The Anatomy Of Our Decline

“Men’s greatest weakness is their facade of strength, and women’s greatest strength is their facade of weakness”

By MRA-UK: Ah, gender! It’s a hall of mirrors, full of misdirection.
You must forgive me if I have not followed the details of all this #MeToo business and the ‘revelations’ of mass sexual victimisation of women in Parliament. I don’t do social media, I am not a regular reader of newspapers, and I haven’t watched TV for years (excepting last night’s Newsnight, a distressing experience which reconfirmed the wisdom of my normal practice). But one would have to be living on the moon not to have heard the gist of it. (I have considered moving). I understand one woman is still recovering from the trauma of a man putting his hand on her knee 15 years ago. I believe another woman is alleging rape “at a social event”. Hmm, one might have hoped that men had got the message by now that having sex with a woman who has been drinking is not legally advisable.
Despite best attempts to isolate myself from the horror, I keep hearing feminist types telling us that “it’s not about sex, it’s about power”. Yes, indeed – but I disagree as to who has the power. I’m a simple minded chap. I suggest that he who is forced to resign over a matter of supreme triviality is not the one with power. I suggest that the group of people whose behaviour is to be modified, constrained, dictated and controlled is not the group with power.
“Men’s greatest weakness is their facade of strength, and women’s greatest strength is their facade of weakness” (Farrell 1993). What we are looking at here is an exercise in bullying, made possible by gynocentrism. But it is bullying with a purpose, and that purpose is the furtherance of female power. It is the most disgusting spectacle to witness.
I do wonder, if sexual abuse is defined as “unwanted touching of a sexual or suggestive nature”, what proportion of men have been sexually abused? I have a suspicion it might be most men, though probably few men will ever have registered it as abusive, or even sexual. I can offer three personal experiences which are clear cut. Be warned, this is not going where you think.
I was a particularly pretty young man, though seeing me now you would be forgiven for being incredulous. On two occasions in my early twenties I had my bottom very firmly tweaked by a ‘gang’ of Amazonian women who appeared to be prowling the street for that express purpose. I assumed at the time it was a gender-political statement. But possibly it was simply sexual. This was outside UCL, so I presume they were students of some sort.
Most people would regard my other experience as more significant. This happened at primary school when I was about eight. A number of boys from my class, perhaps about eight or ten of us, were paraded in the headmistress’s office. She was there with a woman ‘friend’. We were told to strip to our underpants. One at a time we had to approach the headmistress’ desk, where she put her hand down our underpants are fondled our testicles. We had then to walk to the other side of her desk where her female ‘friend’ also fondled our testicles. That was it. We got dressed and returned to class.
Of course, this may have been a medical examination to check that our testicles had descended, and the ‘friend’ might have been a nurse. I cannot recall anything of the sort being said. At that age, we would not necessarily be told anything – one just needed to obey. However, that explanation does not legitimise the headmistress getting in on the act, does it?
Aren’t I brave in speaking out about this abuse?
No, is the answer, in case you were in any doubt.
Some people opine that men’s rights advocates are simply indulging in victimhood Olympics. Some people say that men’s rights advocates are just another type of snowflake. No doubt you, dear reader, have much the same impression of my foregoing tale. Ah, the misdirection!
Let me make this absolutely clear. My purpose is exactly the opposite.
You see, my “dreadful experience” completely failed to ruin my life. It didn’t even ruin my day. In fact, not the slightest frisson of trauma was inflicted upon me, either then or later. It was just a bit weird. Clearly it must have registered as a bit weird or I would not even remember it.
But get real. The average eight year old boy is poked about at will by any adult woman who wishes to do so. Perhaps things are different now, but that’s certainly how it was in that era (I’m talking circa 1962). As a wee boy I sported a mass of tight ginger curls. I hated my hair. Not so the local matrons. It was a common experience for me to have women I didn’t know come up to me on the street and run their hands through my ringlets, going goo goo about my lovely hair (yuck!). As far as I was concerned the ball-feeling incident was much the same thing – the only difference being that that happened only the once.
So my message to the poor traumatised female researchers and Members of Parliament is, frankly, to man up. I don’t expect a terribly high standard of manliness, mind you. Just as manly as I was at eight, that’ll do.
But this is more misdirection. You see, these female MPs and researchers were not really traumatised any more than I was. It is widely appreciated – not least by many women – that these complainants are playing the victim. It is acknowledged that victimhood confers advantage.
Sensible women commentators deplore this victimology, observing that it presents women as feeble and needy rather than as strong and independent. Seeking victimhood status is seen by these sane women as disempowering rather than empowering. Well, yes indeed – as long as one confines attention to the impact on an individual woman. But, for women as a class, it is a power strategy, as I shall argue below. Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter how many Sarah Vines or Julia Hartley-Brewers or Kathy Gyngells or Joanna Williams speak out about this Parliamentary madness. I’m afraid the monster is out of control.
Andrea Leadsom, Leader of the House of Commons, told MPs she would be ‘setting the bar significantly below criminal activity’. She went on to say that all people are deserving of our respect and “your age, gender or job title should have no bearing on the way you are treated in a modern workplace, and nobody is an exception to that”. But, Andrea, I think you meant to say that childcare work is an exception, didn’t you? After all, you are the woman who said we should not hire men in childcare work because they may be paedophiles. That sounds rather like gender ‘having a bearing on the way men are treated in the workplace’, doesn’t it?
But people, people – this is yet more misdirection. There is a broader dynamic at work here than merely victimology, one that makes sense in terms of power-seeking behaviour. Let me approach this obliquely with a short digression.
It has long been the case that male teachers avoid being alone with a female pupil. They will keep the classroom door wide open if such a condition becomes unavoidable. Kato Harris advised men not to go into teaching, the risk of false accusation being so great. It is beginning to be the case that university lecturers are also being formally advised to keep their office door open when meeting female colleagues (let alone female students). In the workplace more generally, men are now becoming increasingly reticent about their interactions with female staff, for fear of accidentally provoking an accusation of some sort.
In particular, it is not so much a brave man as a foolish man who attempts to date a female colleague. The days of the office romance are over. You may, like Mike Spence, be accused of misogyny if you openly admit to any reluctance to meet a female colleague socially. But the irreversible fact is that few men are now willing to take the risk of asking a female colleague out. Inevitably, instead of this being seen as resulting from long-standing policing of male behaviour, the complaint is now that women’s career prospects are being harmed by men becoming more distant.
Calls are beginning to be made for men to be ‘trained’ in how to interact with women in the workplace. So, having absorbed the lesson of what they must not do, men are now to be instructed in what they must do. What is not forbidden will be compulsory. The end result will be that those men with any remaining self-respect will increasingly withdraw from such environments. The space becomes female in nature by a process of making men uncomfortable to be there.
Do you see the social dynamic at work here? What we are seeing in Parliament is the same. For sensible women to decry the disempowering nature of victimhood is to fail to appreciate the implicit strategy. This is a power play. All feminism is a power play, it always was. The objective to is to convert male space into female space. Let me spell it out.
The social dynamic of a male space is different from that of a female space. The former is based on hierarchy and competition. Generally, it is inaccurate to refer to this as a ‘dominance hierarchy’, this being more relevant to other primates than to Homo sapiens. In man, it is generally some form of competence hierarchy which is significant, and this may give rise to a hierarchy of authority. In contrast, female spaces tend to be organised around consensus and mutual caring and support with less overt competition (though there may well be concealed competition). Roy Baumeister has argued that the female group dynamic can only function within small to medium sized groups. He argues that the male group dynamic is essential to form the very large social structures essential for the creation of culture and societies larger than hunter-gatherer societies. Whether that is correct or not, it seems clear that male and female group dynamics are different.
What happens, then, when a few women enter a male space? They are obliged to function within the male dynamic, which is likely to feel unnatural to them and may be perceived as discriminatory. But when the proportion of women in a formerly male space becomes sufficiently large, a female sub-dynamic will naturally form. In Parliament, the broad, cross-party coalition of feminists is part of this female sub-dynamic. Inevitably there will be conflict between the two coexisting dynamics, simply because they are incompatible.
We have seen repeatedly over the last few decades that the female dynamic expands and tends to drive out the male dynamic (e.g., the decline of male teachers). Male spaces are transformed into female spaces. Why? The answer is simply gynocentrism. Men are intrinsically inclined to oblige women, whereas women have no intrinsic inclination to oblige men. Women have strong in-group preference which powerfully assists their group interests, whilst men have no in-group preference. This asymmetry has its origin in the evolution of the human pair bond. This behavioural asymmetry coevolved with the species and is made possible by the male disposability inherent in anisogamous sexual reproduction.
The term ‘gynocentrism’ sounds very pejorative. But it should be understood simply as the constellation of emotionally-based behavioural characteristics which underpin the human pair bond and, by extension, relations between the sexes generally. If you thought that sex was all there was to it, think again. Gynocentrism underpins inter-sex interactions even when there is no sexual attraction on either side at all.
So now we have the ‘abuse’ of women in Parliament in perspective. You should not be misdirected by the details of the current debacle. You should view it as part of a process. This process exerts pressure on men to change to accommodate women’s social dynamic, pressure which is not resisted because men’s gynocentric nature impels them to acquiesce. This episode will be one of many in which Parliament is gradually converted to a female space. At no point will there be any question as to whether this is a good thing. Gynocentrism provides the direction of change, not functionality.
So you now see why those sensible women who have spoken out have not grasped the whole picture when they focus only on the disempowering effect of victimhood. Victimhood may seem to disempower an individual woman, but it is part of the gynocentric mechanism which leads to increasing female power en masse. This is accomplished by the drive for an increasingly dominant female social dynamic via the destruction of the male dynamic through a process of shaming.
Whence cometh the social power which drives the ascendency of the female over the male dynamic? It is important to appreciate that this power does not originate in victimhood. The victimhood acts merely as a trigger or switch. The power is already in place, implicit in ancient gynocentrism. As an analogy consider turning on a light. It is naïve to think that the switch causes the illumination. No, the real cause is the national network of turbogenerators which, via a sequence of transformers, causes a permanent 240 volt potential difference over the terminals of the light switch. Gynocentrism is the national grid; victimhood is just the switch.
Consequently, victimhood stimulates a beneficial societal response only when triggered by a member of an identity group with pre-existing moral cachet. Thus, victimhood works for women, and ethnic minorities, and the LGBT minorities, because their moral entitlement has been constructed in advance. But claims of victimhood would bring no rewards of societal support for men, or conservatives, or white people as a whole, because these identity groups have been morally disenfranchised by decades of conditioning.
I labour this point as a rebuttal of the claim that is levelled at men’s rights advocates that they are indulging in victimhood Olympics. On the contrary, MRAs discover very early that the reaction to the male disadvantages is that no one cares – there is no reservoir of moral cachet to be tapped for men. So victimhood is not an applicable strategy for men.
So why do MRAs bang on about male disadvantages, then? What is the point? Well, I guess reasons vary. Some people come to the view that there is indeed no point and become MGTOW. This is a perfectly rational response. Unfortunately it leaves other men – and boys – to their fate. Others make strenuous attempts to address a specific issue on behalf of male victims, be it DV or child contact or sexual offences against males, etc. What these groups have in common is lack of funding.
For my part the motivation is, firstly, that I believe there is intrinsic merit in truth – though truth can be a slippery fish to catch. My second motivation is to shine a light on gynocentrism itself. In other words, to illustrate the empathy gap – which is just the other side of the same coin as gynocentrism.  It is the empathy gap which precludes any advantage in victimhood for men.
The current pogrom is not just in Hollywood and in the UK Parliament. This mass exercise in denouncing-shame-bullying is spreading everywhere, driven by social media. There have already been male suicides in the Vancouver club scene as a result. There will be more. It may be your club, your workplace, your town next. It may be you next.
Where will all this end? I don’t know. Moreover, fascinating though it is to attempt to understand what is happening, no amount of understanding will divert this historic process from its course – whatever that is.
So here I am on the deck of the Titanic, intent on studying closely the hydrodynamics of shifting buoyancy. Well, what else is there to do? We are in the same boat, but unfortunately one side seems to think that smashing the other end of the boat will be beneficial. Human life rarely rises much above the level of farce, so at least our decline has the merit of genuine tragedy.

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