Reorientating The Men’s Movement

By James Lawrence: Any movement dedicated to securing the future of the Western peoples must deal with the fact that feminist legislation, moral corruption and hate-spreading has rendered marriage to a Western woman a decidedly unwise act for most men. The online networks of male resistance to feminism, most of which overlap at some point or other with the Alt-Right, have so far managed to offer three alternative paths for men:

1. MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way), a deliberate refusal on the part of men to involve themselves in relationships with women or see themselves as destined to marry;
2. 'Game', the manipulation of certain unsalubrious aspects of female psychology to use several women for sex while, again, either avoiding relationships with them or only entering into these on the man's terms;
3. MRA (Men's Rights Activism), the adoption of anti-feminist political positions and pursuit of political activism to resolve the injustices and attacks faced by men.

The insults and mockery often thrown back and forth between advocates of the first two paths, replete with caricatures of the MGTOW autiste on the one hand and the degenerate pickup-artist on the other, should not blind us to the similarities between them.
Essentially, they both attempt to imbue politically-disadvantaged men with a form of autonomy or mastery over women at the personal level, and as such they are unanimous in rejecting the call for men to "man up and get married".

The prospects of a "marriage strike".

Needless to say, if either or both were widely adopted, the result would be a notable decrease in the number of men willing to hold up their end of the broken bargain that is marriage in the West; and this would in turn strike a blow against the claims of the feminist money-spinning activism machine to have actually improved the lives of ordinary women.

The question, then, is whether this alone would be enough to defeat feminism and its ill-effects on Western society, and my view is that it would not. While feminists may go into hysterics at the thought of a male "marriage strike", the state is not without the means of countering it: take, for instance, the old fascist policy of the bachelor tax, which our modern progressivists have more than enough chutzpah to resurrect in the present day. Marrying on one's own terms, as is sometimes advocated by proponents of Game, is no less vulnerable a strategy: one cannot, for example, expect a foreign woman untouched by Western degeneracy to remain so for the duration of her life, or expect to balance a hollow projection of male dominance against the real misandrist discrimination inherent in divorce law. 

In any case, even if a majority of Western men could be persuaded to eschew marriage and commitment to their corrupted womenfolk, the most that could be achieved thereby is the victory of Samson: the feminist dystopia would be brought down, but the next generation of Europeans would be crushed in the process, and the ruins would end up populated by those peoples who never fell prey to feminism in the first place.

This is why the core idea of MRA, namely opposition to feminist misandry at the political and not merely the personal level, is the most promising of the three paths for those who wish to see sanity restored to the West. The problem is that this opposition has hitherto been framed in a way that merely inverts the feminist narrative, establishing men as a victim group and women as the perpetrators of oppression, and expecting men to use the feminist tactics of public complaint and clamour to push back against the privileges of women until "true equality" is achieved.

None of this is without reason. It is no exaggeration to say that the modern West is profoundly oppressive of its men, and it is certainly rhetorically satisfying to point to this as a way of rubbing feminists' snouts in their own manipulative bullshit about "equality". However, while feminists have had enormous success in convincing even normal women of their oppression at the hands of an invisible male conspiracy, those who try to preach the MRA message encounter considerably greater frustration: for every one man who is in full agreement, one will find perhaps three who are well aware of state-sponsored misandry but consider it "unmanly" to clamour and complain, and at least ten drone-like, self-sacrificing "white knights" who are simply deaf to all reason on the subject.

Patriarchal oppression.

Is this merely a result of greater feminist power and privilege - or an indication that the strategy pursued by the MRA movement is simply ineffective at rallying most men to any sort of action?

In The Privileged Sex, Israeli historian Martin van Creveld lays out an argument that demolishes not only feminism but also any idea that modern society is groping towards a long-awaited equality of the sexes. Using factual evidence to smash even the strongholds of the feminist victim narrative (such as the "female holocaust" of the early modern witch trials in Europe, the confining of ancient Greek women indoors, and the oppression of women by the Nazis), he asserts that the privileged treatment of women and the disposability of men have been constants throughout the history of all major human cultures. Moreover, he argues, in rare cases wherein some modern societies have attempted to place equal demands on both sexes (van Creveld cites the Soviet Union and certain Israeli kibbutzim), they have suffered dire generational consequences that would not have befallen them had they simply increased the burdens on their menfolk.

Having established that women are indeed "the privileged sex", van Creveld explains - in an interesting discussion that traces modern Western female bellyaching from nineteenth-century mental health wards to the feminist movement - why they are also "the complaining sex". The primary reason for this is, unsurprisingly, that women can gain just as much favourable attention for seeming helpless and distressed as men can gain for seeming strong, powerful and dominant.
This exposes a fundamental flaw in the existing strategy of MRA: it hinges on the ability of men to outdo women in the art of complaining, while ignoring their own instinctive and socialised protectiveness towards women who complain. This is obviously a losing game for men, and is bound to remain so unless significant numbers of them start abandoning the fundamentals of their historic gender role.

Well, egalitarian MRAs might retort, isn't "abandoning one's historic gender role" exactly what the feminists have already persuaded women to do with a great deal of success? My answer to that would be no. 

Modern Western women have certainly shed almost all of the helpful skills, accoutrements of civilisation, and learned amiability that once made them suitable marriage partners for normal men. However, in an age when experiments are performed to prove that women are mentally incapacitated when men look at them, they can hardly be said to have shed the habit of demonstrating helplessness in order to gain attention and protection. As MRAs have long been aware (at least as far back as Warren Farrell's 1993 book The Myth of Male Power), these appeals are merely being redirected: away from increasingly powerless husbands and fathers, and towards the much smaller and more powerful class of men who make up the bureaucracies, legislatures and coercive apparatuses of the state.

What counts as female rebellion against husbands and fathers is usually also submissiveness to this governing elite - as is epitomised in the ideal of the "liberated woman", who is an atrocious candidate for marriage and motherhood but a great worker, taxpayer and consumer.

It is customary in Rightist circles to conceive of the state as an abstract Leviathan, and the governing classes who staff it as an insipid and faceless "elite". Such thinking should not blind us to the human reality that these groupings are made up of socially powerful men (and only occasionally women), whose despotism has overstepped so many bounds that they are now in direct competition with ordinary men for protective authority over women. As such authority traditionally belonged to husbands and fathers, it is primarily these two classes of men - and not unattached lotharios or parasitic manchildren - who suffer the brunt of anti-male disabilities enforced by the governing elite with the help of the feminist activism racket.

What this powerful minority of men gain from this suzerainty over women accrues to them primarily in a collective, indirect and impersonal way: more tax revenue for the state, more votes for pro-feminist political parties, more power to micromanage people, etc. Yet is this perhaps not all?
Surely it is advantageous to elite men, and thoroughly in keeping with the oligarchisation of the West, that sexual mores have regressed under feminism to a baboon party in which a few "alpha males" monopolise whole harems of women and ordinary girls can be solicited with cash for sex acts that would sicken the most hardened whores of yesteryear. Moreover, while high-profile men can still be brought down by female complaint, there is some evidence that state-sponsored misandry does not fall upon all men equally: Stephen Baskerville's masterful study of the divorce-and-child-support racket, Taken Into Custody, mentions that men with political or judicial connections tend to be the only ones able to skew divorces heavily in their favour. 

That said, even if the governing elite were motivated by nought but selfless chivalry, their misandric meddling would not be one iota less evil and dangerous. By attacking the man-as-husband-and-father, they are destroying the family unit itself, and thus pulling up the very societal roots upon which their authority was originally erected.

In light of this brief discussion, I would like to make some humble suggestions to those who seek to engage in political action against feminism and on behalf of men:

• Rather than seeking to invert the victim-narrative of feminism (which is Cultural Marxist through and through), assert the reality of male authority and female privilege and its continuity throughout history, criticising its mutation into a perverse and decadent form in which women are protected by the welfare state and governing elite.

• Separating the small class of feminists (whose activism typically brings them clear benefits in the form of jobs, money and fame) from the majority of women, develop a critique of the "liberated woman" as a deluded and dependent slave, and introduce scepticism into the minds of ordinary pro-feminist women by mocking them as dupes.

• While continuing to shatter male illusions about female nature and the wisdom of marriage, reject the sort of bitter discourse that exaggerates female depravity, portrays woman as the enemy of man, and gives undue credence to Cultural Marxist tripe about "the war of the sexes".

• Most importantly: drive the majority of male anger not at modern women but at the overwhelmingly male governing elite who have "stolen" these women from all men, with a view to delegitimising the state and clawing back authority for the family - an orientation that happens to be in perfect accordance with the propensity of men to make war on other men rather than on women. 

It is worth mentioning that a men's movement reorientated along these lines would be in no confusion as to the reasons for its association with Alt-Right "deplorables", such as nationalists and reactionaries, which it might otherwise be tempted to disavow. The very existence of organic human bonds in the modern West is threatened by a sociopathic ideology of universal individualism that suffers no centre of authority, such as nation or family, to stand between the increasingly despotic and globalised state and the atomised, deracinated, de-gendered individual. Those who dare to question the legitimacy of this ideology, and who reassert the rights of the nation and family, are united by a fundamental common purpose as well as by indiscriminate external attack.

Source