead to? First, it encourages the idea that all women are so unworthy that relationships are simply impossible. Which then leads to the kind of attitude expressed by one MRA commenter here at this site:

Women of generation y are sadistic whores who want to make men slaves. I refuse to be a part of it. Every generation y woman is a feminist who hates men even the ones who believe they aren't feminists.

Your daughters are all sadistic man hating whores but you believe them to be pure virgins. And you attack men for doing nothing but defending themselves...

I have no doubt that the feminist order will collapse. Western Civilization will die and the Chinese and Muslim hordes will give Western women what they deserve by raping and slaughtering them. I will be watching this in 2160p with 10.2 surround sound safe in the Chinese empire since I will be able to purchase a place in the Chinese empire. Until then I will play Xbox.

And what are men who reject relationships with women to do? The commenter above intends to spend his life playing computer games while waiting for foreigners to violently punish Western women. Other separatist MRAs have discussed the possibility of the Japanese improving the technology of female robots. And in a recent post at the separatist site The Spearhead, a commenter suggested the following:

Just a thought, guys keep talking about male pill how about libido suppressant? Are there any drugs out there that will suppress a man’s libido so much he would be a functional eunuch (oxymoron i know)?

Imagine never even thinking about sex, means you can without effort treat every hot chick without that mild inner bias to her goodlooks. Possible with game but this time, you wont be feinging dis-interest, with the utlimate aim of getting in her pants.

You would genuinely not be interested in chicks. We might be surprised how many guys would actually go on such pills if they were available.

Nor are separatists going to be at all sympathetic to social conservatives. In fact, at sites like The Spearhead, social conservatives are often considered a worse enemy than feminists. They see us conservatives as being supportive of men marrying (which is true). But given that they see no possibility of marriage being in men's interests, they assume that we support men marrying as a male sacrifice on behalf of women (i.e. out of "chivalry" or "white knighting").

And so you get a theory that the real cause of men's problems is not the pursuit by feminists of liberal autonomy, but the sacrifice of men by social conservatives in the cause of chivalry or white knighting.

Which leads to some odd assumptions. For instance, there was a case recently in which a man, Leon Walker, was charged with computer hacking because he went into his wife's emails and found out that she was cheating on him.

It turns out that Walker had married a twice-divorced woman, who cheated on him with her second husband, the one who had beaten her up in front of her son. To a social conservative it all sounds dysfunctional, an example of social decline.

But that's not how it's read at The Spearhead. Why would the man marry such a woman in the first place? It must be, the reasoning goes, a product of social conservatives pushing men to sacrifice themselves as white knights for women:

He must have felt like the hero as he said his vows to her. It’s a role tailor-made for female fantasy – the white knight who sweeps in to save the day for a wayward woman. Finally, the right man to get her back on the right track and provide for her and her child. The Social Conservative types just eat this sort of sh*t up.

The same commenter then links to another example of white knighting that we social conservatives supposedly can't get enough of. It's the story of an American man who met a woman just after she'd had her first abortion. This woman was highly promiscuous and had approached six members of the football team to try and establish paternity of the child, but had failed to do so. The woman was last on the list of our white knight's possible list of marriage partners, but all the rest were already taken so he married her. After marrying, she cheated on him, hit him and lived an extravagant lifestyle, getting him into massive debt.

Does that sound like the social conservative vision of marriage to you? The fact is that it's about the opposite of what social conservatives would advise when it comes to marriage. But we're dealing with the logic of male separatism here. The logic of male separatism is that all women are unworthy of marriage; marriage cannot be in the interests of men; therefore, if social conservatives support marriage it's because of a chivalrous, white knighting desire to sacrifice men in order to rescue wayward women.

That's how a conservative nightmare is transformed by male separatists into a classic conservative marriage scenario.

But if separatism leads to such distortions, what's the alternative? The alternative is to understand that the Western political elite is a liberal one; that liberals believe in equal autonomy as the overriding aim of politics; and that feminists have campaigned to have equal autonomy applied to the lives of women.

How can women's lives be made autonomous? By allowing women to raise their children independently of men (through state welfare, no fault divorce laws, alimony and child support, paid maternal leave, assumption of female custody etc.); by female careerism (affirmative action, changes to school curricula, state subsidised childcare etc.); by delaying a commitment to marriage and children (a single girl lifestyle of casual relationships, travel and career); by promoting sexual "liberation" (women selecting for sex alone, just as men supposedly do, rather than for marriage or romantic love, which then "liberates" women to select hypergamously or crudely on the basis of markers of testosterone, such as risk-taking, thuggishness, violence).

All of this makes life more difficult for the average man seeking a long-term relationship in his 20s.

Therefore, the ultimate aim of a men's movement ought to be to successfully challenge the idea that autonomy is the ultimate aim of politics rather than, say, healthy relationships or an attractive ideal of womanhood and manhood.

Male separatism doesn't challenge the political orthodoxy. It responds to a female attempt to be autonomous of men with a male attempt to be autonomous of women. It makes the pursuit of autonomy less one-sided than it currently is, but it doesn't attempt to promote healthy, functional, interdependent, complementary relationships between men and women.

I don't believe that what most young men really want are Japanese robots or libido suppressing drugs. Nor is a politics based on the idea that there are absolutely no women worth having a relationship with likely to have great appeal. Separatism is a wrong turn for the men's movement.

Elam's separatist response

A couple of months ago I wrote a criticism of certain trends within the men's rights movement (MRM). This post has now been replied to at The Spearhead by Paul Elam.

Elam pushes a hyper-separatist line. According to Elam we have hit an apocalypse. He agrees with Hanna Rosin that the "end of men" is inevitable. He's not sure why it's happening, but he believes that female dominance and male subjugation is an inescapable destiny.

What does that mean for marriage? Women will choose to have sex with thugs and will coerce a few lapdog beta men for supplemental income. There will be just a handful of alpha men who might be able to support a woman in marriage in the traditional way.

So there's no room for marriage in the future and as for masculinity Elam declares himself to be unsure of what that term refers to.

What does Elam advocate? This:

What we need, assuming there is a “we,” is a chivalry strike, which is to say a total abdication and rejection of any responsibilities to women, individually, and as a group.

Elam doesn't seem too confident that men will heed this separatist call. He writes:

Most men, especially traditionalists, will do what men have done in the face of gender feminism for half a century now; that is, follow their instincts to please women and wait for Hannah Rosin to tell them what to think about their own lives, how to live them, and what their place is.

That's confusing. Elam had previously called traditionalists "patriarchs" who would be "intellectually culled" under future conditions. Now he is identifying us as lapdogs who follow along after feminist women doing their bidding.

Elam's approach is not uncommon in the MRM. He takes certain real trends and makes them absolute and inescapable. He does so because it fits his programme, which is a radical separatist one. Being a radical separatist he has to justify men having nothing to do with women.

Elam's justification is sophisticated compared to some others in the MRM. Sometimes what you hear are coarser claims such as "all women are whores" or "all women are gold diggers".

Radical separatists aren't going to like traditionalists like myself. Our aim is to return to the ideal of distinct, complementary relationships between men and women. Although such relationships have been made unnecessarily difficult in modern liberal societies, we don't hold them to be impossible. Our position, therefore, is incompatible with that of the separatists.

As for separatism, it's difficult to see what it's going to achieve. If a Western man drops out, there'll be someone else to take his place. By itself separatism doesn't challenge either the ideas or the institutions on which the current social order is based. This order will carry on whether or not Paul Elam and a few other MRAs decide to marry or not.

What is wrong with the men's rights movement?

The men's rights movement (MRM) continues to grow in size, but politically is deeply flawed.

The average men's rights activist (MRA) is hostile to feminism. And yet he also agrees fundamentally with the feminist agenda.

This leads to the odd situation of feminists arriving at MRA websites, liking what they read, proposing a grand alliance with the MRM, before being angrily chased away by the MRAs.

How has this situation come about? It seems to me that there are two major wings of the MRM. The first is a liberal one. There are now plenty of men involved in the MRM who describe themselves not only as "very liberal" but even as being radically left-liberal.

These men, understandably, don't like the way that men are portrayed as being privileged oppressors (i.e. bad guys) on the mainstream, feminist left. Rather than rethinking leftist politics, they respond by pointing to areas in which it is men who are treated unequally.

There's the usual range of liberal attitudes amongst these men. Some of the more right-liberal ones limit themselves to calls for procedural equality. But others are more radical and want to follow through more consistently with the liberal ideal of making gender not matter.

It's therefore often assumed at MRM sites that masculinity is an oppressive construct; that the aim of the MRM is to liberate men from masculinity; that society should be strictly gender neutral, including in parental roles and in having women drafted into combat roles; and that feminist countries like Sweden are the models for the rest of the world to follow.

The second wing of the MRM are the male separatists (who call themselves "men going their own way" or MGTOW).

These are men who have grown up in an age of female individualism. Their experience is of a society which is geared toward maximising female autonomy, whether it's in terms of education, careers or family.

They have been particularly burned when it comes to relationships. Some of them have lost out in the divorce courts. Some of them are men whose female peers have been "liberated" to waste their 20s chasing a few alpha guys. For these reasons they are not very trusting of, or sympathetic toward, women.

How do men react to female individualism? One way (the traditionalist way) is to criticise a radical individualism, for both sexes, as socially destructive. But the male separatists don't do this. They respond instead by trying to imagine an individualism of their own.

How can men lead a more individualistic, autonomous life? How, in other words, do men "go their own way"? Above all, by not marrying. The male separatists vary a bit here. Some want to shack up with non-Western women (there is much hostility to white/Western women). Others promote the idea of occasional sexual encounters. Others don't want any contact at all.

In order to persuade men not to marry, the male separatists push the idea that men are harmed by marriage. They also portray women in very negative terms (gold diggers, sluts etc).

It ends up sounding uncannily like the feminism of the 1970s, but with the sexes reversed. In the 1970s, it was feminists who thought marriage was oppressive to women, who promoted separatist solutions, and who therefore painted men in the most unflattering light possible.

The liberal and the separatist MRAs get along quite well, as both groups are committed to the idea of male autonomy or individualism. The separatists aren't quite as motivated by the aim of deconstructing masculinity. Even so, they've managed to find common ground with the liberals here, since they believe that "manning up" means having to take on the responsibility of being a husband and father - which they fundamentally reject.

Both groups also react vehemently against the idea of chivalry. The liberals see it as being one reason why equality hasn't been fully implemented; they believe that conservative judges treat women more favourably on chivalrous grounds. The separatists believe that chivalry encourages men to make sacrifices for women, which cuts right across the separatist aim of men living for themselves alone. Conservatives and traditionalists are blamed for perpetuating chivalry and holding back men's rights.

Oddly, there are MRAs who are concerned about the presence of traditionalists within the movement. They believe that traditionalists will rob the MRM of respectability.

It's more likely, though, that it's the liberal/separatist alliance which will hold back the MRM from going mainstream. Just how mainstream did the radical separatist feminists become, even with the backing of the liberal establishment? Weren't they correctly perceived by nearly all men, and by many women, to be man-hating types without a realistic political program?

Where does the current strategy of the MRM get men? What are those men who want relationships with women, and children of their own, to do? You hear MRAs talk about sex with robots, or hiring surrogates to have children without the need for a wife, or developing affectionate male companionship, or hiring prostitutes. It just sounds desperate and unrealistic.

And will the average man gravitate toward a movement which takes just as grim a view of masculinity as the feminists have done?

And consider this. For years feminists have complained that men haven't gotten with the program. Feminists believe that careers are the ultimate in achieving female autonomy, but that women are restricted in pursuing careers by the fact that men haven't abandoned masculinity quickly enough. Too many men, complain the feminists, are still working away in careers rather than accepting androgynous roles and devoting themselves to childcare and keeping house.

The feminist message has fallen on deaf ears. So the latest feminist strategy has been to get men themselves to spread the message. More and more it is male feminists who are pushing the feminist line to men.

But feminists needn't have worried. Because it is now an "anti-feminist" men's rights movement which is doing all the heavy lifting for them. It is the MRM which is getting men to accept the idea that being a provider is oppressive to men; that society should be gender neutral and accept the idea of men as nurturers; that men should reject masculine norms of behaviour and so on.

It's a problem I've seen over and over. People feel the oppressive effect of liberal changes to society. They get motivated to act politically. But political clarity is lacking and so they end up trying to cure liberalism by adopting some more radical form of liberalism. And so nothing changes, despite all the expenditure of energy.

So what should traditionalists do? I think we have to accept, realistically, that the men's rights movement is likely to go the wrong way, just like feminism did (maybe MGTOW should be renamed MGTWW - "men going the wrong way").

But I don't think we should abandon it. The MRAs are, at least, open to criticisms of feminism. So there's an opportunity to make principled criticisms of feminism at MRA sites. And we will be the only alternative at such sites for those men who identify positively with masculinity.

We won't be part of the mainstream, but we can put forward a different approach. I'll outline some of the arguments I think we should be making at MRA sites in a future post.

Update:  A reader has reminded me of some MRM sites which are not liberal/separatist politically. I do believe my post accurately describes the trends at some of the larger, influential sites, but perhaps I should have recognised the existence of a third, generally non-liberal strand of thought within the MRM.

Revealing political profiles

The issue of men's rights has taken off over the past couple of years. It's big enough now to be very politically diverse. One of the major sites where men's rights is discussed is at reddit - the men's rights page there has 8,500 registered users.

However, it's worth knowing that some of the most active commenters there are far from being traditionalists. Recently someone asked for commenters to reveal their political affiliations and these were the results:

1. socially liberal Green voter
2. libertarian
3. Marxist
4. libertarian/anarcho-capitalist
5. left-leaning liberal
6. economically socialist/politically liberal approaching anarchist
7. classical libertarian
8. neo-conservative
9. classical Marxist
10. far left libertarian communist
11. libertarian
12. left wing socialist
13. very socially liberal, economically free market
14. anarcho-socialist
15. left libertarian, anarcho syndicalist

So we have libertarians, Marxists, social liberals and anarchists. Even if the general readership is much more conservative than this, as usual the most active participants come from the radical left.

That's a pity as it's likely to distort the movement. The far left types are likely to argue that men are lacking in rights because they haven't been "liberated" from their masculinity or their masculine role. They'll argue that the way forward is a social change in which gender distinctions are finally abolished.

The far left types - the Marxists, the anarchists, the radical left-libertarians - are also more likely to try to blame social conservatives for the problems facing men. That's a bit perverse as it's clearly been a liberal philosophy rather than a socially conservative one which has affected the position of men in society over the past century or more. And yet on many men's rights sites, it's not a liberally inspired feminism, but social conservatism and/or the remnants of chivalry which is thought to be the underlying problem.

That can have some strange consequences. It means that Laura Wood, who has written boldly in support of the male role within the family and society, is attacked more fiercely at some men's rights sites than the radical feminists who want to abolish any kind of distinctive or necessary paternal role within the family. (If Laura Wood is reading this, you have my sympathies - I hope it's reassuring for you that some of your attackers describe their politics as "classical Marxist" and "anarcho-socialist".)

(Another strange consequence is that it leaves the Roissyites as the better, more "realistic" wing of the men's rights movement - at least they get the drift of what has happened in society over the past generation, even if their response is to collapse into it.)

I don't believe that traditionalists should give up on the men's rights issue. It's a growing movement attracting men who are disaffected by the changes wrought by liberal society. And we can offer much more to these men than an assembly of Marxists, anarchists and libertarians.

Is chivalry to blame?

One of the emerging ideas in the men's rights movement is that chivalry is to blame for the problems men face in modern society.

Pierce Harlan, for instance, recently wrote an article about feminist reactions to the sinking of the Titanic. Back in 1912 the men on the Titanic accepted certain death by giving up their places on the lifeboats to women and children. Many women were impressed by this act of chivalry, with one group of American women erecting a memorial to the men who had sacrificed their lives.

But there were feminists in 1912 who did not wish to accept that the men had made any remarkable sacrifice for women. Some feminists argued that the women had it just as hard as the men as they had to watch from the lifeboats as the ship went down. Others argued that it was a part of natural law for women to be saved as they were more necessary to the survival of the race.

In other words, the feminists denied the existence of a chivalry which accorded them certain privileges in the way they were treated.

Pierce Harlan's take on all this is that society in 1912 accepted the existence of a chivalry which privileged women in certain ways, but that our society, just like the feminists of 1912, denies its existence:

Now, almost 100 years later, chivalry is still a potent force in our society affording special treatment to women in countless ways, but we've done a 180 from where we were in 1912: we've adopted the attitudes the suffragettes held in 1912 of denying that chivalry exists. Their denial -- so marginalized and disparaged in 1912 -- has become the norm in 2010. Denial that chivalry exists is necessary in order to pretend we embrace gender equality. It's a charade. We were more honest about gender in 1912.

Harlan believes that feminists were right to aim at gender equality, but that we don't have true gender equality because women are still privileged by the "potent force" of chivalry.

He supports the views of one of the feminists of the Titanic era who recognised the chivalry but who thought it misguided:

The memorial was not without its detractors. "Some feminists criticized the memorial, saying it was inappropriate to not only commemorate but perpetuate the notion of chivalry. Margaret [Molly Brown] responded that she thought it was very brave that some men had chosen to step aside and let women and children live -- but the gesture should never have been required by law or custom."

Molly Brown, of course, "got it." If only her kind of rational thinking had prevailed.

Now, almost 100 years after Titanic, in important ways, we are less honest about gender than we were when the mighty ship sank. In 1912, women did not have the same rights as men, but society freely acknowledged the chivalry at work on Titanic.

Today, we claim to embrace gender equality, yet chivalry is alive and well and manifests itself in countless ways -- and we pretend it doesn't exist. Like the elephant in the room, it leaves its imprint on virtually every institution, but it's entirely too politically incorrect to acknowledge.

The argument is straightforward enough: modern society promises us gender equality, but men don't get to enjoy equal treatment because of an influential chivalry which can't be openly acknowledged.

Despite its virtues of being simple and clear, I think the argument is wrong.

Chivalry is not the main driver of modern society. It is not a "potent force". There may be a residue of it left in the lighter sentences handed to women in the legal system and in the reluctance to commit women to combat roles or to the military draft.

In general, though, women have been given preferential treatment for an entirely different reason. They have been given preferential treatment because of the way that "gender equality" is understood in liberal societies. Therefore, men's rights activists ought to be wary of accepting the aim of "gender equality" as it is understood today.

The problem is this. Liberals believe that the key good that defines us as human is autonomy. We are autonomous when we are independent, when we have the power to enact our will, when we can choose our own life path etc.

This idea put women at a disadvantage. It made the lives that women traditionally led seem inferior. After all, women were tied biologically to motherhood rather than choosing amongst a range of career options; they were financially dependent on men; and they did not have the same political power that (some) men had to determine social outcomes.

So the early feminists declared that women, as a matter of equality and justice, ought to be free to live the same lives that men did. They rejected the idea that women lived different lives to men because of natural differences between the sexes. Instead, they explained historical differences as a product of socialisation that could be overturned.

The more radical feminists went further and claimed that one class of people ("men") had enjoyed an unearned privilege by oppressing another class of people ("women"). The oppression was systemic throughout society, and was embedded in the culture and institutions of society, including marriage, romance and chivalry. Domestic violence and rape were used by powerful men to maintain their patriarchal privileges.

This is the set of ideas that has been accepted by the Western political classes. The assumption is that women have been historically oppressed and that it is therefore serving the aim of "gender equality" if they are given special treatment in order to lift their status.

In theory, it ought to be enough to give women equal opportunity. After all, if men and women really are the same, and sex distinctions are just social constructs, then men and women with equal opportunities ought to end up having equal outcomes.

But this hasn't happened. Men have continued to earn more, to dominate boardrooms and so on. Liberals don't respond to this by accepting the fact of gender difference. Instead, they assume that historic oppression is still at work and stubbornly resisting women's liberation. They then enact various forms of affirmative action until they get the outcome they want.

This will go on no matter how much men's rights activists argue against chivalry. Let's say that men's rights activists argue that women should serve in combat roles just as men have to do and that this would mean that women are not being given preferential treatment because of chivalry.

What would happen? First, the liberal establishment would be more than happy to take on board the suggestion. Most Western countries are moving in that direction anyway. Nor would most feminists object. Most of the feminists I've debated think it's their right to fight in combat.

But would this stop women getting preferential treatment? The answer is no. When the next round of earnings statistics appeared, and they showed women not earning as much as men, there would still be the same outcry about inequality, and there would be further attempts to rejig the system to favour female earnings. The same with superannuation. Or boardrooms. Or number of MPs. Or women in engineering.

So, again, I would ask men's rights activists to question the assumptions behind liberal notions of "gender equality". Once you accept the liberal version of gender equality you are committing yourself to the view that:

• sex distinctions are just social constructs
• personal autonomy is the overriding good in life, and not relationships, the good of society, love, feelings of connectedness, the welfare of children and families and so on.
• women are not being treated as fully human until society creates the conditions in which they can live as men do
• preferential treatment for women is justified to overcome historic oppression  

One final point. I don't believe that chivalry fits well with modern social conditions. So I'm neither expecting nor advocating for it to make a resurgence.

However, I do remember the culture of chivalry from my youth in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It was a matter of everyday culture back then, at least in middle-class Melbourne, for men to offer up seats for women, to hold open doors, to change tyres, to offer to carry bags and so on.

My memory is that it was largely a positive thing. You would make such a gesture for a woman and she would accept graciously. It was something that marked gender differences in a positive way and which helped to create a good feeling between the sexes.

The feminists of the time were not amused. When I first arrived at campus in the mid-80s there were meetings being held in which such practices of courtesy were strongly criticised. A small number of feminists began to attack men who held open doors, word got around and by the late 80s men had mostly given it up.

My point is that it would be wrong to see chivalry as something that feminists have used against men. There may have been instances of this, but to a considerable degree chivalry was something that expressed a positive feeling of mutuality between men and women.

Why don't powerful men support men's rights?

The men's rights movement is in its intellectually formative stage. It's not clear yet which theory or politics will come to dominate the movement. There are some trends emerging, though, which have surprised me.

On the one hand, the movement is largely anti-feminist and anti-liberal. And yet many in the movement choose to attack, above all else, traditionalism and social conservatism.

Obviously, traditionalists need to understand why this is happening. Here is an important and emerging political movement that is deeply critical of men's place within liberal modernity and yet the focus of attack is often the small number of traditionalists who have criticised this modernity.

I think part of the reason is as follows. Imagine you're a young man who has come to the realisation that the society you live in has chosen to serve a feminist agenda at the expense of men. What is one of the first questions such a man will ask?

I think the young man is likely to ask the following kinds of questions. Why do the powerful men in society allow this to happen? Why don't the male political leaders or church leaders or business leaders put a stop to it? Why are ordinary men left to deal with the consequences alone?

The way such questions are answered is important. Imagine if the young man makes the common assumption that the establishment is conservative and therefore, being conservative, powerful men are either out of touch with the new reality of young men's lives or else protective of women, rather than men, in an old-fashioned, chivalrous way.

That might make you feel abandoned by the "conservative" men who ought to be protecting your place in society. The men who have real power to do something about the situation, and who as the "fathers" of society ought to care about what their "sons" are going through.

A variant of this kind of argument has been made by Paul Elam. Elam asks why powerful men have supported feminism. His answer is that it has to do not with politics but with biology. Traditionally, he writes, alpha men controlled society, using beta men as enforcers, with omega men being the sacrificial drones. However, when their wives demanded power for themselves, the alpha men decided to give up being alphas. In order to maintain their sexual status, they agreed to be the beta enforcers for their newly alpha wives.

Elam concludes that traditional masculinity, with its division into controllers, enforcers and drones is therefore at the root of the problem. What's needed is a radically new type of man never seen before in human history, one who transcends biology. Once again, we have arrived at a position that is radically anti-traditional.

I don't think these are the right answers. First, the political establishment is not conservative but liberal. The powerful men in society are not at all traditional in their thinking. They are not out of touch, chivalrous fathers giving too much support to their daughters rather than their sons. They are men who have adopted a particular principle of political rule, a liberal one.

Here are some leading political philosophers pointing out the dominance of liberalism within the political class:

John Gray, a professor of politics at Oxford: "We are all liberals nowadays."

Alastair MacIntyre, a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame: "Contemporary debates within modern political systems are almost exclusively between conservative liberals, liberal liberals, and radical liberals."

Steven Kautz, a professor of political science at Michigan State University: "Classical and contemporary liberal teachings ... dominate our political discourse. America is still now, or perhaps now more than ever, somehow a liberal regime ... we are somehow all liberals."

There is no commitment to traditionalism from our political leaders or from powerful men. Even someone like the former Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard, saw himself primarily as an agent of change. His first criticism of his successor, the current PM Kevin Rudd, was that Rudd hadn't undertaken enough "challenging reforms" unlike his more worthy Labor Party predecessors, Keating and Hawke.

We are talking about men who are driven to change society along liberal lines. They should not be looked on as the conservative fathers of the tribe, representing a traditional attitude to gender or to anything else for that matter.

Nor does the argument from biology work well. First, it's not true that society can be so easily divided into controlling alpha males who sacrifice omega males via enforcer beta males. The easiest proof of this is that Western societies have been strictly monogamous for many hundreds of years. Monogamy requires the most powerful of men to give up much of their advantage in sexual selection in favour of the well-being of society as a whole.

Imagine you are a powerful, wealthy older male. The truth is that you could easily attract a number of young women as mates. If only 20 to 30 percent of the best placed men decided to do this, then the so-called omega males would miss out on the chance to marry and have families. This, though, would leave a lot of men without a responsible or productive stake in society.

The "alpha" males in the West did not choose to exploit their advantages. They accepted the rules of monogamy. All men had the chance to marry and raise families and the vast majority did so. Western civilisation benefited as a result.

Nor is it at all clear that it was women in the home who pressured their husbands to hand over power. Most of the feminist agitators in history were single women, a disproportionate number of them were lesbians. They had no powerful husbands to leverage. And why would a powerful, married man living in a monogamous culture need to worry about sex selection anyway? How would he benefit by transferring the alpha role to his wife, whilst he adopted a beta role? Is this something that an alpha man would contemplate anyway?

And is it really true that men in power nowadays are merely beta enforcers? It doesn't look that way to me. There still seem to be plenty of men in the political elite who choose to exercise real power. They just don't exercise it to the benefit of men.

Why not? The answer is that these men rule by the principles of liberalism. For a very long time, there was an effort to quarantine what these liberal principles would be applied to. They were to be applied to public rather than to private life. The family was meant to be a separate, non-liberal realm.

But it was hard to maintain this distinction. It's not easy to separate the public and the private. If education, for instance, is the public realm and is ordered on liberal principles, then it will be thought that boys and girls should be educated along similar lines and toward similar ends. It's then difficult at the end of this long process to claim different ends for men and women within the private realm of the family.

And once the public realm had been transformed, feminists began to argue that the "personal is the political," meaning that there is no true distinction between public (political) and private (personal) life.

And so the family was subject to the same principles of liberalism as applied elsewhere.

And this is where the logic of the situation takes over. Feminism is liberalism applied to the lives of women. It is the attempt to maximise female autonomy, even if this harms the family or relationships between men and women. Female autonomy is maximised when women are made independent of men, whether through careers, preferential divorce laws, or state welfare.

If powerful men rule through the principles of liberalism, and these principles are applied to male/female relations, then powerful men have no principled basis to reject feminist demands.

That is the most consistent answer to why powerful men act in favour of feminists, even as many young men feel abandoned by the current situation.

What does this then mean as far as strategy goes? First, it's correct that it's not enough to target feminists themselves. It is the powerful men in society who enable feminism - but not because they are out of touch conservatives, but because they are men who are bent on reform along liberal lines.

Second, it's true as well that a certain kind of "new man" is required (though not one who transcends biology). Given that we can't rely on liberal elites, we need to encourage a type of man who doesn't limit his efforts to the private, domestic sphere, but who also devotes some time and energy toward change at the public, political level.